Give a Dog a Bad Name. Why is Russia Always Presumed Guilty?

I don’t think I’ve heard the old saying ‘Give a dog a bad name…’ for many years. The missing words were  ‘…and hang him’. It used to be common, a caution against prejudice. Maybe it’s been driven out of use by the seemingly universal belief in the rival maxim that ‘there’s no smoke without fire’, which most people who’ve tried to light fires on a wet camping expedition will know to be downright untrue. I think the expression ‘They can’t do that here’ has gone the same way. These days they *can* do that here, and they do.

It’s all part of the general disappearance of the presumption of innocence, not just in law but in life, an increasing belief that, whether the subject is climate change, foreign policy or paedophiles, how you feel is far more important than what you know -and that the authorities must know what they’re doing.

 

For instance, I get attacked here for being sceptical of claims made by spy organisations, as if this is disrespectful and even irreverent.  One of these days I really must review Graham Greene’s ‘Our Man in Havana’ here. If only more people had read this wonderful book, about the readiness of intelligent, serious people to be fooled when it suits them, we might have avoided British involvement in Iraq.

 

But people in politics and journalism need to be a bit more careful than that. Are we too inclined to act as if we know things we don’t know? Now, I don’t struggle to believe that Russian intelligence agencies may have hacked the US Democratic National Committee and leaked some of the results. Moscow cannot have been hoping for Hillary Clinton to win the Presidential Election.

 

But it is a long way from ‘they may very well have done it’ to ‘they did it’ and so far I have not seen anything resembling a *fact* . The CIA’s  supposed findings are ‘still-classified’ according to the International New York Times of today (12^th December) pages 1 and 6. So we cannot study them.

 

Mr Trump’s jibe that the CIA are the same people who found WMDs in Iraq seemed justified to me. I had the same thought. Could the CIA, and such supporters as the ever warmongering Senator John McCain, possibly have a motive? Likewise, could the Washington Post and New York Times, which leaked various versions of the claim , have motives (both papers are Clintonist rather than Trumpoid, and the Post has for years been an especially keen supporter of the Syrian intervention that lies at the core of the current tension between Washington and Moscow)?

But the Post did not publish the CIA’s actual evidence of Russian hacking. It reported that the CIA ‘believed’ this to be so(by the way, there is a disagreement between the CIA and the FBI over the nature and extent of the hacking, the FBI doubting that the Republican National Committee was also hacked).

The New York Times says at one point ‘tracking the origin of cyberattacks is complicated’, which I should say is understatement, especially if the hacker is any good.  As for what is ‘known’, we learn that a hacking group ‘long associated’ with the Russian internal security agency FSB got into the DNC . Then in 2016 a group of Russian hackers ‘long associated’ with’ the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence organisation, got into the DNC again. Forgive me, but terms such as ‘a group of Russian hackers long associated with’ are a sign of the brakes being applied. Cut them out and see how much more confident the report would then be.  I might add that the GRU and the FSB loathe each other as much as rival intelligence organisations always do.

How did the CIA know these things? Or rather, why did they *believe* them?  ‘Malware used in the cyber-attack on the DNC matched tools previously used by hackers with proven ties to the Russian government’.

Well, let’s not be too difficult here, but wouldn’t sophisticated hackers be quite likely to put someone else’s signature on their activity, and be in a position to replicate it? Well, yes. In fact, I would imagine this is close to routine.

For it continued ‘That sort of “pattern analysis” is common in cyber-investigations, though it is not conclusive (my emphasis PH)’.

But the New York Times then said that the agencies had more, and had identified individuals from the GRU who oversaw the hacking efforts. This, we are told ’may have come from intercepted conversations, spying efforts or implants in computer systems that allow the tracking of emails and text messages’.

It also mentions a forgotten fact, that President Putin has long accused Hillary Clinton of interfering in Russia’s 2011 elections, which might be playing some part in all this.

Well, forgive me, but if they can reveal this much in unattributable briefings (which everyone knows came from them) what is stopping them giving a press conference or at least attending an open hearing of a Senate Committee, and, say, naming the GRU operatives? 

 

A lot of intelligence is about not letting the enemy know what you know about him. Well, that’s not an issue here any more, is it? Next comes the vital need to conceal your methods and protect your agents. The highest classifications in intelligence briefings are given to the material which reveals the *sources*. This newspaper briefing pretty much reveals those sources. So what is there to lose in making a specific allegation against specific individuals. I’m not saying I don’t believe it. I am inclined to do so.  I just think we should stop treating it as fact until we know it is one

But there’s a much more serious charge being levelled against Russia, that of being guilty of deliberate atrocities and war-crimes in Syria.

