Islam

A few months back, after the Brussels terrorist attacks, I pointed out on Coffee House that there is a certain routine after any such atrocity. One part of it is that, after a couple of days pause, we always get the ‘Muslim good news story’. This is the part when after a couple of days of everyone insisting Islam has nothing to do with the Islamist attack the national and international media gets to run almost as big a story suggesting that although Islam is not part of any problem, it is, however, a very major answer to almost everything. Fortunately the slaughter of Father Jacques Hamel last week has already got

In Saturday’s Guardian, Natalie Nougayrède, the former managing editor of Le Monde, wrote that in the days following the slaughter of 84 people in Nice by an Islamic terrorist ‘incidents of open, blatant, anti-Muslim hatred have sparked a new, worrying phase’ in France. She didn’t elaborate on what form this hatred took, nor come up with any examples, but Madame Nougayrède was adamant that intolerance among her compatriots was on the rise following four years of bloody religious mayhem that has left more than 200 dead in terrorist attacks on French soil. Then today comes a new attack, the brutal murder by two Islamic terrorists of an elderly priest as he conducted

Last Friday I noted that you don’t have to go back many months to get the latest mass-casualty terrorist atrocity in Europe these days.  But even while people were still trying to find ways to portray the Nice truck driver as a victim of urban-planning laws we had the next attack. Yesterday it was an ‘Afghan asylum seeker’ who went around a train in Germany with an axe shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’.  That’s the same ‘Allahu Akbar’ (or ‘Allah is greatest’) that the man who drove the truck into the crowds in Nice was shouting as he ploughed through the crowded streets.  Like last week’s Nice attacker, yesterday’s attacker in Germany also

I’m pro-gun control, but I come from the most heavily populated corner of one of the most crowded islands on earth, where it’s appropriate. I also grew up in a city and have only fired a gun once, which was basically an air rifle, and the results were predictably Woody Allenesque. But gun control may not be necessarily appropriate in sparse rural areas, although I do find some of the arguments made by American Second Amendment supporters strange. Whenever someone pops up and kills loads of people, the argument is that if only someone there was armed it wouldn’t have happened. Like in a school? In a club? We can’t

Last night a gunman attacked a gay club in Orlando, Florida. At present at least 50 people are confirmed dead and another 42 are confirmed injured – which would make it the worst mass shooting in American history. The gunman appears to have been a US citizen called Omar Mateen. Even the FBI is now admitting that he would appear to have had ‘leanings’ towards radical Islamic ideology. Perhaps that’s why, shortly before his murder spree, he called 911 to declare his allegiance to the Islamic State (which has since claimed responsibility for the massacre). Here’s a prediction. If the gunman from last night had proved to have been a Christian fundamentalist,

Libya’s former Prime Minister Dr. Mahmoud Jibril has become the first senior leader of its Arab Spring revolution to call time on the country’s new western-backed government, saying ‘the chances of success are very slim’. This apparent failure hasn’t been caused by a lack of support, which has poured in from London and Washington in a bid to get the Government of National Accord (GNA) to stand up and walk on its own two feet. It was also hoped that by doing this, a fix could be found for the twin problems of Islamic State and mass migration. But Dr Jibril, who helped steer the country through its brutal uprising