Remorseless Mockery Today

"Well, that was back at the tail end of an era that still believed in archaic concepts as evil and punishment. The point of five life sentences was not just to keep society safe, but also to exact justice for the nine lives she took in her murderous spree. As the son of their most prominent victim testified to the court that granted her five years' probation -- five years! -- none of the Red Army faction terrorists ever expressed remorse for their killings.

One suspects that the reason Mohnhaupt and her twisted colleagues receive such mercy is that the German establishment has sympathy for their original aims. The radical Leftists had plenty of fellow travelers in the 1970s, when many of them agitated for the kind of socialism exemplified in East Germany. Some of those went into politics, others into academia, and still more into the legal system. Baader-Meinhof was just a more violent expression of a movement that many supported, and that many still do.

However, one had hoped that the advent of Islamist terrorism would have stripped the romance from the Baader-Meinhof thugs. They slaughtered civilians to make themselves important, giving it a patina of Marxist revolution by spouting political manifestos that had grown tired even at that time. They're no different than al-Qaeda suicide bombers in London, Morocco, Turkey, Madrid, or at the World Trade Center; they just used a different ideology as an excuse for the same mass and serial murders. Not only has Germany made a mockery of life sentences, they have shown that they do not understand the message that this sends to terrorists -- the kind that used Hamburg as a base to kill almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11." [ The next time you need a definition of the concept "mockery of justice", just refer to this post. -ed. ]