In Foreign Secretary Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson’s recent (Friday 9 November) speech at the ‘Manama Dialogue’ in Bahrain:  https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-speech-britain-is-back-east-of-suez

... the following words appear (Note the pedantic Foreign Office spelling of ‘Assad’,as everyone else calls him): ‘It may very well be true that after months of barbaric bombing Bashar al-Asad and his Russian and Iranian sponsors are on the point of capturing the last of rebel-held Aleppo – perhaps within a matter of days, we can’t know. But if and when that happens it will assuredly be a victory that turns to ashes, it is but a Pyrrhic victory.

‘Remember that two thirds of Syria is currently outside Asad’s control, and that he is still besieging 30 other areas containing 571,000 tormented inhabitants. Surely to goodness, there can be no lasting peace in Syria, if that peace is simply re-imposed by a man who has engendered such hatred among millions of his own people.’

Well, first of all, let’s just mention some undoubted barbarism about which Mr Johnson, speaking in Bahrain,  was tactfully silent. Dialogue is not always welcome in Bahrain, it would seem:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/protesters-are-tortured-in-bahrain-while-britain-signs-45m-arms-deal

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/bahrain-opposition-activist-arrested-while-protesting-king-hamad-visit-uk-621319653

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahraini_protests_of_2011

And then let’s ask:  Why does he describe this particular bombing, of Aleppo by Russia and Syria,  as ‘barbaric’? Is our Foreign Secretary a pacifist?  I do not think so. In what important way does Russian bombing of Aleppo differ from the bombings of Fallujah and Mosul, where Islamist fanatics have been bombed by Western planes (ours included, I believe), and where our one-time ally, Nouri el-Maliki of Iraq, used ‘barrel bombs’ (why are these so much worse than any other kinds of bomb? No bomb is nice) on ‘his own people’ in Fallujah? I hesitate even to mention the British bombing of Libya, in which civilians died as a result of our crazed decision to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and replace him with flaming anarchy, which still persists.

But I will

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/06/as-dave-does-the-talking-war-dead-are-sneaked-out-of-the-back-gate-.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/02/a-plea-for-considered-coverage-lest-fear-and-panic-drive-us-into-the-pit-of-war-.html

The point is that aerial warfare can be relied upon to produce some horrible effects. Unless we can *prove* that Russia and Syria *deliberately* targeted aid convoys schools and hospitals (and I have seen no such proof) how can we say this this was so?  

As for the allegations that Assad ( or 'Asad')has used gas against ‘his own people’ , they remain just that -vallegations. I sought very hard for details of the charges, and evidence of gas use,  and have never found anything which establishes that Assad did this thing. It has always seemed to me that it would have been raving mad for him to do so, since it gained nothing significant but it was the one action which would have licensed the USA to unleash air power against him, and that was the one thing that could, at that stage of the war, have ensured his defeat.

Mr Johnson got something of a pasting from Andrew Marr on Sunday 4^th December, on Britain’s undoubted involvement in Saudi Arabia’s very bloody little war in Yemen, in which there have been a number of rather unfortunate civilian casualties, though nobody says the Saudis are doing this deliberately.

 

And interestingly it is generally assumed that it is this rather poorly-reported Yemen conflict that he was referring to in his now-famous contribution to the Med2 Group, in Rome, which you may watch in a rather poorly synchronised film here http://rome-med.org/speeches/med-shared-security-mediterraneans-path-to-a-new-order-the-helsinki-experience/

Mr Johnson first begins speaking at about 19 minutes in. He then starts again (this is the important bit about proxy wars) at about  46 minutes (though you can’t see him to begin with) I have tried and so far failed to obtain a text of this, which seems to have been off the cuff rather than scripted. The Guardian, which broke the story, reported it thus (it has its own video)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/07/boris-johnson-accuses-saudi-arabia-of-twisting-and-abusing-islam

But Mr Johnson cannot have been referring to Yemen. Yemen is not a ‘proxy’ war by Saudi Arabia. Saudi forces are directly involved, and this is not disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention_in_Yemen

The proxy war is in Syria. If Mr Johnson thinks it barbaric in general, he knows who to talk to. If he has specific allegations against Russia, I should be interested to hear them.

