Quora Answer: Should We Grant Immunity to ISIS Fighters to Return Home in Order to Collapse ISIS?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Should we grant immunity to ISIS fighters if they return to their home countries, as an incentive to collapse ISIS from inside?”

No.  Granting them immunity does not guarantee that these people are deradicalised or that they have renounced their violent exceptionalism.  Instead, it gives their ideology a veneer of respectability, and reduces this to a mere political struggle between contending philosophies, instead of recognising them as an existential threat to multiculturalism and secularism.

Also, we have to consider that supporters of ISIS justify violence and attacks against non-combatants and civilians.  We are putting foxes in the hen house.  That is welcoming the terrorist threat, and allowing them to recruit others.

The only good ISIS fighter is a dead ISIS fighter.  I feel the same for their supporters, but we need that facade of compassion, and that is why we have half measures such as imprisonment and detention.  Deradicalisation is a process, but we must be cognisant of the fact that some people can never renounce their beliefs.  They cannot be trusted in civilised society.  They are a cancer, and should be eliminated.  That is why we have the judicial death penalty for sedition and waging war against the state.