World

Wednesday

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

What did Hamas think was going to happen?

Much misfortune the woebegone couldn’t have seen coming: a raging fire in the house next door that spreads to yours. The invention of some kooky technology called ‘the internet’ that puts your travel agency out of business. Yet other calamities are foreseeable. If you suddenly stop filing tax returns without a good excuse – like, dying – it’s a virtual certainty that the all-seeing computer will come after you. So when compounding fees and interest leave you skint, our sympathies are apt to be scant. What did you think was going to happen? Or to up the moral ante: if you slaughter 18 innocents in a frenzy for no apparent

Jim Lawley

Can Spain’s monarchy survive?

‘We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our laws and liberties; but if not, not.’ This famous oath of allegiance, sworn hundreds of years ago by the noblemen of Aragon in northern Spain to their king, also neatly expresses the transactional attitude of many contemporary Spaniards to their monarchy. They were willing to accept the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty as part of the post-Franco democratic settlement provided the king deserved their loyalty – but if not, not. And for many, the alleged misdemeanours (personal and financial) of ex-King Juan Carlos mean

Sean Rayment

An Israeli ceasefire would be a major strategic error

It would be a major strategic error for Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, as some are calling for now. Any let up in air and ground attacks would simply allow Hamas to regroup, rearm and replenish its depleted ranks with new recruits ready and willing to kill women, children and babies the next time the opportunity arises. Israel’s approach should not just be viewed through the prism of rage or revenge for the atrocity which left 1,500 Israelis dead three weeks ago. The military operation in Gaza is designed to degrade Hamas’s military capability to such an extent that it will take years to recover. The primary

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Why Putin thinks war with Ukraine is like the Israel-Palestine conflict

Who is to blame for the shocking pogrom in the Dagestani city of Makhachkala, where a mob of hundreds stormed the local airport in search of Jews on a flight from Tel Aviv? Vladimir Putin has offered a predictable answer: the West. In a meeting with Russia’s security council and law enforcement agencies, president Putin said the actions of the anti-Semitic mob in Dagestan were ‘inspired through social media, including originating from Ukraine, created at the hands of agents of Western intelligence services’.  Putin is trying to present his invasion as an existential fight against encroaching Western influence Putin then went further, suggesting that the US could also be blamed for war in

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Rethinking Chinese food with Fuchsia Dunlop

50 min listen

All cultures care about their cuisine, but the Chinese must have one of the most food-obsessed cultures in the world. It may be because we have the best food… Those listeners of Chinese Whispers who’ve been to China will know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, you may have come across the classic Chinese takeaway with dishes like sweet and sour pork, or you may like Cantonese dim sum, and some of you may be big fans of Sichuanese cooking. But China has so much more to offer than what has made across into the West’s Chinese restaurants. Thankfully, that’s changing and quite fast. Part

Phoebe Hennell

Is Argentina doomed?

Argentina is a third world country with first world taste. It is the land of Malbec, Borges and polo, but decades of economic mismanagement has crippled the country’s economy. Inflation is spiralling out of control: the annual rate hit 138 per cent last month, trailing only Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It didn’t have to be like this: a century ago, Argentina’s economy surpassed France and Germany, boasting a GDP per capita twice that of Spain. Its geography should have set the stage for success, being the South American country with the biggest variety of natural resources. As I write, £1 fetches 1259 pesos, in contrast with the 415 pesos it commanded

Lynne O’Donnell

Afghanistan is on the brink of another catastrophe

When a massive earthquake struck western Afghanistan on 7 October, thousands of mud houses collapsed, crushing and killing the people inside. Many of them were women, confined indoors by tradition, religion and Taliban edict, and their young children. Over the weeks that followed, Herat province, which borders Iran, has been shaken by three more huge earthquakes, measuring magnitudes of 6.3, and multiple aftershocks almost as devastating. Like most of Afghanistan, the area is poor and facilities are few. People were digging bodies out of the rubble by hand for days. Entire villages have been flattened. Pledges of aid are falling short amid concerns about the Taliban’s theft of food, money