 

PETER HITCHENS: No 10 disaster! Minister is caught telling us the TRUTH

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

WHAT fun it is on the rare occasions when a Cabinet Minister tells the truth. It upsets all the right people.
The Government squawks and flaps and tries to drown out the revelation with fresh lies. The semi-official political press starts babbling about how the culprit has made a ‘gaffe’, a word used by nobody else, meaning ‘embarrassing but honest statement’.
And the rest of us can enjoy it. So it is with Foreign Secretary Johnson’s attack on Saudi Arabia’s nasty, violent meddling in other countries, mainly responsible for turning Syria into a wasteland of ruins, full of corpses and weeping mourners.
He was careful – and correct – to level the same charge against the Iranian ayatollahs. But attacks on Iran are politically and diplomatically acceptable, and anyone can make them. Justified criticism of the Riyadh despotism is taboo because this country has crawled so deep into the pocket of Saudi Arabia that it cannot find its way out.
Actually, I understand why we need to grovel quite a bit to the Saudis. We are poor and they are rich. They have lots of oil and ours has almost run out. They buy our aircraft and our weapons, which most people prefer not to do.
So a certain amount of politeness and flattery are necessary. They can have as many Royal visits as they like, and I can put up with us flying flags at half-mast when Saudi royalty dies. Why not? We recently entertained the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Buckingham Palace.
We get a lot in return for such gestures. But in recent years, the Saudis have asked too much. We should never have agreed to support their attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.
It was a policy motivated by spite. It required Britain to back the Al Nusra front, a bloodthirsty gang of hate-filled fanatics. These are exactly the sort of people we warn against in our ‘anti-extremism’ programmes at home, and it is very hard to tell what separates them from Islamic State.
We have been reduced to pretending, to the laughter of all who know anything, that these merciless Christian-hating, church-defiling sectarian brigands are ‘moderates’. Worse, by helping them to destabilise Syria we have created the biggest wave of Middle Eastern migration into Europe in history. Worse still, we picked the wrong side.
Russia, understanding the Middle East far better than we do, bet that Syria’s Assad would beat off the Saudi attack. And the battle of Aleppo has proved them right. Moscow’s prestige and influence in the Middle East is now at an all-time high. Ours is pitifully low.
Even now we don’t realise it. The head of MI6, who was a much more impressive figure when we didn’t know who he was than he is now we can actually see and hear him, made an unwise public appearance last week.
It seemed he had not read the papers or watched the news, as he used the occasion for an ill-timed and particularly ill-aimed attack on Russia. He wrongly blamed the Kremlin for turning Syria into a desert (that was the Saudis, egged on by us, the French, the Turks and the USA). He also attacked Russia for ‘alienating’ supposed moderates in the Middle East.
This from the Chief of Intelligence of the country which has done more to annoy open-minded, pro-Western people in the Middle East than practically anywhere else, from the overthrow in a squalid putsch of Iran’s beloved (and elected) leader Mossadegh, to the Suez, Iraq and Libya fiascos.
Perhaps his agents out there are still telling him what he wants to hear, rather than what is actually happening. Once, all this stuff was far-away and theoretical. But now that the people whose countries we have wrecked can find their way to Calais in their tens of thousands, it isn’t.
And that’s why I prefer Boris Johnson’s gaffes to official falsehoods. Those who refuse to admit the truth cannot protect this country against the many dangers which threaten it.

 

The search for Sully's enemy

CLINT Eastwood’s clever and engrossing film Sully, about the amazing landing of a passenger jet on the freezing Hudson River, needed a villain. Who could it be?
After all, pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger behaved like the well-trained and self-disciplined gentleman he is, keeping his head and using all his years of experience to land an Airbus on water without killing anyone, after geese destroyed his plane’s engines and turned it into an enormous glider. And the passengers, instead of scrambling over each other and clawing for their possessions as the plane sank (which must have been a temptation), behaved like grown-ups and made their way sensibly to the exits.
All the rescue services did as they should have done.
Who was left to be the bad guy? The government. To put it mildly, the movie plays up the investigations which concluded that Sullenberger might possibly have made it to an actual airport runway, if he’d acted inhumanly fast.
I found all this very believable. But actually the pilot had already become such a figure of admiration that in real life he was more or less above criticism. It tells you a lot about the modern USA, and the victory of Donald Trump, that the authorities are the ones who come out of it badly.

