Dalrymple writes at City Journal on the El Bakraoui brothers, the Belgian terrorists who lived lives of crime long before they committed their atrocities. Their lenient treatment by the Belgian criminal justice system reveals its sheer frivolity:
Given that so many Islamist terrorists graduate seamlessly to politico-religious crime from common delinquency, one can say with tolerable certainty that one of the root causes of such terrorism in Europe is liberal penology, with its view that punishment is therapy and prisons are hospitals for the temporarily disturbed or naughty.