Paris

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My afternoon in a Gallic version of Betfred

For the Cheltenham Festival I received the customary tipster circular from my pal Soapy Joe. Soapy’s most convincing credential as a horse-racing tipster is that he is banned from every high street bookmaker in the land because he takes too much money off the poor souls. I slept with him once. I woke up in an upstairs bedroom of a Gloucestershire stately home on the second morning of our week-long Cheltenham Festival house party, pieced together where I was, and why, and saw, sitting up in the next bed, Soapy in his stripy pyjamas listening to the commentary of a horse race in Dubai or somewhere on a pocket radio.

Thursday

Harry Mount

Seeing Paris through Impressionist eyes

The spectre of the Charlie Hebdo killings still hangs over Paris. Outside the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, opposite the Louvre, there’s a big poster of Cabu, one of the murdered cartoonists. The poster is peppered with fake bullet holes; underneath, the caption reads, ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’ I didn’t realise, until I talked to the curator of the new Impressionist show at the National Gallery in London, that Cabu was a popular figure on French children’s TV in the 1970s. His death particularly haunts the middle-aged, who grew up on his cartoons. The Charlie Hebdo posters across Paris still bring you up short. I hope it isn’t sacrilege

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 5 March 2015

Home The man seen in several Islamic State videos of hostages being beheaded, nicknamed Jihadi John by the British press, was revealed as Mohammed Emwazi, aged 26, born in Kuwait but raised from the age of six in London. He was said to have had help with anger management at his secondary school, Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood. An advocacy group called Cage produced a recording of him complaining that MI5 had questioned him after he had to turn back from a ‘safari’ in Tanzania in 2009. General Raymond Odierno, the chief of staff of the US army, said he was ‘very concerned’ about British defence cuts. Lance

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

The dark comedy of the Senate torture report

Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports, it sometimes brings out in me the opposite of sincere curiosity so essential to my trade. Thus when my French publisher asked me to write a preface to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s report on the CIA’s torture programme, and come to Paris to promote a translated edition, I was reluctant. Hadn’t I already read everything about this? As much as I detest the CIA and love Paris, a book tour to discuss waterboarding and forced rectal feeding struck me as less than appealing. Nevertheless, civic duty spurred me and a lawyer

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Cybersex is a dangerous world (especially for novelists)

Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual premise to a tightly controlled and claustrophobic thriller. Its only drawback was that it was a hard act to follow. Novelists tend to dump all their brilliant ideas into their first book, and the white heat of originality compensates to some extent for any want of craft. Second novels lack both advantages, and have the additional problem that readers come to them laden with expectations. Like its predecessor, Second Life is a slice of domestic noir with a woman narrator. It is set mainly in affluent corners of London, with

Saturday

Douglas Murray

I don’t want to live under Islamic blasphemy law. That doesn’t make me racist

I have spent most of the last fortnight debating Islam and blasphemy and wanted to take the opportunity to put down a few unwritten thoughts. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris atrocities most of the people who thought the journalists and cartoonists in some sense ‘had it coming to them’ kept their heads down.  I encountered a few who did not, including Asghar Bukhari from the MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Committee).  In the aftermath of the atrocity Asghar was immediately eager to smear the cartoonists and editors of Charlie Hebdo as racists.  From what he and others of his ilk have been sending around since, they appear to have

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

French secularism is starting to feel the strain

France is to institute something called a National Secularity Day, which will happen on 9th December every year, when French schools will remind pupils how to sing the national anthem, what the tricolor stands for and generally celebrate the values of the Republic. Odd, isn’t it, that this should sound so much like the reflexive, everyday practice in the United States, where flag veneration and the separation of church and state are hardwired into the consciousness of US children, without impinging at all on the extent of religious observance? Every French school will have to go through this Secularism observance day but it’s painfully apparent which community it’s directed at:

Friday

Douglas Murray

Do Theresa May and Mr Henry Bellingham think we were born yesterday?

On Wednesday the Home Secretary made a statement in the House of Commons about the terrorist attacks last week in Paris. Here is part of the Hansard transcript of the resulting debate: Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con): Is the Home Secretary aware that when the Prophet Mohammed moved from Mecca to Medina all those years ago to establish the first Islamic state, he did not set up a sectarian caliphate, such as that demanded by the Paris murderers, but rather, under the charter of Medina, he created a multi-faith society, where Jews and Christians had the right to worship and were able to proclaim their faiths? Mrs May:

Ed Husain

Down with la laïcité — to beat Islamism, we need a secularism that encourages religion

‘We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad’ shouts the jihadi murderer as he escapes, having killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. In Syria, an American fighting for al-Qaeda says: ‘I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here’. There are thousands of young men and women in our midst who share these sentiments. They believe that their cause is worth dying for – and they want to have that honour, confident in the reward that they will get for their actions. They are disillusioned, not disenfranchised. Many are well-educated, with a good family life. But they seek a value that they can fight for – a cause for

Thursday

Taki

Let’s all become Japanese for a while

This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to the stoic discipline with which the Japanese bore hardship and the death of 15,000 people in March 2011 following a nine-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to have hit Japan. I can remember the TV coverage as if it were yesterday. Very young and very old Japanese formed a long orderly line for disaster supplies. There was no looting whatsoever as there had been in Los Angeles or in Mexico City, no weeping on camera so that the world would send more funds, just plucky resolve (gaman in Japanese) and

Wednesday

Geoffrey Alderman

Here’s how politicians can convince British Jews that they have a future in the UK

