Of the images I have not been able to clear from my mind over these past 12 terrible months the most tenacious is that of two young women: one in an elegant hijab, one not, laughing for the camera as …
Why Israel deserves our support
New York. London. Paris. Madrid. Over the past three decades, at various times, these cities have been yoked together under a pall of terror that has spread right across the West. It has set populations against each other, leaving everyone …
Will a new generation of jihadis flock to Somalia?
On 14 July 2024, as football fans gathered to watch the Euro 2024 final, a fireball ripped through a café in Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, later claimed responsibility for the blast and the five lives it extinguished. It …
Meet the three types of rioter
Since the first spark was lit in Southport, condemnation of the rioters has largely centred on their identity as “far-Right thugs”. Indeed, some experts, including the former head of British counter-terrorism policing, have gone as far as to call the …
Why the Southport suspect’s identity matters
After an atrocity has been committed, a morbid curiosity often takes hold of online sleuths. As they search for clues of the suspect’s identity, what they really want is to look into the eyes of evil, perhaps believing that they’ll …
The truth about Britain’s teenage terrorists
To read a British newspaper or to listen to the rhetoric of counter-terrorism police, you could be forgiven for thinking that the country has incubated a new generation of child extremists. And not just any child extremists: unlike previous moral …
How civil servants killed the spy
The police were searching the home of a Libyan terror suspect, Abu Anas al-Liby, in Manchester when they came across an al-Qaeda handbook. The year was 2000, and the handbook — later dubbed the “Manchester Manual” — laid out the …
Should you watch footage of terrorist attacks?
On Friday evening, an X personality called Ian Miles Cheong posted a video of Isis terrorists marauding through the entrance of a concert hall in Moscow, calmly shooting to death scores of civilians in their path. I don’t follow Cheong, …
Will there be another Stakeknife?
For a spy, a job requiring furtive anonymity, James Bond always did have an unusual side-line in mass homicide. Apart from The Man with the Golden Gun, where Bond dispatches only the eponymous Scaramanga, his body count almost always hits …
The truth about KCL’s ‘indoctrination’ scandal
In the week following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a group of Columbia University students, flushed with ideological fervency, sent a petition to the Dean of the university’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Signed by more …
Hamas and the Houthis have emboldened Isis
While the public’s focus on non-state actor threats is shifting to military action against the Houthis, a resurgent Islamic State (Isis) threat abroad and within the West continues to fester. Three days into 2024, the Islamic State reminded the world …
MeToo unless you’re a Jew
After accompanying British troops as they liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, Richard Dimbleby produced one of the most viscerally horrifying — and powerful — dispatches in the BBC’s history. “I find it hard to describe adequately the horrible things that …
Are all terrorists monsters?
Like many a supposedly timeless phenomenon, terrorism is a modern invention. As a political idea, it first emerges with the French Revolution, so that terrorism and the modern democratic state are twinned at birth. In the era of Danton and …
Incels are the new jihadis
It is hard to know exactly when it happened, but, at some point over the last three years, the word “jihad” vanished from the news. Did anyone notice? There was a time, not so long ago, when jihadists seemed to …
The rise of pro-Western disinformation
When the US State Department launched its Iran Disinformation Project in the autumn of 2018, it was hailed as a new weapon in the war on hostile foreign propaganda. Staffed by diaspora Iranians and handed an initial $1.5 million of …