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Dagestan’s anti-Semitic mob and the truth about Palestinian ‘solidarity’

So now we know what a ‘globalised intifada’ might look like. That’s what people chanted for on the streets of London on Saturday. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada’, they yelled. And now it’s happening, in Dagestan, where last night there was a violent hounding of Israelis arriving in the country by mobs shouting ‘Free Palestine’. What took place at the airport in Makhachkala was truly chilling. Huge numbers of people, some waving the Palestinian flag and holding anti-Israel placards, stormed the airport after hearing that a flight from Tel Aviv was on its way. They were hunting for Jews. It was a pogrom under the auspices of

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why the Kremlin will fear Dagestan’s anti-Semitic mob

As the war in Gaza continues to have global repercussions, a mob in the southern Russian city of Makhachkala stormed their local airport, after news spread that a flight from Tel Aviv was due to land. Beyond the heightened passions of Muslims around the world, this incident also demonstrates the particular challenges for multi-ethnic Russia. Tensions in the predominantly Muslim regions of the North Caucasus had been rising in recent days. Last week, there was an arson attack on a Jewish centre under construction in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria. On Saturday, a rally in Cherkessk, capital of the Karachayevo-Cherkessia, demanded that residents of Israel be banned from entry into the

Sean Rayment

Will Israel’s military strategy work against Hamas?

Israeli soldiers are the masters of street fighting. It is unlikely that there has been a single month in the 75-year history of the Israeli state in which members of its security forces have not been involved in some form of urban warfare. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) have fought on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank during the first and second intifadas, as well as in towns and villages in southern Lebanon. They have developed tactics, now adopted by armies the world over, for moving through occupied urban areas by blasting holes through buildings. And through endless urban battles – known as FIBUA, fighting in a built-up area –

Joanna Williams

Why are feminists like me being labelled ‘far right’?

In what would no doubt come as a shock to great feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, Sylvia Pankhurst and Simone de Beauvoir, arguing for sexual equality today makes you ‘far right’ and a purveyor of ‘hate speech’. Forget Hitler, Mussolini, or even Enoch Powell. According to the London Public Library in Ontario, Canada, it’s people like me, defenders of women’s sex-based rights, who lean perilously close to the wrong end of the political spectrum. When I say ‘people like me’ I actually mean me. Back in May this year, I was invited by the Canadian Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship to give their annual public lecture. Traditionally, this is held

Sunday

Nicholas Farrell

How Giorgia Meloni stabilised Italy

Giorgia Meloni has just marked her first year as Italy’s prime minister. When elected, she was described as a far-right leader, the most right-wing that Italy has had since Mussolini. So after a year in office, were these labels justified? What kind of leader has she been? And has she done anything to justify the ‘far-right’ label still lazily applied to her? While running for office, Meloni asked to be judged by her words and policies, not by the fact that as a teenager she had joined Italy’s long disbanded post-fascist party. ‘Usually, Italian politics are somewhat comical,’ Giovanni Orsina of Luiss University in Rome recently admitted. ‘But by Italian

Michael Gilead

Evacuate Gaza, but don’t call for a ceasefire

In every round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in the last 20 years, I have always wanted an immediate ceasefire. The way I see it, we Israelis were unwilling to pay the price it would cost to remove the Hamas regime and the dangers of Hamas had seemed manageable. Conflicts such as Operations Cast Lead (2008 to 2009), Pillar of Defence (2009), and Black Belt (2019) to name a few), seem like a futile cycle of blood-letting with immense human costs. This was the mainstream view of Israeli liberals.  But now, like almost the entirety of the Israeli left, I believe that in our current situation an immediate ceasefire

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Are Ukraine’s sabotage tricks going too far?

