Isis

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Commons votes to bomb Islamic State in Syria

British airstrikes against Islamic State will be extended to Syria after the House of Commons voted strongly in favour of the government ‘s motion tonight. The government had a majority of 174, enabling David Cameron to claim that he has the consensus backing for bombing IS in Syria that he has long craved. 67 Labour MPs voted in favour of strikes, which was higher than expected this morning. But Hilary Benn’s remarkable impassioned speech, the finest I’ve heard in the Commons, swayed at least one wavering Labour MP—Stella Creasy voting for, having previously been undecided and facing huge constituency pressure against action. Thought, it was worth noting that the government

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Airstrike debate sketch: terrorist sympathisers, anti-Semitism and a basket of old ribbons

Bomb Syria. That was Cameron’s priority today as PMQs was sidelined in favour of the debate on airstrikes. His opponents’ strategy was ‘Bomb Cameron.’ They demanded a withdrawal of his remark that any opponent of bombing must be a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. The snarliest words came from Alex Salmond whose grey jowls jiggled with rage as he shouted, ‘apologise for these deeply insulting remarks.’ Cameron offered a correction but no contrition: ‘There’s honour in voting for; honour in voting against.’ He didn’t hold back when describing Isil. ‘Women-raping, Muslim-murdering medieval monsters,’ he said. And he set out the case for extending the bombing from Iraq into Syria. Right now our jets have

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

‘National security’ has become our main justification for war

I’ve been in touch with Anisa for just over a year, ever since I met her in a dingy refugee compound on the outskirts of Amman. She’s a super-educated young woman from Damascus (most of the early wave of refugees were) and she’s never had much time for self-styled IS (‘none of them are actually Syrian, they’re invaders,’ she insists). Today Anisa is more depressed than ever. If Britain joins the coalition of airstrikes against IS territory in Syria, it will largely be symbolic, as The Spectator’s leader explains. The US has already been bombing Raqqa for nearly a year and a half. As the analyst Shashank Joshi suggests, we have a limited airforce, and

The Spectator

Why it’s time for Britain to join our allies in their fight against the Islamic State

The Islamic State is as monstrous an enemy as that has emerged in recent history. It crucifies and decapitates its victims, holds teenage girls in slavery and burns captives alive. It is wrong to call it a medieval force, because such institutionalised barbarity was seldom seen in medieval times. As far as five centuries of records from the Ottoman Empire can establish, stoning was authorised only once. Isis now regularly stones suspected adulterers to death. It is not seeking inspiration from the Middle Ages. We are witnessing a modern form of evil — and it is spreading fast. Labour MPs, now accustomed to receiving threats from hard-left activists, were told this

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

As we fret about Syria, the Islamic State is moving into Libya

What is it about war that makes normally sensible politicians prone to hype and exaggeration? No10 is today briefing that Cameron has instructed the RAF to ‘decapitate’ the leadership of the Islamic State in Syria – as if the thought hasn’t occurred to the Americans, who have spent the last 17 months (and $11 million-a-day) bombing Isil positions in Raqqa. ‘We’ve got to go out and kill the bastards,’ the Prime Minister is quoted as saying. An admirable sentiment: the Islamic State is as barbarous a group the Middle East has ever known, so there should be no qualms about striking it. The only problem is whether we do so as an act

Friday

Charles Lister

Yes, there are 70,000 moderate opposition fighters in Syria. Here’s what we know about them

Yesterday David Cameron told Parliament that there are ‘about 70,000 Syrian opposition fighters on the ground who do not belong to extremist groups’ who could help fight Islamic State.  The Prime Minister’s number was the result of an internal assessment made by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), backed up by serving British diplomats overseas whose jobs focus on the Syrian opposition. Such a large number struck many as political exaggeration. The chairman of the Defence Committee, Julian Lewis, said he was ‘extremely surprised’. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may issue a formal demand for clarification. So do these fighters exist and who are they? Of course, the debate primarily centres around the

Thursday

Taki

It is political correctness, not maniacal bigots, that will end civilisation

What does one do, attend or refuse a party after a tragic event such as the recent Paris outrage? My son happens to live next to Place de la République, where the massacre of innocents by those nice Islamists showing off their manhood took place. He was having dinner with his two little children when the shooting started. Luckily, they’re all OK, but I spent a terrible couple of hours trying to get through after the news came over the TV screens. The next evening in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute was celebrating The Art of Style with a black-tie dinner honouring Jacqueline de

Nick Robinson

Diary – 26 November 2015

Scientists are experimenting with growing replacement vocal cords in the lab, as well as transplanting them from dogs. That was the Sun’s imaginative angle on my somewhat croaky debut as a Today programme presenter (only one of mine is working properly). It led me to ponder which species of donor would be fitting for my new role. Rottweiler? Too aggressive. Terrier, perhaps? Annoying after a while. Maybe a shepherd or a pointer would fit better with the mission to explain? All suggestions gratefully received. Bar one, that is. Husky is out. If my first programme had not been dominated by events in Paris, I had planned to talk about the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron insists the UK must attack IS in Syria, but only with a ‘clear majority’ in the House

David Cameron came to the Commons today to make the case for the UK extending its bombing campaign against Islamic State to Syria. His tone was as emollient as possible, as he responded to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee report which argued that the UK should not do this. He said that the UK could provide unique capabilities and that there are 70,000 non-extremist, Syrian fighters who could act as a ground force to support the bombing campaign. He stressed that as long as the Islamic State ‘Caliphate’ exists, it would act as a rallying cry for Islamist extremists around the world and that it had ‘repeatedly’ tried to attack

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron sets out his case for bombing Islamic State in Syria

