Janine Drennan, her mother-in-law Hester Rawstone and her baby Kayla were abducted in Pretoria in what is called a "car-jack". They were taken 35 miles to a township, their heavily armed kidnappers grabbing another captive, a 16-year-old girl, en route.
The men shot Kayla in front of her mother and grandmother, then they murdered the grandmother, and then they repeatedly raped and beat Janine and the 16-year-old, before shooting them both. The girl - miraculously - survived, which is how we know about the last and worst hours any woman could possibly experience.
The killer-rapists were raised in apartheid South Africa. What should the state do with them once it has found them? Sentence them to jail, where they could be given various life skills and be counselled in anger management and sexual continence, so that after release they may show women a new and heart-warming respect? Or rather, just kill them?
I don't believe in the principle of an eye-for-an-eye, not least because generally it is neither desirable nor possible; and it is certainly impossible to do anything to the culprits which could in any way match the ordeal they reserved for three generations of the one family, never mind the unspeakable suffering of Janine's husband, Clifford Rawstone. But the lives of those three females must have a value, which society can only place a measure on now by ensuring that the lives of their murderers are forfeit.
It has nothing to do with "deterrence" or "punishment". You cannot punish those men enough, and it's unlikely they would have been deterred by the knowledge that what they were doing was a capital crime (as it happens, the death penalty no longer exists in South Africa). The execution of these men would simply be the trade for the lives of their victims: it's a poor one, to be sure, but it's the only one that can be made. It's a statement that civilised society will exact the only punishment proportionate to the deed; anything less would be an affront to the memory of the violated, murdered women.
We can all gather at the hearth of liberal wisdom and, nodding sagely, agree that this was an unbelievably foul and wicked deed; though not many Irish Times readers would agree the killers deserve to be killed. But were they any worse than Raed Abdel Mesk, the Islamic scholar who blew up a bus full of Orthodox Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall, killing some 20 of them, including five children? For, unbelievably, he was himself a father, with children aged four and 18 months, and his wife was five months pregnant.
What offer could Israel have made that would have caused him to desist from the massacre of innocents, from the widowing of his wife, from making his own children fatherless? There is none, for it is as if he and we were a different species. And in his distance from us, from our personal and political values, is he not every bit as remote as the men who ended Janine Drennan's life so terribly outside a South African township?
Defenders or contextualisers of Islamic fundamentalist murder would say that their motives were entirely different. Indeed, we have heard
similar arguments from soft-shoe shuffling apologists for the IRA - that terrorists have a political motive, and therefore should not be judged by the same standards that one uses to judge criminals. But all their deeds are selfish deeds, and involve the forcible imposition of their will on others.
Does the victim feel relieved at the "purity" of the republican motives that left him a quadriplegic wheezing on a life support machine? Moreover, the motives of an Islamic suicide bomber and of the Pretoria rapists are not entirely dissimilar. For a shaheed or martyr is rewarded in paradise with some 70 or so virgins upon whom he may pleasure himself to his heart's content. The certainty of this is one of the central attractions of martyrdom for a Muslim male suicide bomber.
When he left his pregnant wife and two little children behind him, it was to the three score and ten maidens that Raed Abdel Mesk was going.
Now no part of me understands this, any more than any part of me understands the Pretoria rapes and killings. The gulf between my value system and his is too great, and I don't see how I could possibly co-exist with him. For how can one trust a man who chooses to bring such grief to his own family, even as he massacres strangers' children? What contract will unbreakably bind him to honour his word that he intends to live in peace? For look what he did to the holy contract he took in fatherhood to honour his children and their mother.
Every single attempt to find a pathway out of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio has ended in tears. There are simply too many Palestinians, too many Raed Abdel Mesks, who are anxious to die, to become martyrs in the act of exterminating Jews, even as Israel is releasing militants, for the Israeli state to ignore them. Yet any action to protect Jews is denounced as provocation by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Moreover, the issue is no longer just the existence of Israel. There is a greater project: to cause religious conflict around the world, to start an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war, and countless wars in the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos.
Evil is now among us; and one of its most lethal expressions is the refusal to see the enormous scale of the danger.