Latest from Coffee House

When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley last night, it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography. I shed a tear, but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to offer solidarity and what help we can. And, yes, to hit back. The night after the attack, France launched 20 separate air strikes on what it said were Isis strongholds in Syria. And at home, an extra 115,000 gendarmes were deployed across France, leading to hundreds of raids with dozens of arrests.  In the days following attacks on the West,

Bad news from the continent.  In an interview with the German weekly Stern, Laurent ‘Riss’ Sourisseau, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, announced that he would no longer draw cartoons of any historical figure called Mohammed. This follows his former colleague Renald ‘Luz’ Luzier saying a couple of months back that he would no longer draw Mohammed either. ‘Luz’ announced that he was leaving the magazine shortly afterwards. I don’t judge either of them for this decision. ‘Luz’ happened to be running late for work on the morning that the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and started shooting his colleagues.  ‘Riss’ was in the office and

David Cameron is right to speak against religious extremism, even if it claims not to support violence. But what exactly is religious extremism? He defined it in opposition to British values, meaning democracy and the rule of law and so on. Maybe this is clear enough. But I think the matter can be clarified further. I think it should be defined in this way. Religious extremism idealises religious unity as the basis of good politics, and denigrates pluralism, liberal values, ‘secularism’ (in the political sense). In other words, it is theocratic religion. ‘Theocracy’ is an old-fashioned word, but I think we need to use it a lot more. It gets

Surveillance has hit the headlines again. This morning, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, or DRIPA, which passed last year after just 24 hours debate, was ruled illegal by the High Court in a landmark case. DRIPA was an emergency measure to allow law enforcement agencies access to communications data, and its illegality puts even more pressure on Theresa May’s forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech. Last week, David Cameron announced that WhatsApp, Snapchat, iMessage, indeed, any encrypted messaging system, could be banned under new laws. In the fight against terrorism, the security services’ ability to intercept communications by would-be violent extremists is said to be

Let’s put the question very bluntly: do British Muslims affirm British values, or are they outsiders to our way of life? Or, even more bluntly: can we trust them? It is important that we learn to answer this question with nuance, and not in a self-righteous and simplistic way. A week before the Tunisian carnage, David Cameron implicitly raised the question, when he said that too many mainstream Muslims were equivocating, seeming to condone Islamic State and to disparage the West –this ‘paves the way for young people to turn simmering prejudice into murderous intent’, he said. His comments, and his planned counter-extremism bill, were strongly condemned by commentators, and

Each year Anjem Choudary earns more in benefits than a soldier does starting off in our armed forces. This is a fact I never tire of pointing out – especially to Anjem’s face whenever we have the misfortune to meet. The follow-on point, which I think also worth continuing to make, is that there is something suicidal about a society that rewards its enemies better than it does its defenders. Choudary and his family rake in around £25,000 each year  and – as you can see from this newly-released video above  – we taxpayers now get even more for our money than we had previously thought.  For now we do not only pay

This weekend the masters of the universe will gather at the annual Bilderberg conference. The secretive summit, which is being held in Austria, sees heads of banks and company CEOs mix with political heavyweights including the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, US pollster Jim Messina, George Osborne and… Ed Balls. No notes are taken, no media are invited to cover the event, and the outcome is never revealed which has led conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive. Theories range from plans for a New World Order to world domination by lizards. This year they have disclosed the topics they are planning to discuss: ‘Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, chemical weapons threats, current economic

Al Qaeda terrorists have never had good press. For sound reasons they are always represented as evil, nihilistic, faceless murderers. There are certain interesting signs this is starting to change. This is happening in part because the emergence of Isis has shown that there is something worse than Al Qaeda. It is in part because the West has joined forces with Al Qaeda in some of its wars. The Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra, for instance, seems to have become a western ally in the war against Assad. Tonight Al Jazeera presents an intriguing portrait of an Al Qaeda terrorist. The documentary Al Qaeda Informant tells the story of the life of

The more I think about the debate on Thursday night, the more I think it was a disgrace that there was no question on either defence or Britain’s role in the world. This country might want a holiday from history. But, sadly, we don’t look like getting one on. On Europe’s Eastern border, the Russians are behaving in an increasingly aggressive fashion. The Times’ account of a recent meeting between ex-intelligence officials from Russia and the US shows just how bellicose Putin is and reveal that Britain might well soon have to decide whether to honour its Nato Article 5 obligations to the Baltic states. On Europe’s Southern border, Islamic

Poor Mohammed Emwazi. One day he’s your average ‘beautiful’ young man, nose buried in his computer studies books, looking for a job and looking for love. The next he’s being harassed by the security services, so intensely that — BOOM — he weeps and wails his way to the deserts of Syria where he changes his name to Jihadi John, dons an Islamic ninja outfit and starts chopping people’s heads off. Happy now, MI5? See what you did? Shame on you for pushing this studious, handsome London lad to become the Charles Manson of the Middle East. That, at least, is a rough outline of the script being hawked by

I was invited to Lars Vilks* Committee in Copenhagen to present Passion for Freedom London Art Festival. The committee is organised annually, on the anniversary of Salman Rushdie’s fatwa. The meeting started with a short introduction from one of the organizers followed by François Zimeray, the French ambassador, commemorating Charlie Hebdo and discussing the challenges that we face when it comes to the threats to freedom of speech and democracy in our countries. After a short introduction, Inna Shevchenko opened the panel and started to talk about Femen and her work. She also discussed her close friendship with Charb, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, and how they both stood strong exercising their right to

After Islamist terrorist atrocities, political leaders often rush to say that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. One can understand why they feel the need to do this but the problem is the terrorists clearly do think, however mistakenly, that they are acting in the name of Islam. But if any politician wants to know how to answer the question about the link between terrorism and Islam, they should look at these answers from the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in an interview with The New York Times: There are aspects of Islamic practice and tradition at the moment that involve them in violence, as there are, incidentally,

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