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Joining ISIS should be a career-limiting move.

But not in Australia.

Leave our country to join the Islamic State boys as they behead their way across the Middle East and, if it doesn’t work out, you’ll be welcomed home.

Our Labor Government is only to eager to appease moderate Muslims who advocate for extremist Muslims without anyone asking why.

Selah.

Attacker, Abdul Ballout, Joined ISIS

Our German friends have learned the hard way that taking back ISIS recruits is a fools errand.

The man shot dead by police this morning after ramming a van into the crowd at Berlin’s Pride festival on the weekend had once travelled overseas to join ISIS.

But after being briefly imprisoned in Lebanon, he had been allowed back into Germany.

Germany authorities assured the public that it was appropriate since he would be arrested upon his return.

And he was.

And he cried.

And he said sorry.

And he was believed.

And now at least one German is dead. Others remain in a critical condition.

The German court convicted Abel Ballout of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, as well as publishing Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account.

And then they slapped him on the wrist.

A suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months jail.

That was it.

So he was free to resume his life so long as he didn’t do any more terroristy things.

Foolish Faith in ISIS Fighter’s ‘New-Found Goodness’

The court placed great weight on the fact that Ballout had confessed to his crimes and had appeared to distance himself from ISIS.

The extraordinary faith Western governments place in the power of a heartfelt apology would be touching if it weren’t so catastrophically dangerous.

Somewhere between the airport arrivals gate and the welfare office, officials apparently convinced themselves that a man who had volunteered for a movement built on religious conquest had simply experienced a change of heart.

Not because ISIS had abandoned its beliefs. Because he said he had.

This is the peculiar optimism that infects much of modern Europe. It assumes every ideology is really just a misunderstanding waiting to be solved by counselling, social workers and enough taxpayer-funded rehabilitation programs.

But ISIS wasn’t an outlaw motorcycle gang.

It wasn’t a political protest movement that got a little carried away.

It was a terrorist organisation whose leaders repeatedly proclaimed their religious duty to wage jihad until Islamic rule extended across the world.

That wasn’t hidden in the fine print.

It was the sales pitch.

Two months after his release into the community, Abdul Ballout drove a van into a festival crowd, killing one and injuring 29.

It all raises a rather obvious question…

If someone voluntarily signs up to a movement whose central purpose is violent religious conquest, why would we assume that conviction simply evaporates because they’ve returned home and expressed regret?

Western bureaucracies answer that question with forms.

History answers it with funerals.

Fatal Failure to Take Religion Seriously

Part of the problem is that secular Western societies no longer take religion particularly seriously. For many people, faith has become something that occupies an hour on Sunday, if that. We instinctively assume everyone else experiences religion with the same casual detachment.

That assumption becomes fatal when applied to genuine religious extremists.

We struggle to imagine that someone might sincerely believe eternal rewards await martyrdom, that God’s law overrides the laws of democratic nations, or that establishing a caliphate is not merely political rhetoric but a divine obligation.

Not because those beliefs are impossible. Because they’re unimaginable to us.

Our failure isn’t simply intelligence. It’s imagination.

We cannot conceive that others mean exactly what they say.

When ISIS declared its intention to conquer, many Western commentators preferred to search for socioeconomic explanations rather than accept that its followers actually believed the theology they endlessly quoted.

When recruits abandoned comfortable Western lives to fight under the black flag, officials spoke about alienation, disadvantage and identity crises.

The recruits themselves spoke about jihad.

Guess which explanation should have carried more weight.

Genuine deradicalisation may be possible. But governments have no business confusing possibility with probability, particularly when public safety is at stake.

Joining ISIS should never have been treated as an unfortunate youthful indiscretion.

It was a declaration of allegiance to an organisation that proudly advertised its contempt for liberal democracy and its determination to replace it.

If someone voluntarily walks into that world, the burden of proving they have genuinely abandoned it should be immense.

Instead, Germany appears to have embraced the comforting fiction that extremism can be processed away with enough interviews, enough paperwork and enough optimism.

Reality, as it so often does, proved considerably less sentimental.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Originally titled “The Fatal Fantasy of Forgiving ISIS Recruits”.

Images via screenshots of YouTube/ABC News.