The killing of Mohammed Emwazi, so-called Jihadi John, by the UK government without a trial is a terrible precedent that opens the door to arbitrary executions by the British state.
Certainly, sentiments that he was a "scumbag" who deserved death or worse for his involvement in the Takfiri militant group ISIL were not misplaced. However, that isn't a sufficient reason for society to throw the law out the window and just trust the government to kill whoever it wants.
Such behavior by the assassins of the British government was recently struck hard in an op-ed by Steve Topple for Common Space, published 13 November. He accused the UK's ruling Conservative regime of demagoguery, using a "self-defense" argument and emotional appeals to the population to justify extrajudicial killings.
The killing, Topple says, shows that the UK government can now summarily execute anyone and not be held accountable. He wrote that the state is now "saying that they can decide who among their citizens are classed as 'threats', summarily do away with them first and then ask the questions later."
Describing the illegal assassinations by the British and American regimes as "psychopathy", the op-ed gave the following warning for all readers to consider:
The precedent it (and the killings of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in September) sets should not be underestimated. Who, in the next few years, will be deemed as a threat to national security, requiring action in 'self-defence'? The Marxist PKK in Turkey? The socialist coalition in Portugal which has just overthrown the right-wing government? Domestic extremist Jenny Jones of the Green Party?As with out-of-control surveillance of the population, the hand of the assassins has been freed by Western governments to kill with impunity, on the basis that the population is sufficiently frightened by the "terror threat" that they'll allow the government to do anything. Ironically, Western regimes make constant references to preserving the "rule of law" to defeat terrorism, but are not afraid to break the law themselves.
In the US, the people are so determined to protect their Constitution from "foreign" enemies that they don't notice their own government violating it on a daily basis.
Read our selected parts from the @LOrdreNet commentary on #MontOrder Point 1 https://t.co/jbmHKr1tzg pic.twitter.com/jSCVuTpF8p— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) November 15, 2015
