European police forces are becoming more and more adept at catching terrorist cells. Secret services are becoming more sensitive, more experienced, and they are employing ever more sophisticated methods by which to discover them and forestall their evil intentions. The problem is what is to be done with their members once they are caught.

Jailing them is the norm. The Americans had (have?) Guantanamo, while other countries simply shoe-horn these people into their penal machinery, to serve time. Is this effective? Jails are already bursting at their seams all over Europe with petty criminals. If suspended sentences did not exist, whole penal cities would have to be built. The huge number of convicted criminals already puts severe stress on the governance systems of penal establishments, and the result of this seems to be an environment wherein, at times, the inmates call the shots.

Prisons, too, are never really reformative. They are, more often than not, veritable crime-colleges, where experience and skills are passed on to others, so that when a criminal’s sentence expires, he walks back into society better honed to harm it. So-called ‘life-sentences’ do not cover the remaining years of a criminal’s existence, and in many instances are mitigated and shortened on account of ‘good behaviour’. Probably it is often a case of the mentors desiring to rid themselves of a really rotten apple and ejecting him/her by fabricating this ‘good behaviour’ nonsense.

It is already bad enough to have a rapist, a murderer, a child molester, a burglar or a scammer being let loose on society after a few years of incarceration. It is even worse to let mass-murderers do so, and that is what terrorists are.

The terrorists’ Valhalla is the butchering of as many people as possible. They vaunt themselves on how many people they manage to mow down with a strike. They are your enemy and mine, and on a very personal basis. They want to kill us, and our dear ones, in as spectacular and shocking a way as possible. We must keep this in mind: their sole intention is to spill our blood.

I speak of the death sentence as a secure way of eliminating enemies, as a form of self-defence against those who regard innocents as enemies to be butchered

This is why I advocate the death penalty, not just for people who actually accomplish terrorist acts but also (perhaps more so) for those who are found plotting them. Very often, terrorists who actually do carry out attempts die in the endeavour, and so solve the problem by themselves.

It is the plotters who are insidious, and they are the ones who get thrown into jail, usually; whilst there, they establish new contacts and nurture their hatred of Western society even while steeling their resolve to try again.

One may argue that giving them a miserable life in some godforsaken jail for as long as possible is the best punishment for them, but punishment is what least concerns me here. I am talking about making society safer by eliminating those who threaten it. We must cull the prospective mass-killers.

It will not serve as a deterrent – I am not as naïve as that. What giving them the death sentence would do would be simply to lessen their numbers.

This must sound crude and even barbaric to some ears. One may feel that by installing the death sentence for prospective terrorists society is regressing to dark times, and I would be the first to agree. But facts are sacred. We are in a new dark age, and it is these people who have pushed us back there; in any case, you fight like with like.

I repeat that I do not talk of the death sentence as a punishment: I find death as a form of punishment repugnant, a form of societal arrogance. Neither do I speak of it as a deterrent, for these people are not really afraid of dying for their cause. I speak of the death sentence as a secure way of eliminating enemies, as a form of self-defence against those who regard innocents as enemies to be butchered, for whatever twisted reasons they may have.

If the whole of Europe decides to execute those who plot terrorist acts, and carries out its resolve, whoever is behind these attempts would find his secret armies being constantly depleted. His priority would change from activating his terror cells to creating new ones, thus pushing the immediacy of danger at least a step back, and giving the agents of surveillance more chance to spot suspicious behaviour.

Once IS starts to suffer serious military setbacks (as seems to be already the case), we must expect an upsurge of terrorist attempts. It is time to start thinking seriously about serious measures.