Isis

There was a remarkable report on Channel 4 news last night around a film by Mehran Bozorgnia, which featured an interview with half a dozen young Yazidi women from the Iraqi village of Kucho. They were taken captive by Islamic State, but managed to escaped from their stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. It was horrible beyond words: one young woman taken as a sexual slave spoke of Isis fighters breaking the arms or fracturing the skulls of girls who refused to cooperate, of the shame of forced conversion, of the girls begging their captors to kill them. Her captor was an Australian Isis member; his Yazidi slaves were in addition to his wife. A 30-year-old woman obliged to act as minder for the younger women spoke of seeing girls as young as nine or ten taken for sex.

Home MPs voted by 382 to 128 to make Britain the only country to allow genetic modification of embryos to prevent mitochondrial flaws: this could be done by the removal of the nucleus of a donor’s fertilised ovum and its replacement by the nucleus of two parents’ fertilised ovum, thus giving a child three parents. William Hague, the Leader of the House, outlined his plan for resolving the West Lothian question: ‘Before a Bill or parts of a Bill affecting only England was put to its final vote in the House of Commons, the English MPs would meet separately in what would be called the English Grand Committee and decide whether they agreed on it.’ Sir Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, died, aged 78.

Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the picturesque village postcard beautiful. I am lying in bed listening to a Mozart version of ‘Ave Maria’, a heavenly soprano almost bringing tears to my eyes with the loveliness of it. This is the civilisation of our ancestors — one that gave us Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven and built cathedrals all over the most wondrous continent in the world. It is now being replaced by a higher one in which distinctions of ethnicity and religion will no longer be tolerated. The human race has a limitless capacity for self-improvement, and it shows where architecture, the arts and music are concerned, not to mention literature.

She took the call herself the night the Islamic State came into Mosul. ‘Convert or leave or you’ll be killed,’ she was told. The callers, identifying themselves as Isis members, knew the household was Christian because her husband worked as a priest in the city. They fled that night. Like many of their Christian neighbours they sought refuge in the monastery of St Matthew. But Isis took that over, tore down the Cross, smashed all Cross-decorated windows, used it for their own prayers and flew their black flag on top of the church. Across what was Nineveh, Iraq’s Christians spent this year fleeing from village to village, hoping to find safety somewhere. This woman’s husband and son continued their ministry among the scattered congregations of Iraq.

Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview and in a way uniquely honest. Even a terror gang as vile as the IRA tried to keep a lid on the rapes and paedophilia going on within its rancid ranks.

Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote in the Commons, which enraged backbenchers all the more. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, tabled a procedural motion, forcing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to hurry from the Lord Mayor’s banquet in white tie to vote amid angry scenes. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came back from Brussels claiming that Britain would now only have to pay half of a £1.7 billion bill that the European Union had presented; but critics said that he was merely counting a future rebate that Britain was owed in any case.