A recent study has suggested that over half of Britain’s Jews feel they have no future in the UK. At first glance this might seem outrageous, indeed incredible. Arguably (one might say) we Jews are the most successfully integrated of all the UK’s ethnic minorities.  A miniscule set of communities – comprising in total 0.5 per cent of the UK’s total population –  British Jewry punches well above its weight in all walks of life: the learned professions; the arts; the entertainment industries; academia; big and not so big business; even politics. Of course (you might retort) Jews have a future in the UK! A more pertinent question might be to

The Spectator

Cameron’s reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks has been depressingly predictable

Last Sunday, David Cameron marched through Paris in solidarity, so it seemed, with those who stand up for free speech. Anyone who thought he meant it must now be crying out, ‘Je suis un right Charlie!’ Hardly had the march finished than the Prime Minister had rediscovered his other side: the one which reacts to terror by threatening yet more surveillance, more state control. He has promised to revive, in the Conservative manifesto, the ‘-snooper’s charter’ which would allow the state to retain indefinitely information about every email we ever send, every telephone call we ever make. Not only that. He added a further measure: he wants to ban all

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Nigel Farage: a two-bit demagogue and believer in lazy ‘Root Causes’

Nigel Farage has performed a useful public service this week. Yes, really, he has. The UKIP leader, you see, is a believer in Root Causes. He is, in fact, a Root Causer and, like every member of that miserable tribe, liable to see every event as confirming the righteousness of his own longstanding, stale-breathed, prejudices. You see we – the west generally – bring all this trouble upon ourselves. At home and abroad. It’s western foreign policy that explains and motivates Islamic extremism and it’s uncontrolled (sic) immigration that’s given it room to flourish in France, the United Kingdom and other countries. How very convenient. The idea that the Charlie Hebdo murders

Alex Krasodomski

The real danger of #CyberJihad is that anybody can get involved

There was a certain irony to the news that @CENTCOM had been hacked yesterday afternoon. While President Obama was giving a speech on cybersecurity, the U.S. Central Command Twitter account was spouting pro-Isis propaganda. Nothing new here, though. Since day one, Isis have used the internet to threaten the West and in particular American soldiers. During a few days in August last year, my research group tracked eighty thousand tweets sent using the hashtag #AMessageFromISIStoUS from Isis sympathisers. Many of them contained grisly threats: images of US casualties and coffins with warnings not to interfere in the affairs of the Caliphate. Cyber-jihad is a natural evolution of terrorism. Islamic State seem to have

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

The right to offend is nowhere near as important as the right to speak the truth

Last week I lost count of the number of times we’ve been told, pace the Charlie Hebdo murders, that we have no right not to be offended, that freedom of speech involves the possibility of criticism and ridicule of any religion; indeed, that it’s the flip side of religious liberty. Salman Rushdie, who has more right to make the point than most, said that ‘religion deserves our fearless disrespect’ and  people like Suzanne Moore in the Guardian seemed to suggest that we have a positive duty to disrespect religion, though I am still waiting for that paper to reproduce some of Charlie Hebdo’s finest on the subject of the prophet of Islam as

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Islam had nothing to do with this (and other fibs you’re likely to hear)

I don’t always agree with Peter Hitchens but this is by far the best piece I’ve seen on the political reaction to the Paris attacks. As far as Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are concerned, we must all sign up to these shibboleths: The attack was nothing to do with Islam. Almost all Muslims, here and abroad, found those attacks repugnant. The attacks were perpetrated and supported by a minuscule number of people who can simply be defined as ‘terrorists’. Immigration and multiculturalism were in no way contributory causes of either the Paris attack or the attacks which we might experience in the future or have suffered in the past. All

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Charlie Hebdo attack: French march in defiance alongside world leaders

Up to 0ne million people are expected to march through the streets of Paris today, in defiance of the terrorist attacks on the city during the past week. David Cameron will join the march, alongside approximately 40 other world leaders, including French President Francois Hollande. Security has been increased around the city, with more than 5,500 police officers expected to be on guard.  

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Nothing to do with Muslims, of course

Utterly brilliant piece by Brendan O’Neill at Spiked on what would have happened if Charlie Hebdo had been published in Britain, rather than in France. It does not strike me as being terribly far-fetched. Meanwhile, the BBC, yet again, has misjudged the story in its news coverage, wringing its hands over the treatment of French Muslims, while at the same time insisting that the murders were nothing to do with Muslims – it was just mad terrorists.

Friday

Douglas Murray

The siege in a kosher shop in Paris proves why Israel needs to exist

As I write a siege is ongoing in a Kosher shop in Paris.  In France, Belgium and across Europe in recent years, Jews have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist attack.  They always are.  Last year saw the largest upsurge of anti-Semitic hate crime on record even in the UK. But it is the continent that has seen the worst and growing litany of attacks.  In 2012 Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse.  In May last year three people were shot dead by an Islamist gunman at the Jewish museum in Brussels. During the twentieth century Judaism on the continent of Europe

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Charlie Hebdo’s journalists were murdered for doing. Now people are being attacked simply for being

After Wednesday’s attack on Charlie Hebdo, an argument doing the rounds was that it would have been better not to publish cartoons that were deliberately provocative when the magazines had already suffered violent attacks. Why should the journalists put themselves and others, including Muslim policeman Ahmed Merabet, at risk of death? Now two people are dead in a kosher grocers in eastern Paris, perhaps those who thought that it unwise to publish aggressive cartoons can have a think again. Five or six people are believed to be being held hostage in the shop. The shop sells kosher food. Jews buy kosher food. The attackers appear to be killing people not