 

The myth of wind power...blown wide open

THE current mild weather may make us forget that British winters can still be ferociously cold. How will we cope with such cold, once the current plan to shut down coal-fired power stations is complete?
I asked National Grid to tell me where our electric power came from in the mainly chilly week from November 28 to December 4. For most of that time, an average of just above 14 per cent came from coal, while less than six per cent came from wind.
In the Friday of that week, just two per cent of our power came from all those forests of windmills which cost us so much and make such a mess of the landscape.
A surprisingly large part of the rest was made up of nuclear (just over 25 per cent) and gas (just under 55 per cent) with a small amount sent across from France and the Netherlands by undersea cable.
With coal gone, as it soon will be, and as our worn-out nuclear stations close as well, what are we going to do? Solar power, in midwinter? We are not building any new gas generators, new nuclear plants are many years away, and the wind often doesn’t blow much in very cold weather. France’s nuclear systems are getting old and are breaking down more and more frequently.
Any company or householder looking at figures like these would worry, and act. Yet we do neither. It is because our elite’s minds are closed by Warmist dogma. Quite soon, sensible people will be buying their own private generators, as they do in Third World countries.

*******

I’M not sure why the Government is so chipper about the big Commons vote for beginning the process of leaving the EU. One of the rules of politics is that really big majorities, like very long-standing ovations, are signs that people are concealing their real feelings. It is in the late-night sessions, the committees and the lobbies that the pro-EU MPs will try to frustrate the process.

*****

IT’S no good moaning now about the new plan to persecute soldiers for actions they undertook during the Northern Irish troubles, while IRA murderers go free. This is the ‘Peace Process’ you foolishly bought from the Blair creature back in 1998. It was a surrender, not a victory, and it is time we grasped that.

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PETER HITCHENS: Why are these 'child refugees' fleeing France? The bad coffee?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp. Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims.
I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them. Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them?
Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness? And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.
So what are these enormous, prematurely aged children fleeing from? Why must they come here?
And then, while the self-righteous pro-migrant faction are failing to answer these questions (they cannot), along comes somebody to compare these events with the 1938-1940 Kindertransport trains which carried Jewish children out of the reach of Hitler. Baloney. The comparison is false and, in my view, disgraceful because it diminishes the horror of the past to make a cheap propaganda point about the present.
After the highly public Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, in which Jews under Nazi rule were lawlessly murdered, beaten, robbed and dragged off to prison camps without trial because they were Jews, nobody had any excuse for not helping Jews to leave the Third Reich. Mass murder was plainly the next step. These were real refugees from actual persecution (and it remains our shame that we allowed only the children in, leaving their parents behind to be slaughtered).
Look at the pictures from this era. The children involved have been torn from families, in many cases seen their homes defiled or torched, their parents obscenely humiliated in front of them. Yet somehow they remained children. Pity and mercy are precious things, qualities given to us to keep us human. Those who seek to exploit these emotions for political ends, to play upon real feelings for fake purposes, have much to answer for.

This is NOT justice - it's a witch hunt 

The Great Child Abuse Inquiry continues to devour itself, in a storm of rumour and whispers. There is some justice in this. 

The whole idea that this country is waist-deep in unprosecuted abuse scandals has always been based on allegations that cannot be objectively proved. Now this industry is the target of its own methods.

The whole country has become a vast kangaroo court, in which guilty and innocent alike are accused, and in many cases we can never find the truth.

For a year, I have been fighting the case of the late Bishop George Bell, whose courage and principle I have long admired, who was suddenly accused of long-ago child abuse by a solitary complainant, 57 years after his death. No other accusers have come forward.

To begin with, his own church, aided by several newspapers, the BBC and the police, acted disgracefully as if his guilt was proven. The police even said they would have arrested him if he hadn’t been dead, an absurd and meaningless statement which persuaded many he was guilty. 

Now, thanks to relentless pressure by many good people, plus me, the BBC have honourably retreated, the police have softened their line, and the Church themselves have published a booklet about Chichester Cathedral in which they admit that the charges against Bishop Bell have never been tested in any court and are just ‘plausible’, a feeble word given that the accusation, if true, would strip away his good name for ever.

It’s not enough. But it took all the running we could do just to stay in the same place, returning to the old English custom that all are presumed innocent until guilt is proven. If the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary could grasp this point, their hopeless inquiry could be shut down before it soaks up the entire national budget and we could go back to proper British justice.

The best summary of what is wrong with our selection-by-wealth comprehensive school system comes from a campaigner against Kent’s excellent if oversubscribed surviving grammar schools. 

