Terrorism

When I worked at Lidl, there were a few products that we took extra care with. Some of these were high-value goods at risk of being stolen (like the £100 laptop we once sold, causing biblical scenes of chaos in the middle aisle). Others were to comply with laws on selling dangerous goods. Knives were always locked up behind the till. In Lidl’s Tooting branch, in a relatively rough area near Streatham, the knives were all taken out of their boxes and locked up in the managers’ office. To purchase, you’d have to show ID and wait at a till as a manager brought back the knife. So how was

A terrorist recently released from prison has been shot dead by undercover police in Streatham, south London, after stealing a kitchen knife from a shop and stabbing three people, one of whom one is in a critical condition. Sudesh Amman, jailed for distributing terrorist materials two years ago, was wearing a fake suicide vest when he was shot by the undercover officers who had been following him. There are reports that Amman, 20, kept a notebook where he wrote of his ambition to “die as a shuhada [martyr]”: he seems to have struck days after his early released. He had served half of his three-year sentence. Gunshots were heard on

It has become commonplace to describe terror attacks as ‘senseless’. The horrific Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, which cost the lives of more than 350 people, several British citizens among them, make little sense. The only way to understand them is as a symptom of the growing globalisation of terror. The tactics — synchronised bombs on a Christian holy day — are grotesquely familiar. And it was not surprising to learn that one of the attackers was partly educated in London. The attacks, on three Catholic churches and three hotels favoured by westerners, clearly targeted Christians. The culprits have been identified as local Islamic extremists. The purpose of the

As New Zealand comes to terms with the most deadly terrorist attack ever carried out on its soil, leaders from around the world will be asking their security advisors whether this marks the start of an escalation of right-wing threats and whether their current strategies for defeating this form of extremism are fit for purpose. It has been obvious for several years now that far-right extremism has been growing across western democracies with social media providing the means for a new global connectivity between far-right individuals and groups. In the past three years alone, the UK has experienced two terrorist attacks carried out by far-right extremists (the murder of Jo

At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex.  Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish women who found themselves living under the brutal misogynistic yoke of the Isis empire. Or the Syrian and Iraqi women whose husbands and sons were beheaded for adhering to the wrong branch of Islam. No, their sympathy is for a woman who supported the movement that did all those things. Who provided moral succour to