Terrorism

It has just been announced that my friend Lars Hedegaard, a Danish journalist and frequent critic of Islamic fundamentalism, has narrowly survived an assassination attempt at his home in Denmark. The BBC is reporting: ‘Police said a gunman in his 20s rang the doorbell at Mr Hedegaard’s Copenhagen home pretending to deliver a package and then fired a shot to the head which missed. TV2 News reported that the gun then jammed, there was a scuffle and the attacker ran off.’ Thankfully Lars has not been hurt in the attack. The Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has condemned the attack, saying: ‘It is even worse if the attack is rooted

The Algerian hostage crisis is over and the Prime Minister has warned that the focus of the al-Qaeda’s franchise has shifted westwards. In his statement on the situation, he was channelling Tony Blair, which at least makes a change from channelling the Foreign Office. But the initial reaction from Downing Street was deeply unimpressive. The BBC’s Nick Robinson quoted a nameless, sneering voice, apparently exasperated at the Algerian response to the crisis. It would be interesting to know whether this patronising individual had ever spent any time working outside SW1 or had any idea that the Algerian people have lived on the frontline of the struggle with violent Islamists for

I fear that we are all going to have to learn a lot about Mali and the Sahel—and fast. It is rapidly becoming the latest front in the war on terror. Or, to be more precise, the West’s attempt to prevent the emergence of ungoverned spaces that can be exploited by Al Qaeda and its offshoots. The New York Times today has a good primer on the challenge facing the French in Mali: “The French are fighting to preserve the integrity of a country that is divided in half, of a state that is broken. They are fighting for the survival of an interim government with no democratic legitimacy that

To have a helicopter crash so near the site of the new American Embassy and the headquarters of MI6 raises obvious concerns for national security. I was on a train when I first heard the news, and my fellow commuters all hit their mobiles. Everyone’s first reaction seemed to be to ask if this was another terrorist attack. It wasn’t. But for a lot of Londoners, the incident will have been a reminder of how vulnerable the capital city still is. We choose to have the headquarters of our spies in one of the most visible locations in the country. In Prime Minister’s Questions, we put the entire British government under

Hamas have claimed responsibility for a bus-bombing in Tel Aviv earlier today. It is worth watching this video, which went out a few hours ago on Hamas’s ‘Al-Aqsa’ TV.  Over the presenter’s response are shown the first photographs of wounded Israelis being carried from the scene of the bus-bombing. The presenter is saying: ‘These are the scenes of the casualties. God willing, we will soon see black body bags. I pray to Allah the exalted that we see body bags in a short while. These are scenes of the Zionist casualties so far.’ Right now in these moments, the mosques in the Gaza Strip – their minarets are loudly sounding

A ceasefire is expected in Gaza later this evening, but is yet to materialise. Unsurprisingly, agreement has been hard to reach. Indeed, it has become a tool of propaganda. Hamas was busily briefing the world’s media that the ceasefire had been agreed even as rockets struck Rishon LeZion in southern Israel at 16.22 (GMT), causing two light casualties. Israel, for its part, was clear that there would be no ceasfire while it was still under attack. It was hoped that the message had got through: the BBC reported that the guns, so to speak, fell silent shortly after 16.40 for more than half an hour. However, it was the triumph of

The Books Blog has an interview with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka is worth listening to for his ambivalence towards nationalism, his tolerant secularism and his recollection of solitary confinement during Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s. But his comments on Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group that is terrorising northern and central Nigeria, are worth quoting here on a weekend of bloodshed in the Middle East. ‘I look at Boko Haram not just as a terrorist group, but also as a criminal gang, and a bunch of psychopaths. You don’t enter into dialogue with drug lords and criminals. It

The papers and media are full of the news that Israel has killed a Hamas leader in the Gaza. Why did this happen? Where did it come from? Is it not yet another example of the blood-thirsty Zionists doing their worst? If you read most of the British media that may well be what you think. After all there has been barely any previous mention in the British papers of the massive escalation in rocket fire into Israel in the last month or the even swifter escalation this week. Certainly no British paper or broadcaster has come close to giving these attacks the front-page publicity they grant to Israel’s response

What a lot of things President Obama seems to have been holding back until after his re-election. Each day brings something new. There has been the news of an attack by Iran on a US drone in the Persian Gulf. Then there is the Petraeus affair – known about for months, but only leading to the CIA chief’s resignation immediately after Obama’s re-election. The Benghazi hearings are yet to come. And now another surprise. It transpires that the Iraqi government, a body which is only in power because of the sacrifice of thousands of American, British and other allied troops, is releasing from custody a senior Hezbollah terrorist who was