One of her children didn’t pass the test. Her reaction? ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. We shopped at Waitrose.’

Don't panic! They're just sad old wrecks 

How we love to frighten ourselves about those wicked Russians.

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates.

Actually the Channel is an international waterway, and we don’t own it. Russia (whose Gross Domestic Product is smaller than Italy’s) is quite entitled to send her ships through it. And Russia is in no fit state to invade anything much larger than Rutland.

The Russian ships are handsome, but doddery. The ancient Soviet-era carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, started life in a Ukrainian shipyard and was then named after the decrepit Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She left a shocking trail of black smoke as if she was burning coal.

Her main escort, the outwardly majestic Peter The Great (originally named after the KGB chief Yuri Andropov), recently spent two years rusting gently, tied up at Severomorsk. 

No wonder, given that  most of her class are unusable thanks to wonky nuclear reactors. 

The really sad thing is that, having madly scrapped our own carriers and sold off the Harriers that flew from them, not to mention axeing a huge number of destroyers and frigates, we have reduced our own naval power to a pathetic level. Is it perhaps envy that makes us so fretful? 

If Russia is now better at projecting power in the Middle East than we are, it is because we are weak by choice, not because Moscow is strong.

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PETER HITCHENS: All that's missing from this sorry line-up is a seat for Humpty Dumpty

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to leave the EU.

‘Brexit means Brexit,’ intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

If I were her, I’d be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want. 

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldn’t be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority. 

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might ‘walk back’ the decision. 

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad. 

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table. 

She is not there because she is strong but because – for the moment – nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Government’s pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, it’s either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxford’s standards.

In the days before ‘comprehensive’ schools, Oxford’s non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards – from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965. 

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars. 

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. He’s just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find. 

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

My ‘I told you so’ department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year – in the past two decades, in my case. 

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about ‘more deprived areas’. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits – which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths – even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police – as everywhere – seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present – for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a ‘hate crime’. 

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be ‘Dope Crime’, that growing category, and also a ‘Neglect Crime’, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn. 

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.

 

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Think Dave's won? I bet you believe in flying saucers too!

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

David Cameron is now paying the price for making a promise he thought he wouldn’t have to keep. Sure that he wouldn’t get a majority last May, and genuinely afraid of losing office, he promised a referendum to try to win back votes from Ukip.

It didn’t turn out like that. The cheque he dashed off for a bet he was sure he’d win has now been presented at the bank, and he lacks the money to pay for it.

And so the Prime Minister has been forced into mounting a ridiculous pretence of real negotiations.

David Cameron (pictured in Brussels on Friday) made promises to the electorate in order to win office that he simply cannot keep and has been forced into the ridiculous pretence of real negotiations on Europe

First, he tried to look as if he wanted something he doesn’t want. Now he has to look as if he has won concessions he hasn’t won.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that this is an important change in Britain’s relationship with the EU probably believes in flying saucers as well.

But I can understand how many people will pretend to be convinced, because they are afraid of the alternative.

It was fear of shrivelling into nothingness on the edge of Europe that got us into the European Union and I suspect fear of leaving will keep us there.

Quite how we will be able to keep up a fake debate about the subject till late June, I have no idea.

 

I long ago concluded that I would rather leave, whatever the economic and political cost. I think most of this country’s unique laws and liberty grew up after our break with the Continent under Henry VIII nearly 600 years ago. I think they are worth preserving at practically any cost and, given the chance, I can probably get quite tearful about it.

You cannot expect the Tories to do anything about this. They have never recovered from the day they destroyed us as a great nation by mounting their mad, futile attack on Egypt in 1956.

That was when they decided we couldn’t manage on our own any more, and started whimpering to be let into the then Common Market.

By far the best, wisest and most far-sighted warning against the European project came from Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell in October 1962, not long before his untimely death.

In a speech that still stands up well more than five decades later, he rightly said two things that should be carved in stone in the heart of our capital.

The first was: ‘Of course, the Tories have been indulging in their usual double-talk. When they go to Brussels they show the greatest enthusiasm for political union.

‘When they speak in the House of Commons they are most anxious to aver that there is no commitment whatever to any political union.’

And the second was: ‘We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it.

‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say, “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.’

For much of my life, I have watched his prophecy come true around me. And I have watched a heedless people accept a slow, salami-sliced subjugation they would never have borne if it had been imposed by force of arms.

