Isis

Saturday

Ian Birrell

A dark journey into a fanatical underworld

Two years ago, the counter-extremist analyst Julia Ebner decided she needed to delve deeper into the extremists trying to disrupt and destabilise our democracies. So the Austrian researcher invented five identities and joined a dozen secretive digital worlds of white nationalists, radical misogynists and jihadi women to explore their networks, their strategies and their recruitment techniques. This sobering book tells the tale of her journeys into a swampy underworld filled with fanatics and fantasists. Many of the people she came across seem like the saddest of losers. She joins a white nationalist dating site — motto ‘Love your race and procreate’ — where people admit they received ‘negative’ feedback on

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: An election date is set, al-Baghdadi dies and a row over gay giraffes

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, having shelved his Brexit Bill in the face of parliamentary opposition, persuaded the Commons to vote by 438 to 20 for a general election on 12 December. A one-clause Bill was given its third reading after an amendment put by Labour to change the date to 9 December was defeated by 315 to 295. That majority of 20 coincided with the voting power of 10 MPs to whom the Conservative whip had earlier that day been restored, including Alistair Burt, Ed Vaizey and Sir Nicholas Soames, but not Philip Hammond, Sir Oliver Letwin, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve or Kenneth Clarke. The government had failed

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Who’ll be the next jihadi-jackpot winner?

Reading the news this week of Jihadi Jack (née Letts, of Oxfordshire) having his UK passport withdrawn, my mind went to a Canadian television programme earlier this year. While most people can’t recall what was on TV last night, for us connoisseurs of western masochism the 2019 Easter edition of Tout le monde en parle (Television de Radio-Canada) was a collector’s item. The subject was Omar Khadr. In case you haven’t had the pleasure, the Khadrs are a Canadian family of Palestinian-Egyptian origin. Since 2001 they have had a sketchy patch. Specifically, family members have shown a terrible propensity for being at ‘weddings’ at the wrong place and time. Specifically

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Best of the Fringe

Clive Anderson’s show about Macbeth, ‘the greatest drama ever written’, offers us an hour of polished comedy loosely themed around the Scottish play. Shakespeare’s material is still topical, he says, ‘a clever Scot with a rampantly ambitious wife, like Michael Gove and Sarah Vine’. He prefers Macbeth to Hamlet which is ‘about some bloke who can’t make up his mind, like a three-and-a-half-hour interview with Jeremy Corbyn’. The act’s centrepiece is Anderson’s memory of his infamous encounter with the Bee Gees who stormed out of his TV chat show in 1996. He’d been encouraged to mock pop stars by Sting who enjoyed being teased about his stage name. ‘Sting is

Thursday

Kenneth R. Rosen

A losing battle

Foreign fighters are returning from the battlefield — not Islamists but the Americans, Europeans and South Americans who fought to rid the world of Isis. But for all their bravery, their homecoming is a tricky one because their home countries do not want them back. I have now interviewed more than a dozen volunteers. Many of them share similar stories of arrests and detentions. They have been stripped of their ability to travel, have their movements monitored, their bank accounts closed. One of them, an American, has since committed suicide. One fighter, who wishes to be known as Max, tells me in an email that he has left his home

Thursday

Paul Wood

The brutality of the Isis Beatles

 Beirut Television cameras get everywhere these days. Or maybe that was always true. Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, wrote a book in which NBC gets the rights to the crucifixion, live from Golgotha, with St Paul as the ‘anchorperson’. So it was only faintly bizarre when CNN ‘crossed’ to a prison in northern Syria to speak to two of the so-called ‘Beatles’, the British jihadis accused of murdering British and American hostages while members of Isis. The interview was just as self-serving as if the remote link had been to some politician or celebrity. But it was also revealing, the most honest — or least dishonest

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Make an example of Shamima Begum

The three most popular justifications for punishment under the law all (as it happens) begin with R. They are retribution, rehabilitation and removal. But the fourth and to my mind the most important seems to have fallen rather out of public consideration. Yet that fourth, deterrence, is by far the best reason for the investigation and interrogation of Shamima Begum and — if there is a case against her to answer — her detention and trial. Leading all other reasons for the prosecution according to due process — and, if convicted, the punishment — of those who may have committed a criminal offence is deterrence: the discouragement of others who

Kate Chisholm

Points of view | 28 February 2019

Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in the news that test our moral and ethical principles to the limit, forcing us to question ourselves and what we think to such an extent that it becomes impossible to be sure of what is right? I can never understand the high-minded righteousness and full-blown convictions of the panellists on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, who each week are given a topical issue and who then spend 45 minutes tossing it about, testing the pros and cons and questioning a group of often baffled witnesses who are invited on to the

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Media exposure was the worst thing that happened to Shamima Begum

Why has Sajid Javid announced that he is revoking the citizenship of Shamima Begum? The 19 year old, who travelled as a teenager to join the Islamic State in Syria, has asked for ‘forgiveness’ from the UK, but last night the Home Secretary responded by saying he would be removing her status as a British citizen. He can do this, he argues, because she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, which means the government will not be rendering her stateless. A fair few people have suggested that this is about Javid’s own ambitions in the Conservative party, as this move will likely appeal to the Tory grassroots. It has already

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Sajid Javid is wrong to strip Shamima Begum of her British citizenship

Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum of her British citizenship leaves me deeply uneasy. I can understand why a Home Secretary charged with keeping the public safe would want to do whatever possible to keep this woman out of the country. But Begum was born in this country, grew up here and was educated here. This, surely, makes her British. As a country, we should want to take charge of investigating her and, if the evidence is there, prosecuting her. After all, she offended against the ties that bind when she headed from this country—a liberal democracy with the rule of law—to go and serve in a so-called caliphate

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Will ‘Isis bride’ Shamima Begum really end up in a British prison?

