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Friday morning’s attack in Paris in which a machete-wielding man was shot and wounded in the stomach by a French soldier after he injured another soldier near the Louvre museum is the first terrorist incident in France since July. Then two teenagers murdered an elderly priest in his Normandy church, an attack that shocked and repulsed in equal measure. While the full details of Friday’s incident are still to emerge, it hasn’t the hallmarks of a determined and well-organised attack. There were no explosives in the two backpacks recovered at the scene and launching oneself at two armed soldiers holding just a machete is frightening but foolhardy. Nonetheless, interior minister

Europe’s unpreparedness to deal with the terrorist threat it is now facing is highlighted in two reports today. The Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of the report prepared for the Belgium parliament on the failure of the Belgium authorities to stop the Islamic State terror cell who travelled from Belgium to carry out the 2015 Paris attacks. The report details a quite remarkable litany of incompetence, including the failure of the Belgium police to act on a warning that Salah Abdeslam had changed his social media profile picture to a picture of the Islamic State flag. The failure of Belgium’s various police and intelligence agencies to cooperate with

Anybody who has observed Germany in recent years may have noticed that the country’s politicians have gone a bit nuts.  For instance, it isn’t just Chancellor Merkel but a broad swathe of the German political class, who believe it wise to invite an additional 1-2 percent of the population into the country in a year and only wonder afterwards whether this was a good idea. Happily there is a reassuring factor: this is that the German police and domestic intelligence agency (the BfV) generally appear to be on top of the resulting challenges.  Listen to any of their representatives and you will be assured that the agency is fit to

A man has set fire to a train in Switzerland and stabbed lots of people. On the BBC News last night the perpetrator was described as ‘a Swiss national’. Similarly on the BBC News online today: ‘The suspect, described as a Swiss man aged 27, was also taken to hospital after the incident near Salez in St Gallen canton, close to Liechtenstein.’ Do you know, I think there is something the BBC – and the Swiss authorities – are not telling us. This attack was quite similar in some respects to one carried out in London recently, in which an elderly American woman was murdered. Then, at least, the BBC

On the bright side, the elderly priest who was murdered during mass in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen, had pretty well a perfect ending in Christian terms: celebrating the eucharist and targeted precisely because he was a priest. Two men took him hostage during mass, along with a couple of nuns and a couple of members of the congregation and they slit his throat – not quite the decapitation favoured by Islamic State in its own territory, but not for want of trying. By one account, one of the men shouted Daesh during the attack, which is odd, because this is the euphemistic term used by those who wish to call IS

Update: This piece was written yesterday and so is already out of date. This morning two armed men entered a church near Rouen during Mass.  They took the priest, two nuns and a number of congregants hostage. It appears that they slit the priest’s throat before themselves being killed by French security forces.  Nobody can think of any possible motive, though people claiming that attacking Christians at prayer is not a traditional Islamist practice have clearly not paid attention to Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt or any number of other countries around the world. Well this is all going very well isn’t it?  I refer of course to the totally unforeseeable, impossible to predict wave

Living in France is a lottery. The chances of getting a losing ticket are very slim, but a chance it is all the same. Twenty four hours before the slaughter in Nice, I took my daughter to the Bastille celebrations in the southern suburb of Paris in which we live. The centrepiece of the celebration was a parade through the town centre finishing in the town square. On arrival the kids in the parade leapt up on stage and sang La Marseillaise before trooping off into the embrace of their parents. Next up on stage was a pop band, and as they launched into their first number my 11-year-old daughter

I’m pro-gun control, but I come from the most heavily populated corner of one of the most crowded islands on earth, where it’s appropriate. I also grew up in a city and have only fired a gun once, which was basically an air rifle, and the results were predictably Woody Allenesque. But gun control may not be necessarily appropriate in sparse rural areas, although I do find some of the arguments made by American Second Amendment supporters strange. Whenever someone pops up and kills loads of people, the argument is that if only someone there was armed it wouldn’t have happened. Like in a school? In a club? We can’t

The new year has not started well for France. On the last day of 2015 – the most traumatic year for the French in decades because of the twin attacks in Paris – president Francois Hollande warned the nation in his traditional New Year’s Eve address: ‘France is not done with terrorism… these tragic events will remain for ever etched in our memories, they shall never disappear. But despite the tragedy, France has not given in. Despite the tears, the country has remained upright.’ Hollande’s warning was borne out within 24 hours. On the first day of 2016 a lone motorist – inspired by Islamic State – drove at a

The term ‘victim blaming’ is most commonly used to describe people who claim that a woman walking out in a short skirt is ‘asking to be raped.’ But even this claim is not quite as gut-wrenching as the claim that some people are ‘asking to be killed’ or once killed are effectively ‘guilty of their own murder.’ This most malicious form of ‘victim blaming’ was rolled out in the American press at the weekend by the interestingly named Linda Stasi. In a column in Saturday’s New York Daily News Ms Stasi wrote about one of the 14 people massacred in an Isis-inspired attack in San Bernardino, California (a terrorist attack