Traditional laws no safeguard against fanatical terrorism

In such measures, due legal process, i.e. the presumption of innocence, beyond reasonable doubt, and so on, is totally inadequate to deal with a fanatical enemy who would use weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, once they were in its possession, against Western societies. The most inconceivable terrorist action that could not be imagined by reasonable people is more than possible, since such an action is (perceived as) conceived in the mind of Allah, in the zany warped thinking of these religious fanatics. No traditional laws can protect Western societies from such a Luciferian inferno. The quintessence of the law - deterrence - is futile and totally unavailing against such votaries of fanaticism.

The gauntlet of fanatical terrorism has been thrown into the midst of Western civilisation. This is the challenge that political leaders have to pick up by the tip of their sword. No edifyingly just norms and conventional laws, as we know them, can shield their citizens from this mortal threat. Such legal norms apply only in normal circumstances, not in states of exception. To "deify" these legal norms, as civil libertarian predilections desire, in conditions where thousands of human lives are at risk and the foundations of civilised life are under the pulverising bulldozer of the terrorists, is an act of irremediable folly. According to Carl Schmitt, in states of exception, the legal order rests on a decision not on a norm. The exception could not be subsumed under legal concepts and all order is based on the sovereign's decision.

In democracies, the sovereign power lies in the elected government. The prime minister or president who heads the government, has the executive power to enact the appropriate legislation to protect the people, to the highest degree possible, from terrorist attacks. The long-term survival of our democratic values lies on decision, on decisive remorseless actionable judicial measures that can apply instantly on suspicion against our mortal foes, not on interminable legal processes and debates about human rights and civil liberties. In any existential conflict, sacrifices are inevitable both in blood and in our accustomed ways of life. But these sacrifices are temporal, unlike the other case; by being unwilling to make them would be terminal to our existence.

In these perilous and hazardous times, mechanistic thinkers, who wantonly place the tenets of traditional law above this existential threat that hovers like a spectre over Western, cosmopolitan civilisation, totally disqualify themselves from any kind of leadership. Only leaders that are endowed with prescience, prudence and determination have the right to hold the rudder of leadership in their firm hands and pass the necessary and harsh anti-terror laws that can save western civilisation from the maelstrom of fanatical terrorism. Only Iron Statesmen and Iron Ladies are cast in this role.