And show them and the world that we mean business.

What do you call the two Islamic terrorists whom Jordan hanged on Wednesday? A good start.

Wherever legally possible, radical Islamic terrorists who currently are imprisoned should be dispatched. Henceforth, every country on earth should declare militant Islamic terrorism a capital crime and require prompt execution for anyone convicted of committing or enabling such butchery.


Radical Muslim terrorists should be killed in action. When they are captured, however, they should be interrogated. As soon as their intelligence value is depleted, they promptly should be tried. If convicted, they should be executed the next dawn.

Speeding such terrorist killers and their cadres onto gallows and before firing squads would yield enormous benefits:

First, executing terrorists would remove them from battle — permanently. A malignant tumor that is excised and discarded will menace its host no more. Agents of the aggressive cancer called Islamic fundamentalism urgently deserve similar treatment.


Islamic terrorists repeatedly have escaped or been released from prison and then resumed jihad.

In 2006 the Center for Security Policy helped me detail one dozen terrorist jailbreaks after September 11, 2001. In these cases, at least 138 suspected or convicted Islamic extremists fled incarceration in Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Yemen. Collectively, these killers had murdered at least 328 individuals and wounded 518 others.

In a brand-new low, ISIS incinerates Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasabeh.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi departed U.S.-run Camp Bucca in Iraq in 2009. He supposedly was an unthreatening, “low-level” prisoner. Al-Baghdadi then joined, and now runs, ISIS — an operation whose child sex slavery, live burials, crucifixions, beheadings, and other savagery inspire nostalgia for the relative restraint of al-Qaeda.


Last March, French officials released Amedy Coulibaly from Villepinte prison. He had been convicted of helping to spring an Algerian terrorist locked up in France. On January 8, 2015, Coulibaly killed four hostages at a kosher grocery in Paris.


Last July, a French court convicted nine members of a local terror cell for aiding an Afghan jihadist network. “Some, however, were released due to time served while awaiting trial,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. “And some group members had logistical expertise that French police now suspect was put to use in helping Mr. Coulibaly.”

One of the five top Taliban commanders whom Obama swapped for U.S. Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl “attempted to reestablish contacts” with the Taliban, U.S. officials told NBC News on January 29. This happened despite Obama’s vaunted “safeguards” against such behavior. NBC News also reported that Bergdahl soon may face desertion charges for abandoning his colleagues at their isolated Afghan post in June 2009. The Pentagon disputes NBC’s story.

Second, an executed terrorist is worthless in a hostage exchange. This should disincentivize Muslim extremists from nabbing people and trying to trade them for their radical comrades behind bars, as ISIS recently attempted with Sajida al-Rishawi. She was the female homicide bomber whom Jordan executed after ISIS burned Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasabeh alive inside a cage.

Israel, of all countries, never learned this lesson. Lacking a death penalty, Israel merely imprisons convicted terrorists. This creates abundant hostage bait. Between 1993 and 1999 — the U.S.-Israeli Almagor Terror Victims Association estimates — 6,912 Palestinian prisoners were freed from Israeli captivity in exchanges and various “goodwill gestures.” Of these, 854 later were arrested for terrorism. Between 2000 and 2011, Almagor calculates, “released terrorists have murdered over 180 Israeli civilians, while crippling or wounding many others.” In 2011, Israel foolishly traded 1,027 Palestinians for Israeli Defense Forces sergeant Gilad Shalit. According to Almagor, at least 63 of these butchers subsequently have been arrested for terrorism.

Courtesy Rick McKee/Augusta Chronicle

Third, widespread — if not universal — executions of Muslim terrorists will demonstrate that Civilization recognizes this existential threat and is serious about annihilating it. Such clarity is needed badly amid Obama’s rhetorical fog. On Tuesday, Obama referred to “whatever ideology” drove ISIS to torch that Jordanian pilot. Perhaps ISIS was fueled by Utilitarianism. Or 19th-century mercantilism. Or maybe militant Buddhism. As Obama said: “Whatever.”


Such moral obtuseness has become deadly. Routinely executing terrorists would display moral clarity as precisely as a laser slicing through steel.

Some may argue that hanging Islamic terrorists would make them martyrs, enrage Muslim extremists, and cause them to hate us even more. But it is difficult to imagine these evildoers becoming any further upset with Civilization. Those who, last December 17, machine-gunned 132 schoolchildren in Pakistan and ignited one of their teachers cannot get any angrier. They are trapped in a perpetual, diabolical state of rage. Civilization’s submission to Islam, the enslavement of its women, conversions or killings of its Jews and Christians, and the murders of its gay people might calm these savages. Civilization, of course, can pay no such price. So, let’s get on with it and exterminate these walking, talking carcinogens.

In short: Capture, question, convict, kill, and cremate.


Dead terrorists never should go home. Instead, their ashes should be poured very publicly down open manholes. What a fitting resting place for this filth — and what an unmistakable message that Civilization finally will stop monkeying around and, instead, swiftly relegate militant Islam to the same sewer in which Nazism and communism fester.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.