Terrorism

PMQs: Fighting suspended as leaders respond to Iraq terror

A few days ago, one would have expected the first PMQs of term to be a rowdy affair as Labour went for Cameron over the Carswell defection. But the recent, hideous events in Iraq have changed all that and today’s PMQs was instead a sober, statesmanlike affair which reflected well on both Cameron and Miliband. listen to ‘PMQs: ‘Universal sense of revulsion’ at the murder of Steven Sotloff’ on Audioboo

The current political climate rewards authoritarians, not civil libertarians

The talks between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the anti-terror measures that David Cameron will unveil this afternoon have finally finished. There are a few more details to be thrashed out – crossing of Ts and dotting of Is rather than major policy decisions – but the two parties are basically there. That the talks have only broken up with just over an hour to go until the statement shows how contentious these measures have been in the Coalition. David Cameron’s press conference, in which he set out the heightened threat, was partly a softening-up exercise to push the Lib Dems into accepting what the security and intelligence

Coalition minds the gap on anti-terror measures

The Coalition parties are gearing up for a week of minding the gaps. Tomorrow, David Cameron plans to tell MPs about measures that he feels are necessary for plugging the gaps in Britain’s armoury. They’re gaps highlighted to him by the intelligence and security services, and where the Tories once said they would be very sceptical about gaps, whether they existed, and whether it was right to plug them, the Prime Minister seems pretty keen to listen to the spooks. But the Lib Dems are still cross about the gaps, and possibly cross about another change of heart from the Conservatives. That’s why Sir Menzies Campbell told the World this

David Cameron may be about to call time on the coalition’s civil libertarian stance

It was not so much the announcements that David Cameron made in his press conference about the terror threat to the UK that were significant, but what he looks like he’s going to have to announce on Monday. The Prime Minister confirmed that the threat level to the UK has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. But he also said that on Monday he will be unveiling new measures to address ‘gaps’ in the UK’s ‘armoury’: ‘I said very clearly last week that there would be no knee-jerk reactions. We will respond calmly and with purpose. And we’ll do so driven by the evidence and the importance of maintaining the

Jihadi John – a very British export

It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. listen to ‘Terror’s London accent’ on Audioboo

We may not think ourselves at war with ISIS but they are pretty sure they are at war with us.

John McTernan’s column in today’s Telegraph about Kurdistan – and our, that is the West’s, debt of honour to the Kurds – is a piece of which, I think, the late Christopher Hitchens would have been proud. The Kurds had no greater western defender than Christopher and he would, I believe, have been appalled by the pusillanimity on display in Whitehall and the White House alike in recent days. Granted, ‘because Christopher Hitchens would have supported it’ is an insufficient justification for military action. Then again, the witless self-abasement of the so-called Stop the War coalition is no reason to oppose it either. (By Stop the War, of course, they mean let someone vile win

Violence, threats and blackmail ought to have no place in politics

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Tim Stanley discuss Baroness Warsi’s resignation” startat=462] Listen [/audioplayer]I have never issued a call for violence before, and I’m certainly not going to start now. But I wonder if people might consider the following, purely hypothetical situation. In her resignation letter over the UK government not being anti-Israel enough for her, Sayeeda Warsi backed up her ‘case’ by writing: ‘Early evidence from the Home Office and others shows that the fallout of the current conflict and the potential for the crisis in Gaza and our response to it becoming a basis for radicalisation could have consequences for us for years to come.’ Let us ignore

Jon Snow’s view of the Middle East is biased, inaccurate and dangerous

I suppose viewers of Jon Snow’s Channel 4 News don’t expect impartial journalism, any more than viewers of Fox in the States expect their political opponents to get a particularly fair hearing. This is, after all, a journalist whose first reaction when the Malaysian airline plane was shot down over Ukraine was to express concern that the deaths might distract attention from Israel’s war with Hamas. Awful danger that the shooting down of flight MH17 will provide cover for an intensification of Israel’s ground war in Gaza — Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4) July 18, 2014   But what an extraordinary way to present the situation in the Middle East: Hamas as

Our spies have stopped chasing subversives. That’s why we’re in so much trouble

Peter Clarke’s powerful report on the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham schools is confirmation of the weakness of David Cameron in demoting Michael Gove. When Mr Gove appointed Mr Clarke to conduct the inquiry, there was execration — even from the local police chief — about how wickedly provocative it was to put a policeman with counter-terrorism experience into the role. But Mr Clarke was just the man and his inquiry has swiftly and efficiently uncovered serious problems of Islamist bullying and infiltration. Too late to reap a political reward, Mr Gove is vindicated. The next time this problem arises — and there undoubtedly will be a next time in another British city

Why won’t suspected terrorist John Downey be tried?

The Hallett Review was published yesterday. This is the review ordered by the Prime Minister in February after the collapse of the trial of John Downey. Readers will remember that Downey was about to face trial over the 1982 Hyde Park bombing – in which four British soldiers were murdered – when his lawyers produced a letter from the Police Service of Northern Ireland saying that Downey was not being sought for any offences. This opened up the remarkable discovery that unbeknown to most people involved in the political process in Northern Ireland: that such ‘amnesty letters’ had been sent to almost 200 ‘on-the-runs’ (people being sought for terrorism offences

Video: Rules of engagement, according to Hamas

CNN recently came across a video of Hamas officials calling on civilians in Gaza to volunteer to become ‘human shields’ so that Palestinian civilian casualties can be maximised. Fascinatingly a CNN news anchor has put this fact to a Palestinian ‘spokeswoman’ in a live interview. And what was the response of this ‘spokeswoman’ to the Hamas video?  Well, among other things she said that the idea that Hamas promote a culture of death is ‘offensive’. And best of all she said that ‘the idea that Palestinians use children as human shields is racist’.