In the past few minutes, David Cameron has published his response to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the case for British action against Islamic State in Syria. You can read the response here. The Prime Minister argues that the threat to Britain is so great that ‘now is the time to scale up British diplomatic, defence and humanitarian efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict and to defeat ISIL’. ‘The threat Isil poses to Britain and to our citizens today is serious and undeniable’, he says, warning that Britain must act before the terrorists succeed in an attack again this country. Cameron’s challenge from MPs was to set out what

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘They pull a gun, you pull a hashtag’ – the ridiculous debate over what to call Isil

‘They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He shends one of yoursh to the hospital, you shend one of hish to the morgue.’ Thus Sean Connery in The Untouchables, explaining how you fight a war ‘Chicago-style’. How would you adapt that, do we think, for our collective response to the Paris attacks? ‘They pull a gun, you pull a hashtag. They send 132 of yours to the morgue, you start calling them a slightly rude name.’ As they say on the internet: srsly? Imagine you’re in Raqqa, having at last made hijrah from the family semi in Dudley. You’re chillaxing, maybe having a bit of a kickabout with the

Anonymous

Military action against Isis needs a coherent strategy. . . . here it is

Like most British soldiers of my generation, I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Few would now justify the reasons for invading Iraq; most of us who fought there at first recognised the amateurish nature of the strategy and its lack of realistic political objectives. But in 2007, under General Petraeus, the coalition adopted a new strategy that was underpinned by coherent policy. This stemmed from the recognition that unless common cause was found with moderate Sunnis, a workable Iraqi polity could never be established. The rapid improvements that flowed from this change were impressive but disgracefully shortlived. The US departure from Iraq in 2010 allowed the Shi’ite Nuri Al Maliki

Andrew J.

The pretend war: bombing Isil won’t solve the problem

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatfakewar/media.mp3″ title=”Andrew J. Bacevich and Con Coughlin discuss the West’s war with Isis” startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer]Not so long ago, David Cameron declared that he was not some ‘naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet’. Just a few weeks after making that speech, Cameron authorised UK forces to join in the bombing of Libya — where the outcome reaffirmed this essential lesson. Soon Cameron will ask parliament to share his ‘firm conviction’ that bombing Raqqa, the Syrian headquarters of the Islamic State, has become ‘imperative’. At first glance, the case for doing so appears compelling. The atrocities in Paris certainly warrant a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What Muslims think

Do you have sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria? It’s a hard question to answer: perhaps you’d wonder who the ‘fighters’ were. Or whether the ‘young Muslims’ were 14-year-old girls, groomed by fanatics to be jihadi brides. But if you answer ‘yes’, you may be surprised to find yourself described as having ‘sympathy for jihadis’. Such are the perils awaiting British Muslims who respond to opinion poll questions. The Sun this week found itself in a row about a front-page headline: 1 IN 5 BRIT MUSLIMS’ SYMPATHY FOR JIHADIS. The poll, by Survation, had asked a rather different question: what level of ‘sympathy’

Kate Chisholm

You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could

It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign in Syria — and not a word was spoken. Martha Kearney called it an ‘audio graphic’ on the World at One on Monday and explained how Neal Razzell and James Beard for the World Service had been monitoring the number of US combat missions on Islamic State targets in Syria, hour by hour, 24/7, and comparing them with earlier bombing campaigns. Each electronic beat we heard represents one hour, Razzell told us; each beep represents the launch of one combat mission. For Syria, the electronic beeps between each beat were

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

How can we defend our liberal heritage by abandoning its values?

Yusuf, when I last saw him, was still smiling, a middle-aged man with the greying pony-tail of a rock roadie. He described himself as a feminist: he met his wife through work, where, he told me proudly, she was a better computer engineer than he. Yusuf had the stoop of a tall man who’d spent most of his life under ceilings too low for him, and the corrugated iron hut his family now called home was no exception. So we sat cross-legged on the floor, while I asked him about religious tensions in a southern Turkish refugee camp. ‘If you want to know, I’m an atheist. I mean, in Damascus,

Monday

Nick Cohen

C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le journalisme

Andrew Neil is the best political interviewer in Britain. I am not just saying that because he is so high up here at The Spectator, although that helps. I am not saying it because he once bought me lunch, although he did his cause no harm there either. I am saying it because he is one of the few broadcasters who makes me stop what I am doing and listen. God help the interviewee who goes on his programme unprepared. If he or she has not thought through every flaw in their argument, they will find that Neil has done their thinking for them. He will expose their contradictions on

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Britain should be proud of its role in spreading universal morality

I promised to provide, in this space, a forum for thinking about ‘what we believe’. We the West. There are two articles worth noting in the last few days. Toby Young, right here in The Spectator, wondered how liberal values can be sexed up. Should we hope that potential Islamists will be won over by ‘a crash course in the virtues of limited government and the rule of law, drawing on the writings of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson’? He goes on: ‘Liberalism offers its adherents peace and prosperity – it appeals to man’s desire for comfortable self-preservation, as Nietzsche pointed out. That’s fairly tepid and uninspiring compared to the

Saturday

James Forsyth

Cameron to make his case for war to the Commons next week

David Cameron will set out his case for air strikes against IS in Syria to the Commons late next week. Cameron is, as I say in my Sun column today, immensely frustrated by the current British position of only bombing Islamic State in Iraq and not Syria. But he knows that it would be politically back breaking for him to lose another Commons vote on a matter of war and peace, so is proceeding cautiously.   But last night’s UN resolution has strengthened Cameron’s hand. Even before that, 30 Labour MPs were certain to back Cameron on this issue and another 30 were highly likely to. With a UN resolution