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Child stealing, then and now?

A senior English police officer has called for children of extremists to be taken away from them.

Terrorists should have their children taken off them in the same way that paedophiles do, Britain’s outgoing top anti-terror policeman has said.

Assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police, Mark Rawley, said that children of terrorists were exposed to environments equally as “wicked” as victims of paedophiles were and so should be afforded the same protection.

In his valedictory speech, he told the Policy Exchange: “If you know parents are interested in sex with children, or if you know parents believe that people of their faith or their belief, should hate everybody else and grow up to kill people, for me those things are equally wicked environments to expose children to.”

Meanwhile, far away in Argentina, the Grim Reaper has finally called for one of the old ‘Dirty War’ Generals, Luciano Benjamín Menéndez (cousin of the clown who was ‘Gauleiter’ of the Falklands in 1982 until some Paras, Guards, Marines and Gurkhas et. al. turned up).

Menéndez, also known as “The Hyena,” was the military commander of ten Argentine provinces from 1975 to 1979.
Some 30,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the military in its infamous Dirty War against dissidents.
Menéndez was also convicted for abducting children from detained anti-government activists and giving them up for adoption.
The children were often adopted by families of military officials, who strived to give them a non-communist upbringing.

The Montoneros were a murderous bunch for sure. But why does a senior English police officer think it is appropriate to imitate a South American Junta?

26 comments to Child stealing, then and now?

  • pete

    Taken from ‘extremist’ parents into the care of the state?

    An out of the frying pan and into the fire predicament for the children involved given the state’s appalling record of abuse of children in its care.

  • Mr Black

    Expel the entire family, all blood relations as far as they go. They are banned from ever returning, as is anyone related to them. Problem solved.

  • Larry David Niven

    Brexit extremists included.

  • Expel the entire family, all blood relations as far as they go.

    So you support guilt-by-blood-ties? Do you apply the same logic to the families of white people I wonder?

  • Brexit extremists included.

    There is no such thing as a Brexit extremist, either you support actual Brexit or you don’t.

  • Because it will so help a teenager to get through that difficult stage calmly by discovering their ‘parents’ stole them from their real parents.

    I’m sure many would take this in their stride but as a way of minimising the number radicalised I have my doubts. (The Christian children enslaved and raised as Janissaries by the Ottomans were mostly reliable – Scanderbeg is one exception, but was perhaps not quite a typical Janissary – but they were raised as slaves in a society that was very different from ours.)

    I expect other commenters can think of another objection or two.

  • Mr Black

    Perry, I am of the view that immigrants have no right to stay if they are no longer welcome. Ideally, they’d all be sent home tomorrow. But I’ll settle for expelling terrorists and everyone around them. I really couldn’t care less about their “rights”. They certainly don’t care about ours.

  • pete

    Will this new policy have any greater success than the metropolitan police’s 0% conviction rate for FGM?

    If it does it is my guess that children will be removed from ‘right wing’ extremist parents, with none taken away from extremists of the belief system that the police and the justice system treat with kid gloves so as not to cause any offence.

  • Lee Moore

    why does a senior English police officer think it is appropriate to imitate a South American Junta?

    I think Jordan Peterson is particularly good on this sort of thing – telling his students, you imagine that if you’d been in Nazi Germany, you’d have been hiding Jews and secretly working to overthrow the Fuehrer. But it’s overwhelmingly more likely that you’d have been rounding up Jews, stoking an incinerator or two, or shooting Polish women in the head. Because most people who imagine themselves to be good, are really just people who’ve never had a viable opportunity to be bad..

    A British policeman who thinks it’s OK to imitate a South American junta is just normal, I’m afraid. It’s easy to believe that YOU would be corrupted by power. But me ? Nah, I’d use it for the best. I’d come down really hard on the bad guys. But only the bad guys. It takes an unusual person to truly believe that he would himself be corrupted by too much power. Or someone who has personally experienced the wrong end of too much power.

  • staghounds

    And alas,most people who have experienced the wrong end of too much power can’t wait to get hold of too much power so they can turn that misery loose on the right people this time and see how they like it. “Bottom rail on top now” is the human default.

  • staghounds

    And it’s not child “stealing”,you don’t own these precious innocents.

    It’s child SAVING.

  • Mr Ed

    staghounds, of course it is ‘saving’.

    A few thoughts have struck me: This ‘right’ to ‘save’ children would have to apply, and be recognised, throughout the UK. Might a fervently nationalist Scottish administration seek to ‘extradite’ and ‘save’ children whose ‘extreme’ anti-Indy views lead them to flee to Berwick, where their views might be regarded as innocuous?

