Terrorism

Thursday

Ed West

Christmas markets without armed police are now a thing of the past

From our UK edition

I love the Christmas season, so friendly and wholesome and filled with evocative memories – but don't the machine guns and anti-terror bollards seem to go up earlier each year? Look at the touching festive scenes in Manchester, and Edinburgh, and we'll see the police and barriers across the country from Liverpool to Lincoln. It's not quite Bedford Falls is it? I've noticed these 'diversity bollards' popping up everywhere, without a word spoken about it; a few weeks ago I spotted them at Hyde Park Corner opposite the Duke of Wellington's house. How would one explain that to Old Nosey?

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Could the Manchester Arena bombing have been stopped?

From our UK edition

Today's report into the Manchester and London terror attacks makes for devastating reading, spelling out as it does the horrors of the murderous events in which 51 people lost their lives. The details are further daunting for making it clear just how great the threat facing Britain from Islamist terror continues to be. Much of the focus today though has rested on a question: could the attacks have been prevented? The answer is not clear but there are certainly reasons to think that at least one of the attacks could have been stopped. While there is little evidence to suggest that the Westminster Bridge attack could have been thwarted, the same cannot be said for the Manchester Arena attack.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Security overkill is terror’s real triumph

From our UK edition

The moment the news broke on Halloween that an Uzbek in a rental truck had just killed eight people on New York’s West Side cycle path, my heart sank. Now, you might think that any decent human being — I marginally qualify — would be profoundly saddened by the pointless murder of folks merely out enjoying a city’s recreational facilities on a crisp autumn day. But that wasn’t it. Or you might think — since I spend a fair whack of the year in New York, where as usual I get everywhere by bike — that I might be concerned about becoming a terrorist target myself. I use that bike path constantly in summer. Had the attack occurred earlier in the year, one of those victims could have been me. But that wasn’t it, either.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Better a dead fanatic in Syria than a live one in Britain

From our UK edition

Let us give thanks for the straight-talking Rory Stewart. After last week's alarming comments from Max Hill, a QC who appears to believe British Isis fighters just need some TLC, Stewart, a Foreign Office minister, has given a more incisive assessment of the approach that should be taken towards the British jihadists still at large in Syria and Iraq. 'They are absolutely dedicated, as members of the Islamic State, towards the creation of a caliphate,' the Conservative MP told the BBC's John Piennar. 'They believe in an extremely hateful doctrine which involves killing themselves, killing others and trying to use violence and brutality to create an eighth century, or seventh century, state.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Calling Paddock a ‘lone wolf’ isn’t racist

From our UK edition

It’s been nearly two weeks since Stephen Paddock committed mass murder in Las Vegas and the FBI is still casting about pitifully for clues. Why did he do it? Not even his girlfriend knows, though it’s said he claimed to have been simply ‘born bad’. Plans are afoot to put up billboards urging anyone who ever met Paddock to come forward. There’s something touching about billboards in the internet age. Perhaps because there are no answers in the offing, in place of them has swelled a great wave of outrage, not, oddly, about America’s gun laws, but about race.

Boyd Tonkin

Navigating a new world

From our UK edition

In the 1890s, when British-owned ships carried 70 per cent of all seaborne trade, legislators worried about the proportion of foreigners who served in their crews; which could top 40 per cent. Their worry is not surprising, given the verdicts gathered from British consulates in port cities on the native seaman: ‘drunk, illiterate, weak, syphilitic, drunk, dishonest, drunk…’ In 1894, a parliamentary committee interrogated officers about manning and skills in the merchant marine. One informant was a British-naturalised master ‘with 16 years’ experience’. The MPs, who didn’t presume to ask this expert witness specifically about foreign crews, recorded his name as ‘Mr J. Conrad Korzeniowski’.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Verbal diarrhoea

From our UK edition

In Beckett’s Happy Days a prattling Irish granny is buried waist-deep, and later neck-deep, in a refuse tip whose detritus inspires a rambling 90-minute monologue. ‘An avalanche of tosh’ was the Daily Mail’s succinct summary. Wings is similar but worse. Mrs Stilson (Juliet Stevenson), an American pensioner sheathed in white, hovers over the stage on ropes and talks non-stop gibberish. ‘Three times happened maybe globbidged, rubbidged uff to nothing there try again window up!’ Thus begins her battle with intelligibility. ‘And vinkled I,’ she goes on, ‘commenshed to uh-oh where’s it gone to somewhere flubbished what?

