Paris

Friday

Ed Husain

Down with la laïcité — to beat Islamism, we need a secularism that encourages religion

‘We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad’ shouts the jihadi murderer as he escapes, having killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. In Syria, an American fighting for al-Qaeda says: ‘I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here’. There are thousands of young men and women in our midst who share these sentiments. They believe that their cause is worth dying for – and they want to have that honour, confident in the reward that they will get for their actions. They are disillusioned, not disenfranchised. Many are well-educated, with a good family life. But they seek a value that they can fight for – a cause for

Thursday

Taki

Let’s all become Japanese for a while

This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to the stoic discipline with which the Japanese bore hardship and the death of 15,000 people in March 2011 following a nine-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to have hit Japan. I can remember the TV coverage as if it were yesterday. Very young and very old Japanese formed a long orderly line for disaster supplies. There was no looting whatsoever as there had been in Los Angeles or in Mexico City, no weeping on camera so that the world would send more funds, just plucky resolve (gaman in Japanese) and

Wednesday

Geoffrey Alderman

Here’s how politicians can convince British Jews that they have a future in the UK

A recent study has suggested that over half of Britain’s Jews feel they have no future in the UK. At first glance this might seem outrageous, indeed incredible. Arguably (one might say) we Jews are the most successfully integrated of all the UK’s ethnic minorities.  A miniscule set of communities – comprising in total 0.5 per cent of the UK’s total population –  British Jewry punches well above its weight in all walks of life: the learned professions; the arts; the entertainment industries; academia; big and not so big business; even politics. Of course (you might retort) Jews have a future in the UK! A more pertinent question might be to

The Spectator

Cameron’s reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks has been depressingly predictable

Last Sunday, David Cameron marched through Paris in solidarity, so it seemed, with those who stand up for free speech. Anyone who thought he meant it must now be crying out, ‘Je suis un right Charlie!’ Hardly had the march finished than the Prime Minister had rediscovered his other side: the one which reacts to terror by threatening yet more surveillance, more state control. He has promised to revive, in the Conservative manifesto, the ‘-snooper’s charter’ which would allow the state to retain indefinitely information about every email we ever send, every telephone call we ever make. Not only that. He added a further measure: he wants to ban all

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Nigel Farage: a two-bit demagogue and believer in lazy ‘Root Causes’

Nigel Farage has performed a useful public service this week. Yes, really, he has. The UKIP leader, you see, is a believer in Root Causes. He is, in fact, a Root Causer and, like every member of that miserable tribe, liable to see every event as confirming the righteousness of his own longstanding, stale-breathed, prejudices. You see we – the west generally – bring all this trouble upon ourselves. At home and abroad. It’s western foreign policy that explains and motivates Islamic extremism and it’s uncontrolled (sic) immigration that’s given it room to flourish in France, the United Kingdom and other countries. How very convenient. The idea that the Charlie Hebdo murders

Alex Krasodomski

The real danger of #CyberJihad is that anybody can get involved

There was a certain irony to the news that @CENTCOM had been hacked yesterday afternoon. While President Obama was giving a speech on cybersecurity, the U.S. Central Command Twitter account was spouting pro-Isis propaganda. Nothing new here, though. Since day one, Isis have used the internet to threaten the West and in particular American soldiers. During a few days in August last year, my research group tracked eighty thousand tweets sent using the hashtag #AMessageFromISIStoUS from Isis sympathisers. Many of them contained grisly threats: images of US casualties and coffins with warnings not to interfere in the affairs of the Caliphate. Cyber-jihad is a natural evolution of terrorism. Islamic State seem to have

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

The right to offend is nowhere near as important as the right to speak the truth

Last week I lost count of the number of times we’ve been told, pace the Charlie Hebdo murders, that we have no right not to be offended, that freedom of speech involves the possibility of criticism and ridicule of any religion; indeed, that it’s the flip side of religious liberty. Salman Rushdie, who has more right to make the point than most, said that ‘religion deserves our fearless disrespect’ and  people like Suzanne Moore in the Guardian seemed to suggest that we have a positive duty to disrespect religion, though I am still waiting for that paper to reproduce some of Charlie Hebdo’s finest on the subject of the prophet of Islam as

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Islam had nothing to do with this (and other fibs you’re likely to hear)

I don’t always agree with Peter Hitchens but this is by far the best piece I’ve seen on the political reaction to the Paris attacks. As far as Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are concerned, we must all sign up to these shibboleths: The attack was nothing to do with Islam. Almost all Muslims, here and abroad, found those attacks repugnant. The attacks were perpetrated and supported by a minuscule number of people who can simply be defined as ‘terrorists’. Immigration and multiculturalism were in no way contributory causes of either the Paris attack or the attacks which we might experience in the future or have suffered in the past. All

Lara Prendergast

Charlie Hebdo attack: French march in defiance alongside world leaders

Up to 0ne million people are expected to march through the streets of Paris today, in defiance of the terrorist attacks on the city during the past week. David Cameron will join the march, alongside approximately 40 other world leaders, including French President Francois Hollande. Security has been increased around the city, with more than 5,500 police officers expected to be on guard.  

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Nothing to do with Muslims, of course

Utterly brilliant piece by Brendan O’Neill at Spiked on what would have happened if Charlie Hebdo had been published in Britain, rather than in France. It does not strike me as being terribly far-fetched. Meanwhile, the BBC, yet again, has misjudged the story in its news coverage, wringing its hands over the treatment of French Muslims, while at the same time insisting that the murders were nothing to do with Muslims – it was just mad terrorists.

