The Politics of Dancing

After Charlie Hebbdo, after November in Paris and now Brussels, after the flags flying in solidarity, the tricolour projected onto buildings and monuments, after the altered avatars declaring that we are all Charlie, Belgian or Parisians, after all the instant analysis and 24hr rolling news coverage, can the penny finally have dropped in the silence of the heart? It is you they want to kill. They want to kill you for everything you are and for everything you are not. If you are a Muslim, cuts no ice with them, at least not until you are willing to cut your kufr neighbours throat. Foreign policy, Israel, Iraq, Tony Blair, Donald Trump, blasphemy, cartoons and anything else you want to add on, -Sykes Piquet perhaps, or the Crusades, - have nothing to do with it.  They want to kill you because you do not see the world as they do. They want to kill you because you dance and listen to music. They want to kill you because you laugh and sing in the bath and live your life with...

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. First a reality check, we are already hitting Daesh from the air, what parliament is voting on today is merely extending air operations from Iraq to Syria. Daesh is already being attacked from the air in Syria by a coalition including Jordan, France and the United States. There is also the continued indiscriminate bombing by Assad now joined by the Russians. Whatever parliament decides today that bombing will continue. Should the House of Commons agree the RAF will represent a very small component of those forces striking Daesh in Syria. Our contribution will make a difference, but not a very significant one . Parliament is not voting on whether to ‘go to war’ or whether to fight Daesh or not, that decision has already been made. The importance of the vote today has taken on an importance out of all proportion to reality. Jeremy Corbyn Speaks at So Called Stop the War Rally. That said doing nothing...

The self-described Islamic state/Daesh is on the retreat, though far from finished the tide is turning and they will, eventually, be defeated.*  As they taste defeat and the army of foreign volunteers begin to experience the corrosion of morale and spirit in the face of the squalid reality of daily slaughter and the constant presence of violent death, thoughts will turn to desertion, escape back to a world of clean clothes and bed linen, were the bombs and shells no longer fall. Extricating oneself from Daesh is not however an easy process and requests to leave are met with the threat of execution . Though reports of numbers vary it seems have made good on this threat, executing up to 200 individuals . Even if this ‘obstacle’ can be overcome there is still the little matter of finding ones way back home. If they achieve this on arrival back in the UK they then, at least theoretically, face arrest and charge with terrorist related offences. I say theoretically since it seems t...

Military campaigns fail for many reasons. Many factors can come into play. The inability to re-supply, inferior firepower, or simply an opponent’s superior tactical strategy. One reason that campaigns fail is however more psychological than military, it is when commanders and leaders become mesmerised by symbols, by the idea that the capture or annihilation of a particular place will somehow magically confer victory. This obsession can drive even great generals insane, as against all logic or practical strategic concerns they throw ever greater resources, particularly the lives of the men they command, into the capture or destruction of the symbolic objective. For Napoleon the obsession was Moscow, the capture of which he thought would bring Russian defeat and victory for the Grand Army. The prize of Moscow dazzled him preventing him from seeing that whilst a Russian army still remained intact in the field Russia would never surrender. Not a mistake he would normally have made. ...

If there was ever a tale for our time it is surely the case of @ShamiWitness. This pro-IS Twitter account was responsible for propagandising for IS on an industrial scale, pouring out tweets defending beheadings, slavery and the war unleashed against the Shia, Yazidi and Kurdish communities. ‘ The account's influence cannot be underestimated. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR) pointed to ShamiWitness as the single greatest "influencer" on militant jihadist Twitter, around whom foreign fighters and their fans would cluster. "We found that of all the Twitter accounts that Western foreign fighters followed, he was by far the most important, popular, and influential one, with more than 60 percent of the foreign fighters in our sample following, re-tweeting, and/or mentioning him," ICSR director Peter Neumann told VICE News.’ [1] Now the keyboard warrior has been ‘outed’ by a British television channel and...

In 1937 when he was fighting on the Aragon front for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War George Orwell had a Nationalist soldier in his sights. However the man had just visited the latrine and was in the process of hitching up his pants, this small detail made a difference to Orwell and he did not pull the trigger. Was Orwell right? For the man who survived as a result of Orwell’s decision may have been a hardened fascist responsible for some atrocity against Republican prisoners, he may have gone on to kill some of Orwell’s own comrades. Yet I suspect that many will sympathise with Orwell’s decision. What it provides is a cameo, a little glimpse of humanity amidst the hideous barbarism of war.  Later during the Second World War Orwell was cheered by the news of the sinking of a German U boat, he then went on to reflect that he has been made happy by the deaths of several dozen healthy young men. Amongst the multitude crimes of war is the fact that it coarsens human ...

The reasons that Daesh is ultimately doomed to fail are multiple, they are military, psychological, ideological and political.  IS has control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq and in late June the group declared it had created a caliphate, or ‘Islamic state.’Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, runs a ‘state’ that is larger than Lebanon or Israel. The US Central Intelligence Agency believes IS may have up to 31,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria including tens of thousands of fighters from at least 90 different countries. Capturing oil and gas fields and the second largest city in Iraq it is by far and away the richest terrorist group that has ever existed. Its hard-core fighters from Afghanistan and Chechnya are amongst the fiercest in the world. It has at its disposal captured sophisticated American weaponry from the Iraqi Army, including M1 Abrams Battle Tanks.  Yet with all this going for it ultimately IS, or to use the Arabic term Daesh, is doomed.  Abu Bakr al-Bag...

‘ By comparison, chimpanzees at birth are neurologically and cognitively ahead of human babies of the same age, but the chimps begin to fall behind by about six months old because of the more rapid continued development of the human brain following birth. With the exception of these differences, we are quite similar to the African apes anatomically and genetically, especially to the chimpanzees and bonobos.  Humans have 46 chromosomes in their cells while all of the great apes have 48.  In reality, this difference is not as great as it would initially seem because the human chromosome 2 is a fusion of ape chromosomes 12 and 13 with most of the same genes.’ Last week I paid a short visit to the very dark side of the Twitter-sphere, to the tweets of the Islamists, the would be Jihadist warriors and big time haters, haters of all that we think of when we think of a free and democratic society. Above all they hate secularism and the freedom to reject religion. Those t...

'ISLAMIC STATE'  TURKEY  AND THE WEST: DOUBLE DEALING AS A STRATEGY  TURKEY'S TWO FACED POLICIES ON IS On twentieth of September this year, as the same time as IS was holding journalists and aid workers, ready to be dressed in garish orange jumpsuits and beheaded in front of well-placed TV cameras, 47 Turkish hostages were released unharmed, well dressed and obviously reasonably well cared for. This, seemingly without a quid pro quo from the Turkish Government, is not normal IS modus operandi and understandably it raised some eyebrows. Some might even think shady business had gone on. No, was the Turkish President,  Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response to western cynics, the release was the product of the ingenious work of Turkey’s intelligence services. Some eyebrows however remained raised. Turkey sits famously between three worlds, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The European dimension to Turkey has always been important both inside and outside Turkey, whe...