There has never been any doubt that Ukraine was the focus of an intelligence war as much as a physical one. But the extent of Western assistance, as well as growing concern at some Ukrainian tactics, is only now becoming clear. On Monday, the Washington Post ran a lengthy examination of the level of CIA assistance for the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and military intelligence (HUR) that bore all the hallmarks of being facilitated by the US government. It acknowledged that since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Americans has invested ‘tens of millions’ of dollars in training and technical assistance for their Ukrainian counterparts, even building new headquarters

Jeremy Seal

Turkey has plenty to celebrate on its centenary

It’s difficult to imagine the Middle East having reason to celebrate. It happens, however, that today is the centenary of modern Turkey, an occasion which president Erdogan, in an uncharacteristically emollient mood, recently described as a ‘big embrace of 85 million people’. If Turkey’s authorities mean to mark the occasion with rallies, fireworks and festivities, it could be said they have good reason. For while war, sectarianism and displacement continue to stalk so much of what once comprised the Ottoman Empire – not only in Palestine and the Holy Land, but in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, not to mention much of north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula – the Ottomans’

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne, Kate Andrews and Jonathan Maitland

18 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud, Peter Oborne reads his letter from Jerusalem (00:55), Kate Andrews talks about why Rishi Sunak has made her take up smoking (07:20), and Jonathan Maitland explains his growing obsession with Martin Bashir (12:15). Presented by Cindy Yu. Produced by Cindy Yu and Natasha Feroze.

Limor Simhony Philpott

What Palestinian ‘solidarity’ marchers in the West don’t understand about Hamas

The atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October have been revealed in their terrible savagery. There are accounts of dead babies, their bodies riddled with bullets, entire families burnt alive in their homes, women and girls raped and killed. Bodies tortured and mutilated beyond recognition. Israelis thought that the world would finally recognise Hamas for what it truly is; an Islamist terror organisation seeking to destroy Israel. It did not.  Since the war started, there has been an explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. Although Western leaders and large proportions of the public were shocked by Hamas’s atrocities and expressed support for Israel, the streets of London, Paris, Toronto and

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How Britain failed Israel

That the United Kingdom’s central institutions are rotten, crumbling, captured and perhaps beyond recovery is not news, but the Gaza intifada has crystallised the scale of institutional debasement. The brutalisation and murder of 1,400 Jews by Palestinian terrorists, and the open celebration of those actions by Jew-haters in this country, ought to have been met swiftly and resolutely. We do not do that sort of thing here. Instead, this demonic behaviour has granted us the most intimate and bracing glimpse at the decay inside the British state since the aftermath of 9/11. At a time when statesmanship is called for, we are forced to choose between Rishi Sunak, a waste

Friday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why Israel is set to invade Gaza

If reports this evening are correct, Israel is stepping up its ground operations in Gaza. The Jerusalem Post quotes IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari saying: ‘In the last few hours, we have severely increased our attacks in Gaza.’ For two weeks, a threatened ground invasion has failed to materialise. The Israeli press attributes the delay to diplomatic efforts with Washington and the need to assess the IDF’s capability for fighting on two fronts should Hezbollah decide to invade or shell from the north. Israelis, particularly though not exclusively on the political right, have been urging Benjamin Netanyahu to get a move on. ‘Tnu tzahal lenatze’ach’ runs the old Second Intifada era

Patrick West

Is the business world sane again?

There are signs that woke capitalism is on the way out. Unilever, purveyor of the most right-on brand of the moment, Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, will no longer ‘force fit’ all of its brand with a social purpose, following a backlash over the company’s ‘virtue-signalling’. Hein Schumacher, who became Unilever’s chief executive in July, has said that for some brands, giving them a social or environmental purpose ‘simply won’t be relevant or it will be an unwelcome distraction.’ He added: ‘I believe that a social and environmental purpose is not something that we should force fit on every brand.’ This report, in today’s Daily Telegraph, marks a significant U-turn for the manufactures of