Paris

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The GP charged around to my side of the table and roved her hand all over my pubic area

On Friday morning I was peeing razor blades so I rang up the doctor and was given an appointment after lunch. The surgery was at the top of a dingy staircase in an ancient, dilapidated village house. Except for some magazines spread out on a table, the waiting room might have been a comfortably furnished private sitting room. The woman with whom I am staying speaks better French than me and she came along to translate if necessary. We sat down on one of the sofas, and while we waited she picked up a magazine and was immediately absorbed by beach photos of celebrity couples. I made a snobbish remark

Alexander Chancellor

How do you explain events that even adults can’t understand to a child?

Seeing my ten-year-old daughter, Freya, a week after the massacre in Paris, I asked her if she had heard anything about the events there. She said, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, that she had heard something, but didn’t say what it was or from whom she had heard it. All she would say was that it hadn’t been mentioned by her teachers at school. And then she changed the subject. I didn’t feel like saying any more on the matter. Either she didn’t know anything much or she didn’t want to talk about it. And what would have been the point of discussing something so horrible with her? We

Toby Young Toby Young

Mr Spielberg, you cannot be serious

I wonder if Steven Spielberg is having second thoughts about Bridge of Spies in light of the attack on Paris? Spielberg’s latest film —released this week and tipped for Oscar glory — is an espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War with no immediate relevance to the ‘war’ we find ourselves in today. But it contains a strong liberal message about the importance of observing due process when dealing with enemy combatants and prisoners of war. The hero of Bridge of Spies is James Donovan (Tom Hanks), a straight-arrow insurance lawyer who is asked by the American government to defend Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a Brooklyn-based artist

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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The French might as well bomb Belgium

I am always open to spiritual guidance from any quarter, all the more so if that guidance is of practical import. So I was especially grateful to hear reports of a fatwa from the prominent Saudi Arabian cleric, Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah. This fatwa apparently made it clear that it was perfectly permissible for me, if suffering from ‘severe hunger’, to eat my wife. Either eat all of her — or merely, as it helpfully elucidated, some of her ‘body parts’. It did not say which body parts. In lieu of further enlightenment, I assumed that all of them were up for grabs. Anyway, many has been the time that I have

David Rose

‘I was tossed out of the tribe’: climate scientist Judith Curry interviewed

It is safe to predict that when 20,000 world leaders, officials, green activists and hangers-on convene in Paris next week for the 21st United Nations climate conference, one person you will not see much quotedis Professor Judith Curry. This is a pity. Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, and in America she has become a public intellectual. But on this side of the Atlantic, apparently, she is too ‘challenging’. What is troubling about her pariah status is that her trenchant critique of the supposed consensus on global warming is not derived from warped ideology, let alone funding by fossil-fuel firms, but from

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Is the Archbishop of Canterbury forsaking God?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, we heard during the BBC’s Songs of Praise broadcast last Sunday, ‘doubted God’ after the Paris attacks. On a walk on Saturday (he told listeners) he said to God, ‘Where are you in all this?’ As we are in confessional mood, here’s an anxiety of my own. The Paris atrocity has not occasioned me any new doubts, but Justin Welby’s remarks have caused me to doubt Archbishop Welby. Speaking on behalf of God, I have to ask the Archbishop: ‘Justin, where are you in all this?’ I’m not a believer, but I try to understand what believers believe. Christian theology has a long and distinguished intellectual

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Get ready: these climate change talks might actually do something

The Prince of Wales is right, and I appreciate that this isn’t something people say very often. Now and again, certainly, Prince Charles does turn out to be right about things, such as the need for interfaith dialogue or the horrors of some modern architecture, but the manner in which he tends to be right about them does rather have the feel of happy coincidence. In the future, as Warhol didn’t quite say, we will all be right for 15 minutes. Unless it’s about homeopathy. This week, you see, the Prince told Sky News that the war in Syria may be linked to climate change. Not, please note, that it

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

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

Sebastian Payne

Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity plummets after Paris attacks

Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the Paris terrorist attacks has been heavily criticised by the media and it appears the public have similarly negative views. According to a new ComRes poll from the Sunday Mirror/Independent on Sunday, the Labour leader’s net favourability rating has dropped to –28 — a ten point decrease since the last ComRes poll in mid-September. Notably, 53 per cent of Labour voters view Corbyn favourably, compared to 85 per cent of Conservatives for David Cameron. While George Osborne has a -19 net approval rating and John McDonnell -12, the only politician with a worse score than Corbyn is Vladimir Putin on -41. There is also bad news for

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is it really ‘grossly irresponsible’ to be critical of Islam?

