If there is one thing that we the people and the government of the United Kingdom need to learn from the horrific second London Bridge attack is that deradicalisation schemes do not work on jihadists. Reform and rehabilitation may well work on some who have committed other offences such as acquisitive crime or violent or sexual crime, because those who have committed such crimes can in some cases be persuaded to accept internally that what they’ve done is wrong. The likes of Jimmy Boyle the artist and former gangster show that some individuals can with help turn their lives around.

But what of those who have enmeshed themselves in the world of jihad? Can they be reformed? I’m not so sure. This is because other non jihad crimes have their roots outside of ideology, in lack of education and guidance, stupidity, lust or greed. When a person is motivated by ideology it seems to be much more difficult for those running offender rehabilitation schemes to get past the ideology to the person underneath. The ideology will always call shots with the brainwashed ideologue.

We would not look at the likes of Laverentiy Beria, Stalin’s executioner or the Nazi Heinrich Himmler and think that they could be reformed, such individuals are too far gone. So, why do those who promote the rehabilitation of criminals think that jihadists, who follow an ideology just as revolting as that followed by Himmler and Beria believe that jihadists like the savage who carried out the latest London Bridge attack can be reformed? I really don’t believe that such individuals can be reformed as a desire to reform must come from within and it is inside the jihadist that the fascistic ideology that drives them lives.

Innocent people have died because they thought that Usman Khan could and had been reformed. They didn’t take into account that the London Bridge savage might have lied to them and others about wanting ‘deradicalisation’ or was practising taqiyya or lying for Islam in order to get out of prison. The ideology of jihad was still festering inside this murderer and jihad is a major part of Islam. I personally do not buy the idea that Khan was genuinely pleading for help in prison to deradicalise, especially as he said that he wanted to be a ‘good Muslim’ and not a jihadist. Jihad is an obligation in Islam and it would take a person of great strength of character to walk away from Islam in its entirety after being a jihadist, because walking away from Islam completely is what would be required to even take the first steps to reform. These jihadists are not misinterpreting Islam by becoming jihadists, they are instead acting out Islam’s core values.

What is needed now is not for offender reform groups or the government to carry on as before with regards diverting jihadists from jihad, but instead they need to acquire the cold hard logic that is needed to deal with this problem. They need to recognise that whatever comes out of the mouths of such offenders are probably lies and that only by the offender abandoning Islam completely can any form of rehabilitation be considered.

Few jihad offenders are going to choose this path as the theocratic fascism of Islam is buried too deep within them to be extracted and countered. The only sensible options that the governments of Western nations can take against jihadists is to hold them in prison for life, exile them or execute them. Every other path that may work with other more general criminals just endangers the lives of others as we saw from the case of this latest savage who has murdered innocent people in the name of Islam. There should be an end to the naivety about Islamic terrorism and extremism and a beginning of a more realistic view about jihadists which is that they are no more capable of reform than a monster like Charles Manson would be.