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Speaking from the Élysée Palace, Francois Hollande has said that the terror attacks which killed 127 in Paris last night were the work of the Islamic State. What happened yesterday in Paris and in Saint Denis is an act of war and this country needs to make the right decisions to fight this war. This
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[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next” startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already
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Yesterday I argued that if it became clear that the Russian plane was brought down over Egypt by a bomb, Vladamir Putin may be forced to reassess his Syrian campaign – especially in light of a strong counterattack by Islamic State on the ground in Syria. Today, as the bomb theory became the only plausible
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It now seems fairly likely that an explosion brought down the Russian passenger airline over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula over the weekend. One Metrojet official has already suggested that the ‘only explainable cause is physical impact on the aircraft’ and they have ruled out technical failure or human error. If the ongoing investigation proves that to be the
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Sir Gerald Kaufman is Jewish, which he seems to use as an excuse to make claims that would, ordinarily, be denounced as anti-Semitic. He has made this a trademark of his career but on Tuesday night, Sir Gerald – now Father of the House of Commons – outdid himself. In an extraordinary speech he allegedly discussed the influence
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During the past month, news about domestic Saudi Arabian politics has been dominated by frenzied speculation over an imminent coup within the world’s most opaque and important ruling family: the House of Saud. This rumour was started by a little-known website dedicated to Middle Eastern affairs. It was then quickly picked up by the Guardian
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Over the weekend an Israeli-Arab flew from his home in the Jewish state on a paraglider, evading Israel’s formidable air defences to land smack bang in the middle of the Golan Heights. Despite a search by the IDF so intense it provoked a flurry of tweets stating that an Israeli invasion of Syria was underway,
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Nicola Sturgeon is to close the SNP annual conference today, and her aides have leaked what she proposes to say about UK military intervention in Syria. I hope there’s time for her to change the text because, as it stands, it’s muddled and rather embarrassing – it suggests that she does not understand the situation at
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The United States has abandoned training rebel forces on the ground in Syria but not equipping them, or at least some of them, and over the weekend its military cargo planes dropped 50 tons of ammunition to rebel groups in the north of the country. All apparently reached their intended target: yet another hastily formed
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Tunisia is preposterously touted as the one success story of the nightmarish revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars, jihadist invasions and Islamist terrorist atrocities in the name of an Arab Spring we are still told represents a thirst for Western-style freedom and plurality. The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the country’s National Dialogue
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It is too early, as the Kremlin admits, to assess how effective Russia‘s week-long military assault on the Islamic State in Syria has been. However, one thing is already crystal clear: Moscow is winning the propaganda war. While Barack Obama was apologising today for the disgraceful bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan, changing Washington’s official version
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A young Saudi prince, Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud, has apparently fled to the Wahhabi kingdom on his private jet after a bleeding woman was found trying to escape from his Los Angeles mansion. She filed sexual assault charges against him, claiming her injuries were sustained when he tried to force her to give him a blow
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At the outset of Syria’s brutal four-year civil war, I was an almost unique voice in the British media deploring the push to depose the secular dictator President Bashar al-Assad, especially in the absence of a genuinely popular uprising against him. Here in The Spectator I tried to point out that such a short-term strategy
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It started in America. The Midwest has for weeks been suffering what is now the worst drought in living memory. Prices for maize and wheat have soared by 50 per cent and the G20 will next week decide whether to call an emergency meeting to discuss what the United Nations believes could be a repeat
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Is the Syrian regime hellbent on political suicide? There can be no doubt that he is determined to crush any resistance, but if President Bashar al-Assad had really started a massacre in the city of Homs (as was reported by most of the western media) it would have been an act of complete madness. And
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A year ago, Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia for Saudi Arabia, thus ushering in the Salafi Spring. No doubt now bored out of his mind, this once stubbornly secular leader is said to have caught religion of the deranged Wahhabi variety propagated by his oil-rich hosts. In turn, the Saudis
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For the past half a century, the Tunisian film director Nadia El Fani would have had no problem showing her new documentary, Neither God Nor Master, which explores her atheism and disdain for radical Islam. But before the Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia was the most socially liberal country in the Muslim world. Its Islamist extremists were
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A few years ago, I spent a month in Damascus. I arrived late in the evening but was so eager to see a city I’d long wished to visit — getting a visa had proved nightmarish — that I soon found myself in a little coffee shop round the corner from my budget hotel. I
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It’s tribal and religious divisions that really shape the Middle East – and that account for the Saudi intervention in Bahrain I once got lost in Asir, the mountainous region on Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border with Yemen. This was the home of many of the terrorists on September 11, from the million-strong al-Ghamdi tribe. But
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In Abdallah Guech Street, a few hundred metres from the main mosque in the heart of Tunis’s old quarter, lies a red-light district which has thrived since the 19th century. Here the Ottomans legalised (and regulated) prostitution as they had in much of the rest of the Muslim world. Uniquely, though, in the Arab world,
