Should ransoms ever be paid to Islamic terrorists?

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Wordsmith ( 37 comments already! )

The trio of videos released by the Islamic State in recent weeks have followed the same grim pattern — a helpless and unarmed Westerner is forced to kneel in front of a masked militant who threatens the U.S. and Britain before calmly beheading the captive — but the group’s newest video contains a small glimmer of hope that the hostage, British journalist John Cantlie, might potentially make it out alive.

To be clear, the roughly three-minute video makes for extremely difficult viewing. Cantlie, who was captured in Syria in 2012, appears wearing the orange jumpsuit that has become synonymous with the outfits worn by American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley and British aid worker David Haines before their brutal murders. Speaking directly to the camera, Cantlie promises to reveal the truth about how the media is dragging their respective countries back into another unwinnable war. In the “next few programs,”

It’s not the media that’s “dragging their respective countries back” into war; it’s ISIS. And these beheading videos only invites public outrage and support for more war.

Cantlie says that he will expose how European governments negotiate for their hostages while the United States and Britain refuse to do so.

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While European governments have negotiated for hostages captured by Islamist militants and regularly paid multimillion dollar ransoms, the United States and Britain have maintained a hardline policy of refusing to strike such deals. In the video, Cantlie criticizes this policy. “I’ll show you the truth behind what happened when many European citizens were imprisoned and later released by the Islamic State, and how the British and American governments thought they could do it differently to every other European country,” Cantlie says. “They negotiated with the Islamic State and got their people home, while the British and Americans were left behind.”

It is thanks to these other European governments, in their short-sighted compassion for the captured victim, that an environment of cruelty in the long-term is created; by capitulating to terror demands, these governments endanger all of us to more such kidnappings and extortion:

“Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil,” one al-Qaeda leader wrote to another in 2012, marveling over the amount of money terrorist groups can extort from the West with little effort.

Indeed, al-Qaeda and its franchises have taken in more than $125 million in ransom since 2008, according to an estimate by The New York Times, including $66 million in the last year alone. The money makes terror groups bigger and more difficult to defeat — and more likely to take additional hostages.

Now if this was your family member, would you do whatever it took- including paying ransom- to save your family member’s life? It’s difficult to fault a family for that. But when you think of the larger picture and the harm it brings, that “forgivable”, selfish act is bad for society because it puts other families in danger of having a loved one kidnapped by these Islamic terrorists.

The story of the Somali pirates is instructive. When pirates were first seizing ships off the East African coast, ship owners treated ransom payments as a cost of doing business. But that just encouraged more piracy. Eventually, owners began hardening their vessels and putting armed teams onboard to fight back. The number of hijacked ships fell dramatically.

When paying ransom is the only policy, you’ll just pay more of it, enriching and strengthening the kidnappers. What works is refusing to pay. This can seem outrageously callous, but there’s evidence that it can reduce the number of kidnappings as long as the target nations stick together.

And where does the money go? It goes into fueling jihad. And jihad murders your family. Your friends. Your neighbors. Your fellow countrymen.

The “higher” self-interest is to resist temptation of giving in to terror ransom demands.

If families and governments had thought to do that previously, then perhaps Foley, Sotloff, and Haines (and Cantlie) would never have been put into the situation they found themselves in, in the first place.