Deport the terrorists – and their families too, by Andrew Urban.

United States Green Beret, Terry Schappert, Master Sergeant (ret) 82nd Airborne Division Special Forces, tells a compelling story on how democracies could better protect their citizens from terrorists:

… I’ve spent a lot of my life – almost 25 years – in the Middle East. I’ve lived with Arabs. I’ve trained their soldiers, I’ve fought with them, bled with them, I’ve watched them die. I was a Green Beret medic; I’ve delivered their babies, I’ve pulled their teeth, I’ve inoculated their farm animals. You’ve got to understand them, how these folks think. They’re worried about their family, their clan and their tribe. They don’t have a national identity. That’s why it’s such a hard sell. And most Middle Eastern countries are either kingdoms or theocracies or dictatorships, because you have to crush them — clans and tribes — to hold them together.

Fast forward to the guys who are living here in the West … the killers, not the regular Islamic people. What do they care about? They hate the country they live in. What they care about is their family; they care about that group.

So any time any of these guys does this (act of terrorism) their whole family should get picked up and deported, back to the country of their origin. …

You take from them what they care about and it would slow them down, if not stop them. …

Australian National University terrorism and counterterrorism expert Professor Clive Williams has said he has no doubts that deporting whole families of convicted terrorists would open the flood gates of intelligence from families about family members who have become radicalised – and be generally effective from a counterterrorism point of view. …

How do we know (obviously from the evidence, we don’t) when a refugee or asylum seeker or an Australian born Muslim is a potential jihadi? I like the analogy of the jar of 1000 lollies in which just two are poisonous and unmarked. How many will you eat?

hat-tip Stephen Neil