Isis

Of all the guff churned out about Isis, the refrain that we are engaged in a 'clash of civilisations' and 'battle of ideas' is uniquely moronic. Isis doesn't want civilisation. As for a battle of ideas - what ideas? Isis doesn't have any, unless you count an apocalyptic fight to the death in Dabiq or Rome. We are reliably informed that Isis includes some very intelligent people who spend years planning terror attacks. Yet it took the, ahem, 'conflicted' Mohamed Bouhlel - that brave warrior who defecated on his own daughter's bed - months to plan his terror attack, which consisted solely of getting in a lorry and putting his foot down. Has any moment more succinctly captured the utter hatred of these brainwashed idiots than the moment Bouhlel's truck accelerated into the crowd?

I only got around to reading Michel Houellebecq’s Submission last month, a darkly amusing book about how France destabilises as it is caught between Islamic and nativist violence. It is, even by French standards, extremely pessimistic, but then who can blame them? When I visited France last summer, I noted just how many heavily armed police there were, even in the obscure western region we were staying at; more than I’d seen in any European country apart from Northern Ireland. The owner of the campsite, who was also a local official, explained that they were expecting something terrible to happen. Which it has done, twice now, this latter atrocity worse in many ways as it involved children.

I always thought the Freuds a pretty sordid bunch, and after the latest revelations it seems I wasn’t far off. I first met Clement Freud when John Aspinall employed him as an adviser for food and wine. He was lugubrious and aggressive, and none of us punters liked him one bit. He was not a gambler but talked as if he were a big one. While crossing the Atlantic on board the QE2 back in 1974, he tried to pRlay the tough guy with me over — yes, you guessed it — a lady, but it didn’t work. But there’s no use giving him the business now that he’s dead, so all I will say is that I found him just a bit less loathsome than his painter brother and leave it at that.

Life is speeded up. It used to be that when a hideous atrocity occurred people waited a day or two, even a week, before co-opting it into their political armoury. Now it happens while the smell of cordite is still in the air and before the blood has dried. There is a breathtaking shamelessness about it and a certain narcissism, if not outright solipsism and an eagerness to demand a sort of acquired victim status. The revolting murders in an Orlando nightclub are a case in point. Some 49 people dead and 53 injured after a Muslim, presumably what we are enjoined to call a radical Muslim, ran amok with a gun.

Strolling around Tate Modern’s recent Alexander Calder exhibition, something bothered me. Calder is best known for creating mobile, rather than static, sculptures; most of his pieces were intended to move, but some were now sitting lifelessly by the gallery’s white walls. It’s hard to appreciate how radical Calder’s kinetic art was in its time. Hergé, who owned one of Calder’s sculptures, put it best: 'I don’t know if you are familiar with his "mobiles". They consist of elements of light metal, assembled by thin wires. When hung from the ceiling, the slightest draught will make them move. They are graceful, light and extraordinarily poetic.' They sure are, or were.

'We would fight them, slaughter them,' Aadheen told me. 'The moment we take a pill we would stop thinking about anything.' The pill he's referring to is Captagon, an amphetamine that's said to fuel some of the brutality associated with Isis. In November last year, Turkish authorities seized 11 million Captagon pills on the Syrian border. In the same month, a Saudi prince was arrested after two tonnes of Captagon pills were found in cases being loaded onto a private jet. Aadheen is a former Isis member; he's now a drug addict in hiding. We met late at night in a safe house arranged by his dealer, close to the Syrian border. Aadheen sat silently in the corner, gently rocking back and forth. He was waiting for his next fix.