Hours before the Paris atrocities, Al Arabiya news reported a speech by David Anderson QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. In it, he said that because some mainstream media were ‘grossly irresponsible’ in their coverage of Muslim issues, Ipso, the press standards body, ought to consider making it possible for an entire religious group to bring a complaint about coverage. Mr Anderson is an able and distinguished lawyer. Surely he knows that the entire history of this subject is that mainstream Muslim bodies are constantly trying to criminalise hostile remarks about their religion. And surely he knows that if this were conceded, the chilling of free speech would be

Friday

Douglas Murray

Another day, and another terror attack that is ‘nothing to do with Islam’

Another day and another group of men from an unknown religion storm into a hotel shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. This time in Mali. Once again they take hostages. And once again they free only those who can recite the Quran. Of course our Home Secretary Theresa May along with the President and Secretary of State in the U.S. will all say this has ‘Nothing to do with Islam.’ Or as Secretary Kerry said a couple of days back after the massacre in Paris. ‘It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean you name it’. Indeed, so

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil takes on ‘loser jihadists’

After the Paris terrorist attacks over the weekend which left at least 132 dead, there has been much discussion about how best to tackle the problem of IS. While politicians put out carefully worded statements and mull over their stance on air strikes, Andrew Neil has a message of his own for the ‘Islamist scumbags’ responsible for the Paris attacks. He kicked off BBC’s This Week with a special introduction in support of France at this testing time: ‘Evening all, and welcome to This Week. A week in which a bunch of loser jihadists slaughtered 132 innocents in Paris, to prove the future belongs to them rather than a civilisation like France.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Did the BBC really need to deploy Huw Edwards to Paris?

On Saturday morning, I watched BBC rolling news about the Paris atrocities. Then I spent the day hunting and switched on again at about half-past five. It was extraordinary how little the Corporation had advanced its coverage in the course of seven hours. It suffered from the curse of ‘big-footing’ — the custom of flying news ‘anchors’ from London to broadcast on the spot without knowing anything. No one needs Huw Edwards looking very serious in some boulevard and telling us again and again that ‘Paris is today a city in shock.’ We want to know, first, as much as possible about what actually happened; second, whatever can be gleaned about

Thursday

Peter Jones

Why do we assume our western good life will last for ever?

The slaughter in Paris is a catastrophe for the victims and their families, but the usual hysterical response across the media reminds us, yet again, what an extraordinary achievement it is that we Westerners simply assume the world owes us a life lived to the full, in comfort and security. From the ancient world until relatively recently, there was little sense that the world owed us anything. About half of Romans would not make the age of five; probably a third would not make three months. War was commonplace, as deadly for civilians as soldiers, as were disease and famine. The destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius was greeted with relative indifference. Ancients simply

John Laurenson

Death watch | 19 November 2015

At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene set in and by 1 September he was dead. He’d been on the throne for 72 of his 77 years. A new exhibition at Versailles looks at the elaborate rituals that followed. The Sun King died as he had lived — in public. Despite his illness, he carried on his daily routine until two days before his death, a decision made easier perhaps by the fact that he’d always conducted a good part of the affairs of France from his bedroom. It was no ordinary bedroom, and what went on

Toby Young Toby Young

Are we looking at the end of liberal democracy?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/parisattacksaftermath/media.mp3″ title=”Toby Young and Kemi Badenoch discuss the role of integration in the rise of Isis” startat=1470] Listen [/audioplayer]As a graduate student in the Harvard Department of Government in the late 1980s, I became slightly jaded about the number of visiting academics who warned about the imminent demise of the West. The thrust of their arguments was nearly always the same. The secular liberal values we cherish, such as the separation of church and state and freedom of speech, won’t survive in the face of growing religious animosity unless they’re rooted in something more intellectually and spiritually compelling than capitalist individualism. They were talking about Islamic fundamentalism, obviously, though

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 November 2015

When Jeremy Corbyn says it is better to bring people to trial than to shoot them, he is right. So one might feel a little sorry for him as the critics attack his reaction to the Paris events. But in fact the critics are correct, for the wrong reason. It is not Mr Corbyn’s concern for restraint and due process which are the problem. It is the question of where his sympathies really lie, of what story he thinks all these things tell. Every single time that a terrorist act is committed (unless, of course, it be a right-wing one, like that of Anders Breivik), Mr Corbyn locates the ill

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 November 2015

Home After the killings in Paris, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that seven terrorist attacks on Britain had been prevented in the past six months. He met President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a G20 meeting at Antalya in Turkey. Mr Putin said: ‘We should join efforts in preventing terror. Unfortunately our bilateral relations are not of the best.’ Mr Cameron said in the Commons: ‘Raqqa, if you like, is the head of the snake… we need to deal with it not just in Iraq but in Syria too.’ He said funds from maintaining defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP would go to special forces, drones and