Hoist With His Own Petard

There’s a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that has crept into the common speech even though many people don’t understand what it means. A petard is a hand-held bomb, a grenade. Something like those bowling balls with fuses coming out of them in Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. To be “hoist with his own petard” is to be blown up by the bomb your are carrying. In his most recent Washington Post column David Ignatius notes that most of the European countries are hoist by their own petards with respect to the “foreign fighters”, i.e. Europeans, who are being held in Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi prison camps, captured while fighting for DAESH:

The Europeans protest that they don’t have adequate laws to try their nationals who committed terrorist offenses on foreign soil, and that they don’t have evidence that would stand up in court. They worry, too, that Islamist extremists in European prisons would radicalize other Muslim prisoners and then be released back into society in a few years, perhaps to commit new terrorist acts.

It’s a political problem for Europe, too, explained one European who has talked extensively with officials there about the repatriation issue. “The European Union is in denial,” he told me. “The security and interior ministers don’t want to hear about it. The Europeans feel that a government that takes them back has no chance for reelection.”

The problem isn’t just the foreign fighters in the prisons but also their wives and children living in camps. Experts estimate that of the 74,000 people at a huge camp known as al-Hol, about 11,000 may be related to fighters who aren’t Syrian or Iraqi.

The European desire for self-protection was epitomized by Ben Wallace, Britain’s security minister, who told the Guardian: “I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which visits prison and civilian camps in northeastern Syria, said in a statement: “Countries of origin cannot turn their backs. People — especially children — cannot be made stateless. Faced with this complex problem, moral inertia is not an option.”

What peeves some U.S. officials is that the European nations shunning responsibility for Islamic State prisoners have for years been lecturing the United States about its immoral treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Facing a post-conflict dilemma now that’s similar to what the United States encountered with al-Qaeda, the Europeans are ducking the problem.

The problem is that shaming only works against people with “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”. It is the reason that Gandhi’s tactic of passive resistance worked against the British but would not work, for example, against the Russians or Chinese.

Regardless of their cowardly bluster our European cousins do not really have such respect and don’t really care what happens to their unrepatriated terrorists.

What, then, to do about these terrorists, hostes humani generis? It’s telling that the countries that have repatriated their terrorist citizens, e.g. Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco and Bosnia, all have sizeable or majority Muslim populations. Gitmo’s beginning to sound like the lesser evil. After all, out of sight out of mind.