Thursday

Katrina Gulliver

Ratings war

From our UK edition

Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years. The first and second world wars were the most anticipated conflicts in history. Military strategists and popular novelists all published the wars they envisioned in the decades before. Whether in the spycraft of Erskine Childers or the science-fiction of H.G. Wells, the reading public was warned of the carnage to come in many imaginative forms. But all that anticipation did little to avert the bloodbaths. In this book, Lawrence Freedman offers a detailed analysis of how we have planned (or failed to plan) for conflict. Into the 20th century, military planning suffered from still focusing on the model of the Napoleonic wars, with the notion of the decisive battle.

Thursday

Marina Wheeler

A court’s contempt

From our UK edition

The issue of sovereignty has mysteriously disappeared from the debate over Brexit. Some business-focused commentators even like to assert that in a ‘global, interconnected world’, sovereignty is meaningless. But a court judgment, delivered earlier this month, perfectly illustrates what is at stake. The case is about national security. Specifically, it is about the legality of techniques used to identify and disrupt people intent on unleashing terror: the kind of terror we have seen recently in Manchester, Westminster, Borough Market and Parsons Green. The technique at issue is the bulk collection of communications data (BCD). This data is the ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘with whom’ of communications, not what was written or said.

James Delingpole

Accept this as the new normal? Never

From our UK edition

Not long after the Parsons Green Tube bombing, another of those viral, defiant-in-the-face-of-terror cartoons started doing the rounds. It was quite witty — a section of Tube map, redrawn in the shape of a hand giving those pesky terrorists the middle finger. But it wasn’t remotely funny. In order for humour to work it has to spark a feeling of amused recognition. This did the opposite. It said something that all but the most deluded among us know to be a complete lie.

Thursday

Ed West

Do we really want restriction on German immigration?

From our UK edition

At my nearest library recently there was an art exhibition featuring the works of local school children on the subject of 'unity', with lots of drawings (many of them outstandingly good) emphasising how we're all the same (and yet diverse) and that what we have in common is far more important than anything that divides us. We are totally, totally united. Because I'm a terrible person, there was once a time when this sort of thing would have caused me to break out in an involuntary sneer - except that this was just after the Manchester bombing and one of the schools involved was my kids', and it just made me feel sad for that generation.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Straight to hell

From our UK edition

No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it throughout the four episodes. The fundamental problem is this: if you’re going to make a watchable drama about bad people doing terrible things, you inevitably have to humanise them. And from there it’s just a short step to making them sympathetic. Peter Kosminsky’s drama followed four British Muslims to Syria to join IS.

James Mcnamara

A clash of loyalties

From our UK edition

If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember if this is the one about the guy who shagged his mum or the parent who offed their kids. (Bit of both.) For those whose Sophocles is hazy, let me summarise. After a civil war in Thebes that sees two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, dead, the new king Creon rules that Eteocles is to be buried with honour, while Polyneices will be left outside the city gates to rot. Their sisters, Ismene and Antigone, have different views. Ismene — concerned that their social position is a bit shaky, given a family history of incest and rebellion — obeys Creon.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

We’re losing the cat-and-mouse terror game

From our UK edition

I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the clue’s in the name — was waiting to board a flight when he started ‘harmlessly’ talking about 9/11. There is no reason to believe he has any connections with extremists, but he was kicked off the flight because of security concerns and had to fly out of the UK with another airline. Although he was later offered a refund, he is now suing, claiming he was ‘racially and religiously profiled’ by the Virgin staff. ‘I know this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been a white man in his sixties,’ Mo complained. No, probably not. But if the world were comprised entirely of white men in their sixties, then 9/11 might not have happened.