    Would there be, on conviction (I’m being optimistic that a conviction would be required) the penalty of imprisonment, and a ‘Child Confiscation Order’ or ‘Termination of Parental Responsibility Order, a bit like asset forfeiture, or would one unconvicted parent be allowed to retain his or her child?

    Would the child be put into care, or adopted and be given a false name and new identity and new ‘legal’ parents?

    There are so many exciting options for the State to consider. What if someone wins an appeal, but the child is ‘settled’ in the new family (say the Social Workers and the Judge)?

    And of course, would it be applied in Northern Ireland (and why was it not thought of before?) to those who are in ‘Continuity’ terrorist movements?

    We can’t have the law applying different rules just because of someone’s ethnicity or national origin, that would be discrimination (in favour or against the Irish, I’m not sure) and an absolute disgrace to the PTB.

  • Larry David Niven

    Perry I’m talking about the perception of our benevolent policy makers and police management.

  • Thailover

    There is an obvious reason the usual criteria of apparently dangerous environment, with evidence that will stand up in court, isn’t considered good enough. Statists are never happy with anything less than a police state. The trick in poker is to intimidate people with their own money, and the trick in statism is to threaten innocent people without overtly literally threatening them.

  • But I’ll settle for expelling terrorists and everyone around them.

    It is the latter half of that sentence that I really have a major problem with. It is unwise almost beyond words to trust a government with the ability to declare guilt-by-association, of which the most egregious form is surely guilt-by-blood-relationship. That is the notion that drove a great many of history’s genocidal atrocities.

  • Perry I’m talking about the perception of our benevolent policy makers and police management.

    I got that 😉

  • bobby b

    There is a halfway measure.

    You take the children of the deplorable people away for six to eight hours every day, and you spend all of that time indoctrinating them concerning their parents’ errors.

    This gives the same essential result with none of the bloodshed.

  • Jacob

    About Argentina:
    “Some 30,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the military in its infamous Dirty War against dissidents.”

    That 30,000 figure seems an exaggeration to me…
    And it was not a war against “dissidents” .. it was a war against violent, armed communist revolutionaries. I think it was necessary to avoid another Cuba or Venezuela. It was an excessively dirty war… those Argentine Generals weren’t too bright, but in all – it was a good war.

    Point for discussion: which war wasn’t “dirty”? I mean: calling a war “dirty” is an act of propaganda.

  • Jacob

    About taking away children: nowadays the State takes away children from their parents whenever it wants or feels like it, or whenever a social worker finds that the children were neglected… The assumption that the State is a Supreme being endowed with Supreme power (employed exclusively for the good…) is the creed of the day.
    Taking children away from their parents is a daily, normal occurrence. This is the background for judging this officer’s proposal.

  • Laird

    The thing is, I understand his point. Allowing children to grow up in a toxic environment that extols terrorism and murder is tantamount to child abuse, and once you accept the principle of parens patriae you are almost forced into Rawley’s position. And one can also read this as an almost-explicit acknowledgement of the dangers posed by your Muslim population (although I note that he was careful to include the obligatory reference to the “far-right threat”).

    Of course, we all here recognize the slippery slope of this argument, and are right to pre-emptively stop it before it even begins. But its appeal is obvious, and it is rational.

  • Mr Black

    It seems as if our misguided policy of accepting barbarians into our cities is forcing us to accept all sorts of other distasteful compromises as well.

  • onkayaks

    The idea of separating children from their parents when one of them is convicted of heinous crimes would not only be appaling if written in Criminal Codes, it would make any legal scholar cringe. Yet, it happens now —often on the whim of public officials— before the conviction for such eminent reasons as the child’s best interests, and the presumption that social workers know best.

    The notion of making it a policy for certain crimes is a leap forward. However criminal the conduct of a man, it does not follows from it that he should be presumed a terrible father. It is hard not to see this as a dismaying extension of criminal punishments. Such decisions should be exceptional, and taken on a case by case basis,

  • Paul Marks

    Surely if someone is a terrorist then they should be sent to prison – and if they are in prison their children are not with them.

    Unless the policeman is saying that children should be taken away from parents who have NOT been proved to be terrorists.

  • Rich Rostrom

    There are ethnic groups where parents teach their children to be thieves, and expect them to steal from anyone who is not a member of the group.

    Does society at large, acting through the state, have the moral right to remove children from such parents?

  • Mr Ed

    Paul,

    It may be that one parent is a terrorist, the other not (or even not convicted, whilst the distinction matters). I see no reason why the parents could not appoint guardians for the duration of their incarceration, after all they have the Human Right to a family life (sarc.).

  • Paul Marks

    Mr Ed – I see now.