Here’s the full quote: “So I’m afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

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Take note: This is a British official publicly declaring that citizens of his country should be killed without trial or due process. Is he expressing an official policy? The first hints that it might be came out last November, when media reports suggested that Britain’s elite SAS troops were handed a kill list with the names of 200 Britons in ISIS ranks in the Middle East.

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It was also suggested that the policy stipulates that in case of failure to “eliminate” the targets, all efforts should be made to make sure those terrorists are handed over to the Iraqi government – which, of course, generally executes any suspected Islamic State members that fall into its hands. Preventing the return of any ISIS members to British soil seems to be the driving principle behind this policy.

Britain is not the only Western democracy to follow this course of action. “If the jihadis perish in this fight, I would say that’s for the best,” said French Defense Minister Florence Parly last week. Her words were soon seconded by America’s envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk: “So if they’re in Raqqa, they’re going to die in Raqqa.”

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It is obvious that no Western countries want any of their citizens associated with ISIS (as well as their spouses or children) to return home. This has yet to be confirmed by any of the nations concerned. But if true, this shows a rather peculiar situation: nations such as Britain and France, who have abolished the death penalty, are outsourcing the execution of their own citizens to countries that have no such scruples.

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Granted, how to deal with ISIS fighters poses a serious dilemma. De-radicalization schemes have hardly worked convincingly anywhere in the Western world. Putting Islamic State alumni in normal prisons is also problematic. There have been many notorious terrorists who entered French and British jails as petty criminals only to emerge as fanatical jihadis. The Toulouse murderer Mohamed Merah, the 2015 Paris attacker Amedy Coulibaly, and the Charlie Hebdo attack’s Kouachi brothers all radicalized and met in prison. In a word, our attempts to contain and reform violent jihadis have not set encouraging precedents. Yet this is also a poor excuse for disregarding the rule of law.

Most disturbingly, there has been no real public debate about this de facto policy. Our public intellectuals and other thought leaders around the world have had little to say on this point. We are all so dazed by the Islamic State’s horrific crimes that we have begun to think of the world in Manichean terms, the light versus the darkness. Yes, there is no question that we are locked in battle with a profoundly evil and unrepentant enemy. But surely we would serve ourselves best by not forgetting why we represent the light and our enemy, the darkness.

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The greatness of nations is not only measured by how they treat their own citizens, but also by how they treat their own treacherous combatant enemies. Even Germany’s Nazis and the Japanese militarists had their day in court. (Well, perhaps not all of them, but the precedent stands.) The victorious Allies confronted an unprecedented challenge: how to try leaders whose crimes included genocide and wars of aggression – and doing so without simply administering victors’ justice.

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Great legal minds wrestled with the task. They understood that democracies cannot simply put to death those whose actions qualify them as enemies of mankind. The Allies had fought for the sake of democracy and rule of law, and they could not simply abandon these principles once the war was over. The architects of the war crimes trials ultimately managed to set new legal standards. In fact, it is to their work that we owe one of the 20th century’s great contributions to progress: International Humanitarian Law.