Friday

Douglas Murray

The siege in a kosher shop in Paris proves why Israel needs to exist

As I write a siege is ongoing in a Kosher shop in Paris.  In France, Belgium and across Europe in recent years, Jews have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist attack.  They always are.  Last year saw the largest upsurge of anti-Semitic hate crime on record even in the UK. But it is the continent that has seen the worst and growing litany of attacks.  In 2012 Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse.  In May last year three people were shot dead by an Islamist gunman at the Jewish museum in Brussels. During the twentieth century Judaism on the continent of Europe

Isabel Hardman

Charlie Hebdo’s journalists were murdered for doing. Now people are being attacked simply for being

After Wednesday’s attack on Charlie Hebdo, an argument doing the rounds was that it would have been better not to publish cartoons that were deliberately provocative when the magazines had already suffered violent attacks. Why should the journalists put themselves and others, including Muslim policeman Ahmed Merabet, at risk of death? Now two people are dead in a kosher grocers in eastern Paris, perhaps those who thought that it unwise to publish aggressive cartoons can have a think again. Five or six people are believed to be being held hostage in the shop. The shop sells kosher food. Jews buy kosher food. The attackers appear to be killing people not

Thursday

Ross Clark

Objecting to Charlie Hebdo cartoons doesn’t make you a terrorist

The French liberal-left and George W Bush are not natural bedfellows, but today the former are sounding just a little bit like the latter. The ‘Je suis Charlie’ banners they are carrying in reaction to yesterday’s murders at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are effectively saying, to borrow the former US president’s slogan: you are either with us or you are with the terrorists. The terror attack, of course, deserves universal condemnation. It is an act of cold-blooded murder. That it was carried out against a targeted group makes it neither better nor worse than 9/11 or the London tube bombings which were conducted against random victims.

Wednesday

Irshadmanji

The Islamic case for a free press

Last year, I watched the British brouhaha over my friend Maajid Nawaz, the prospective Liberal Democrat candidate for Kilburn and co-founder of the counter-extremism outfit Quilliam. Nawaz had tweeted a cartoon called Jesus and Mo. Jesus to Mo: ‘Hey!’ Mo: ‘How ya doing?’ The end. That was it. Two top-tier prophets swapping props. The problem for some Muslims is that, according to tradition, Muhammad cannot be depicted in image lest he become an object of worship. But by insisting that he cannot be drawn under any circumstances, these Muslims make the prophet off-limits to anyone who does not believe as they do. They thus turn Mo into, well, an object of

Lara Prendergast

Gun attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ‘kills 12’

Gunmen have attacked the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Current reports suggest that up to 12 people have been killed. One eyewitness told French TV channel Itele: ‘Two black-hooded men entered the building with Kalashnikovs. A few minutes later we heard lots of shots.’ Ils ont tiré à deux reprises les balles ont traversé la porte et la fenêtre pic.twitter.com/Jhgi4MBlnp — yve cresson (@yvecresson) January 7, 2015 The magazine has courted controversy in the past by publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. An hour ago the magazine’s Twitter account posted a cartoon of the Islamic State militant group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The attackers reportedly escaped in two vehicles. A

Thursday

Ismene Brown

An American in Paris: a zingy new Wheeldon dance-musical that you won’t want to miss

A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places, I’d urge you to resolve to dust off the private jet and get to Paris quick this weekend hoping to find a ticket somehow for the last Châtelet performances of An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s s’wonderful, s’marvellous new staging of the Gershwin/Minnelli musical film. Or book for New York in March when the show moves to its second home on Broadway. But surely there must be a UK run soon. It’s the first big dance-musical of the Royal Ballet’s favourite son, which is why we should pay attention. The

Tuesday

Digby Warde-Aldam

A stunner of an exhibition at Paris’s flashiest new gallery

You can tell a lot about an art gallery from its attached eatery. The Tate has the grand but gratuitously naff Rex Whistler restaurant. The Serpentine its globular Zaha Hadid nouvelle cuisine joint. Then there’s the Mess Restaurant at the Saatchi Gallery’s newish space in the old Chelsea Barracks. To be charitable, the name is a bad but unfortunately appropriate pun. Anyway, I report from a children’s park in BCBG west Paris, where Louis Vuitton have just opened a new art gallery. Obviously, a luxury (and erstwhile collaborationist) megabrand were never going to settle for an ordinary white cube. Oh no. Instead they hired virtuoso architect Frank Gehry to build

Thursday

Jonathan Meades

Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?

The French for French-bashing is le French bashing. This verbally costive nation is at it once again, torpidly borrowing an approximately English expression rather than coining its own. Such bashing is not an exclusively Anglo-Saxon practice. There is indigenous bashing. At least there is Éric Zemmour, whose salutary Le Suicide français was published a couple of months ago. Its very first sentence declares that France is the sick man of Europe — which prompted Manuel Valls, little Hollande’s prime minister this week and a man who is not growing into that poisoned office, to take the bait, exhibit a preposterously thin skin and denounce the book twice in a few

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print. Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?

The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for political ideologies. The Imperial eagle spread its wings over the German Pavilion; the Soviet hammer swung above the Russian Pavilion; and the Spanish Pavilion unveiled Picasso’s shocking monument to the civilian dead of the bombed city of Guernica, raising the clenched fist of the Spanish Republic in the capital of non-interventionist France. Not everyone was convinced by ‘Guernica’ as art. Anthony Blunt in The Spectator commended Picasso’s political gesture but dismissed the painting as ‘the expression of a private brainstorm’. Piqued on the artist’s behalf, the British surrealist Roland Penrose,