Douglas Murray

Another week and another completely random attack by a gunman hunting down cartoonists before inexplicably heading to the local synagogue. My guess is that events in Copenhagen yesterday have already been put down in many quarters to what President Obama describes as 'a random bunch of folks' being targeted by somebody who has 'misunderstood' what every Western leader agrees is an entirely peaceful and harmless religious tradition. As it happens, I know the people who put together the Lars Vilks committee and had a number of friends who were in the room in Copenhagen yesterday when the gunman attacked. One of them wrote a brief account of events for us here yesterday. Of course at a time like this it is appropriate to stress how brave these individuals are. And they most certainly are.

Jeremy Bowen's half-hour long interview with Bashar al-Assad is being heavily trailed by the BBC this morning.  And while it has little that is new it does provide an interesting insight into the Syrian President's current situation. The main story from it is Assad's confirmation that there is some line of communication between the Syrian regime and the Americans. Bowen put to Assad that there are American planes over Syria all the time engaged in the fight against Isis and that there must be some contact between them. While confirming that they do not speak directly, Assad did confirm that Iraq and other countries act as intermediaries.  But it was the way in which Assad said this that was most interesting. Assad: 'There's information but not dialogue.

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth.  I cannot recommend this book - newly translated from the German - highly enough.  It challenges and indeed changes nearly all received wisdom about the leading figure behind the genocide of European Jews during World War II. The title of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s omnipresent and over-praised account of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil.  I would say that Stangneth’s book not merely surpasses but actually buries Arendt’s account.  Not least in showing how Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s role-play in the dock in Jerusalem.

Shin Dong-hyuk really shouldn’t need defending.  The thirty-two year old was born in, and grew up in, the North Korean gulag system.  And as he has related in his book Escape from Camp 14, and in public appearances, what he saw on an average day in his childhood constituted more horror than most people will see in their collected nightmares. At one point he overheard his mother and brother talking about an escape attempt from the highest-security category camp they were in.  He informed on them, as he had been educated to do.  Subsequently, along with his father, he was forced to watch their execution by prison camp guards.

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 was almost wiped out.  In twenty-first century Europe the remaining Jews are once again the target.

listen to ‘Douglas Murray discusses the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine’ on audioBoom.

The £31 million al-Sweady Inquiry is in. And it describes claims that up to 20 Iraqis were killed and mutilated by British troops after a battle in 2004 as "without foundation": ‘Sir Thayne Forbes said Iraqi detainees who alleged they were tortured and abused - and subjected to mock executions - had given evidence that was "unprincipled in the extreme" and "wholly without regard to the truth".’ The detainees in question were fighting as ‘insurgents’ at the time. But once they were detained they used the now familiar route of claiming they had been abused by their captors. This is not only an al-Qaeda tactic. The Iraqi insurgents (from the Mahdi army) also knew that they could simply take advantage of their enemy’s increasingly self-defeating playbook.

On Thursday I was on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ to talk about the CIA and torture. It is, for many reasons, perhaps the most gruesome subject possible. And not just because of the hideous allegations involved, but also because it is one of those subjects which people wantonly lose their reason over. Like a small number of other subjects in our society at the moment, it is one which people try wilfully to simplify, usually in order to show the world what a moral person they are and, by contrast, what immoral people their opponents are. I will use this post to set out some of my own views and certain objections to what seems to be the status quo debate on all this. Didn’t this week’s report showed the CIA to be torturing on an industrial scale?