Hugo Rifkind

If Britain was being shelled, as Israel is being now, how would we respond?

Glaring, the ennui over Israel. The way we drag our eyes to the page, and sigh, and want to read something else. Sympathy is hard. Even anger is hard. It’s just… bleurgh. Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s?

The emergency surveillance legislation will make us safer

Isabel wonders whether it is a good thing that all main parties allied in passing emergency surveillance legislation into law yesterday. While it’s true that legislation passed without any significant political objection can be bad news, this is one case where that rule does not apply. There are a number of reasons why the legislation was necessary. One was the European Court of Justice verdict from earlier this year that meant that this country and a large number of internet providers were at risk of entering a legally grey area. Far from being an ‘extension’ of powers, this bill is about the retention of powers which had been accepted until the

Who are Britain’s stupidest jihadis?

You have to laugh. Two men who’ve admitted to trying to go abroad to fight jihad had to buy copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies before their glorious mission. Shouldn’t the publishers cash in by publishing a Jihad for Dummies? It would sell like hotcakes. The young chaps, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, are off to jail for a while, but to paraphrase Bill Hicks, I don’t think we’ve lost any cancer curers here. But they are far from being Britain’s stupidest jihadis. This country, which is at the cutting edge of social trends in pioneering the Reverse Flynn Effect, seems to produce an enormous number

All this airport security is utterly useless

Here we go again: another summer of airport fun. This year it’s been announced that due to a ‘heightened’ security threat, any Brit attempting a holiday abroad will be subject to an even grimmer ordeal than usual: body searching, shoe removing, laptop searching and endless grinding queueing. Expect it to take twice as long to get through security, an official from the Department of Transport said. Superficially there are some excellent reasons for all the extra precautions and checks. ‘New intelligence’ from America’s security agencies suggests al-Qa’eda has developed clever explosives that can be soaked into clothing or concealed in human ‘body cavities’, and plastic explosives that masquerade as briefcases

The Security Services have lost track of 1 in 4 of those who’ve gone to fight in Syria

We have just had a second intelligence failure on Iraq. The speed and extent of ISIS’s sweep into the country took the UK governnment by surprise. Whitehall was not alone in this. As I reveal in the magazine this week, when representatives of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff came to London recently, Iraq was way down their agenda. What makes this intelligence failure so worrying is that we are relying on the security services to keep track of the 400-odd Britons who have gone to fight with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Senior government figures believe that of those who have gone to Syria and then returned to the

Please, Cameron – no moral grandstanding over Iraq

If there’s a bright spot in the murky mess of Iraq, it’s that finally we have a war that it is impossible to paint in simple terms, as a battle of good against evil. This time, even our PM, the self-appointed heir to Blair, can’t grandstand about defeating ‘terror’ or protecting ‘innocent civilians’ because there’s terror and innocence on every side. He can’t pose as world policeman; stand side by side with Obama and say ‘we must not let this evil happen’, because clearly we already have. Take ISIS, the Islamist group once affiliated to al-Qa’eda who’ve become the world’s new public enemy number one. ISIS have captured parts of

Please take your holiday in Kenya this year

 Rift Valley Many of my British tribe fled Kenya around independence in 1963 because they believed there was no future. Gerald Hanley, an Irish novelist who knew the country, forecast ‘a huge slum on the edge of the West, Africans in torn trousers leaning against tin shacks, the whites of their eyes gone yellow, hands miserably in their pockets…’ For sure, poverty here is an awful, destabilising reality. But Kenya’s past 51 years is a story of hard work and enterprise in which there has been real social mobility and countless stories of rags to riches. In everything from finance to farming, Kenyans are Africa’s most successful capitalists. Still, for

Will Theresa May now become the Gordon Brown of this government?

You can judge a minister by their special advisers. Ambitious ministers surround themselves with aides who view their primary loyalty as being to the minister rather than the Prime Minister or the government as a whole. But those who are just happy to be in Cabinet accept the advisers they are sent by Downing Street and CCHQ. Theresa May was, without a doubt, in the former category. Her aides are ferocious defenders and promoters of her. Indeed, May is, in many ways, the Gordon Brown of this government. Anyone who her team thought was interfering in her domain got their head bitten off. Even on relatively minor issues like visas

They always come for the Jews

Just over a week ago a gunman opened fire at the Jewish museum in Brussels. Four Jews – including two Israeli tourists – were killed, shot in the face and throat. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said immediately after the killings, and before a suspect had even been identified: ‘This act of murder is the result of constant incitement against Jews and their state. Slander and lies against the State of Israel continue to be heard on European soil even as the crimes against humanity and acts of murder being perpetrated in our region are systematically ignored. Our response to this hypocrisy is to constantly state the truth.’ It looks