Tuesday

Mark Nayler

Catalonia’s fight for independence is turning nasty

From our UK edition

As if the issue of Catalonian secession wasn’t fraught enough, some of its most committed advocates are now arguing that the terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils last week demonstrate the region’s readiness for independence. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, for his part, has suggested that the vehicle attacks that left 15 dead require regional differences to be cast aside in the battle against jihadism. The debate about Catalonian independence has always been a heated, complex one in Spain. Now that the tragic events of last week are being introduced into the discussion, it will become even more so.

Sunday

David Patrikarakos

Combating 21st-century terror: what Europe can learn from Israel

From our UK edition

Spain, Finland, Russia: in the space of a few days, Europe is reminded, yet again, that terrorism – like the virus it is – kills brutally, indiscriminately and, critically, transnationally. On Thursday, August 17, a van rammed into crowds of people in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas boulevard – a hub of tourism and social life. Thirteen were killed with dozens more injured. The atrocity was followed by a knife attack the very next day in the Finnish city of Turku, which killed two people and injured eight. Another knife attack, this time in the Siberian city of Surgut on the 19 August, injured eight. Islamic State has claimed responsibly for all the attacks. In a democratic society based on liberal values it is impossible to stop every madman that wishes us harm.

Friday

Tom Goodenough

Spain terror attacks: what we know so far

From our UK edition

14 people have been killed and more than 100 injured after a van ploughed into pedestrians on Las Ramblas in a suspected jihadist attack Five suspected terrorists were shot dead by police in Cambrils, a coastal resort near to Barcelona, after a second vehicle attack was foiled It is believed the incident in Cambrils - in which six pedestrians and a police officer were injured - is linked to the earlier attack Isis has claimed responsibility for the Barcelona atrocity. Spain's PM has referred to it as a 'jihadist attack' Four people have been arrested in connection with the attack on Las Ramblas.

Thursday

Brian Martin

A clash of creeds

From our UK edition

This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better for this to happen than in Northern Ireland? At the Day’s End pub ‘two eejits in Halloween masks’ enter the bar; ‘Trick or treat,’ they shout. ‘Fut-fut-fut-fut went the gun.’ A woman screams, ‘then a very fast piece of metal entered the side of her head and she stopped’. Throughout the first half of the book, the horror of the pub massacre alternates with the narration of an ordinary family’s home life.

Tuesday

Niru Ratnam

Hepworth Wakefield’s latest show is grossly irresponsible – the museum doesn’t deserve any sort of prize

From our UK edition

Last week the exhibition Painting India by the late Howard Hodgkin opened at the Hepworth Wakefield. Hodgkin started collecting Indian miniatures as a schoolboy at Eton and first visited the subcontinent in 1964, travelling with Robert Skelton, the then assistant keeper of the Indian collection at the V&A. Hodgkin would return there many times during his life. He would later say to David Sylvester 'I think my main reason for going back to India is because it is somewhere else.' The exhibition at the Hepworth features over 35 works by Hodgkin which take their cue from his visits. The promotional text on the museum’s website notes that the exhibition 'takes place as part of the UK-India Year of Culture', a year long initiative that features exhibitions and events throughout the UK.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 June 2017

From our UK edition

How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/ government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages and flowers, flags at half-mast. Instinctively, I feel uneasy because the meaning of it all gradually suffers attrition, and also, perhaps, because it asserts a solidarity which isn’t quite there. Yet the fundamental cause of mourning is true and deep enough — it is first for the dead, then for a civilisation which may be dying. In these pages, on 4 February, Matthew Parris wrote that Brexiteers seemed very anxious, despite having won.