What will the UK do about Shamima Begum, the schoolgirl who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State? The Times’ stunning scoop this morning about the 19-year old’s plea to be allowed home from the Syrian refugee camp prompted Security Minister Ben Wallace to tell the Today programme that ‘actions have consequences’ and that she could face prosecution. Some argue that as a teenager who left when she was just 15, she has been indoctrinated and needs rehabilitation, not punishment. Wallace may well agree with that, but it’s not something he’s likely to say in a broadcast interview, given it is still important for the government to send the message

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Hunter, scholar, boaster, dreamer

The Assyrians placed sculptures of winged human-headed bulls (lamassus) at the entrances to their capital at Nineveh, in modern Mosul, to ward off evil. The mighty lamassu to the right of the Nergal Gate had been on guard for some 2,700 years when Isis vandals took a drill to it in 2015 and blew away its face. Today a copy, crafted out of date syrup cans, stands on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. It wears the oblong beard and proud look of the Assyrian kings. The original sculpture dated to the time of Sennacherib, who ruled Assyria from 705 to 681 BC, and transformed Nineveh into a magnificent metropolis.

Thursday

Ed Husain

The true face of Islam

In Britain today, Islam in its original essence is not to be found in mosques or Muslim schools, but on the first floor of the British Museum. There, the Albukhary Islamic gallery, newly opened to the public, dazzles visitors and defies every certainty promoted by today’s hardline Muslim activists. This spectacular exhibition of objects from across continents and centuries shows us a history of continuity of civilisations, coexistence of communities. It offers a compelling corrective to current popular notions of Islam as an idea and a civilisation. Too often, we assume that Islam’s arrival on the world stage involved some violent break with the past that brought forth a new

Thursday

Rod Liddle

And I think to myself, not a wonderful world

The story of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan is an interesting one, I think, for what it tells us about the right, the left and human nature. These two youngish people — both 29, one of them a vegan, the other a vegetarian — jacked in their wonkish jobs in Washington DC in order to experience the world in all its glory. Their itinerary included dangerous areas — or at least areas deemed dangerous by western governments with an axe to grind. As Jay put it: ‘People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept

Thursday

Ian Birrell

Millions of shattered lives

The fateful day five years ago began like any other for the family. A pot of black tea with cardamon seeds sat on the table as Sara roused her youngest children and prepared them for school. But there were tiny clues. Leila, just turned 16 and wearing a floor-length dress, unusually offered to help. Her older sister Ayan appeared from her bedroom with a suitcase, which she said was being lent to a friend. Before they left, Leila whispered to each of her parents that she loved them. The pair did not return after school. Sara tried to call them, but their phones were switched off. She knew they were

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

How can any intelligent person have faith?

Ten years ago, I had a strange debate about faith with a famous Jesuit and an agnostic psychoanalyst in a monastery on a cliff-top in Syria. At the time I thought I’d made some valuable additions to the discussion. The notes I took then record my own contributions with horrible precision. Looking back on it, I was just an observer. The main players were Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian priest who’d made his life in the Middle East, and Bernard S., a highly regarded Jungian analyst: neat, Swiss, troubled. The scene of this chat was Deir Mar Musa, a 6th-century monastery that Fr Paolo had restored, perched high on a

Thursday

The Spectator

Bring jihadis to justice

At first sight, the evidence presented in David Anderson’s report into the four terror attacks committed between March and June sounds damning. The security service, MI5, had had three of the six attackers on its radar. The Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, who murdered 22 people, had come to the attention of MI5 in 2014. As recently as the beginning of this year, he had been implicated in criminal activity, which MI5 officers now admit might have led to his attack being thwarted had it been investigated. Khuram Butt, one of the attackers at London Bridge, had been under investigation for two years, yet still he and his two accomplices were

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 November 2017

Home The engagement was announced of Prince Henry of Wales, aged 33, and the Los Angeles-born Meghan Markle, an actress aged 36. They are to marry at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in May. Ms Markle scotched rumours that she might be a Catholic, declaring herself a Protestant preparing to be baptised into the Church of England and receive Confirmation before the wedding. Though Ms Markle is divorced, she has been allowed to marry in a church service. The couple told the broadcaster Mishal Husain in a televised interview that they were attempting to cook a chicken one day last month when the prince went down on one knee to propose.

Thursday

The Spectator

The next Iraq war

After the most intensive street-by-street combat since 1945, Isis’s so-called caliphate is no more. Last weekend, the Iraqi government won what should be the final battle and is now preparing to say that the war is ended. The jihadis still have the odd redoubt — but they have been forced out of Mosul and Raqqa after an intensive coalition campaign led by America and Britain. Donald Trump is unlikely to emulate his predecessor-but-one by appearing in front of a banner saying ‘Mission Accomplished’. Theresa May probably won’t deliver such a statement either. Indeed, the war against Isis has barely been mentioned by either politician, even though our involvement has been

Thursday

James Forsyth

What to do about returning jihadis

In normal times, the reported return of 400 Isis fighters to Britain would be the biggest story out there. But with policymakers preoccupied by Brexit, and the press examining the sexual culture of Westminster, this news has not received the attention it deserves. The return of these fighters has profound implications. The security services are struggling to keep up with all the possible terrorists at large. Notably, Andrew Parker, the director-general of MI5, has warned that plots are being devised at the fastest rate he can remember in his 30-year career. Though he stressed that the security services have prevented seven attacks since March, he also said they cannot foil