Do we really, really have the guts to leave now?

A friend of mine who bravely goes to terrifying war zones, but has a lot of common sense even so, is amused by the Western media’s continued belief (encouraged by David Cameron) in ‘moderate’ Muslim groups supposedly fighting against Syria’s President Assad.

My friend asks: ‘If these journalists really believe these people are moderate, why do they not go into the zones they control and report from there?’

And he answers his own question with a wry smile: ‘Because they know perfectly well that within ten minutes of arriving, they’d be trussed up in a car boot and well on their way to the badlands of Syria or Iraq, never to be seen again.’

Even menacing Maria can't shine a light on this mad, bad world

Communist East Germany was so mad and odd that I was always afraid that future generations would refuse to believe the truth about it – such as that its policies on education and women were almost identical to David Cameron’s.

That’s why I thought the Disney company should have bought the whole country and kept it going as a theme park – and as a lasting warning of what human beings can do, given the chance.

Alas, as the disappointing Channel 4 thriller Deutschland 83 has shown, even Germans are forgetting what it was like.

Despite featuring Maria Schrader as the best female villain since Cruella de Vil, the series simply failed to recreate the sheer hopeless, baggy dinginess of the German Democratic Republic – every curtain yellow, every wall and ceiling stained, nothing repainted since about 1942, even the air full of coal dust and rasping fumes.

And without that, it couldn’t really recreate the menace of it, either.

This matters. As we forget it, I begin to see much of it being resurrected all around us.

Even menacing Maria can’t shine a light on this mad, bad world.

Remember we were told that the great Kiev ‘spontaneous’ protests of two years ago were all about ending corruption? Well, corruption in chaotic Ukraine is now so bad that the economy minister, brought in from abroad to combat dishonesty, has just resigned in frustration. The International Monetary Fund is threatening to cut lending unless more is done to fight corruption. Fat chance. Ukraine is corrupt, much as the Atlantic Ocean is wet. The 2014 outbreak was a putsch and its real target Russia. Now it’s gone wrong, coverage in the West has virtually stopped.

Now we’re addicted to stupidity

Can nobody think any more? The word ‘addiction’ is plainly meaningless, as supposed ‘addicts’ so often give up the things they are said to be enslaved by, using willpower.

And it is surely obvious that when someone says he is a ‘gambling addict’, there is no possible chemical or biological explanation for his behaviour. He’s just looking for an excuse for his selfishness and greed. So what ninny decided it was a good use of our money to prescribe such people a pill – Naltrexone – which is normally given to drug abusers and heavy drinkers?

People who do bad things are not ill, and should not be treated.

They are wicked and should be punished.

As I travel home by train on Saturday evenings, my heart often sinks at a major junction when I hear the aggressive shouts of football fans. Imagine my surprise the other day when the shouts turned out to be coming from uniformed police officers, all got up with clubs and baseball caps, who seemed to be nerving themselves up for some sort of combat.

The British bobby is long dead - but we have one last chance to bring him back

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country.

We are all less free than we used to be. We have to be careful what we say, especially if we work in the public sector. We are under constant surveillance, from CCTV cameras, and thanks to snoopers who monitor our calls and internet use. If, for some reason, the authorities take against us we can be plunged, in an instant, into an unexpected underworld of highly publicised suspicion that can last for years and ruin us with legal fees, even if at the end they sullenly drop the charges.

Nobody is safe from this. If a field marshal in his 90s can be raided at home by 20 officers at breakfast time, and subjected to questioning and searches on the basis of the wild fantasies of an unhappy nobody, then so can you. And though the police themselves will insist they have not released your name, don’t be surprised if this Trial By Plod somehow becomes very public, very quickly.

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country

Yet, at the same time, ordinary crime and bad behaviour – the things the law now regards as trivial – grow unchecked around us. Who now lives in a town free of graffiti and vandalism, or one where Friday night has not become menacing, drunken and loud?

Years ago, when I first noticed that something had gone badly wrong with the police, readers would write in and chide me for being rude about a force they still trusted. I get very little of that now. Respect for the police has largely disappeared among the law-abiding classes, and seldom survives any actual contact with them. Now I brace myself for apparently organised abuse from police officers themselves. I should warn them that this behaviour only helps to make my point.

Their ‘I’m all right Jack’ mentality and refusal to accept just criticism is as bad as anything trade unionists used to do and say back in the 1970s.

I have to say, because I hope it is true, that not all police officers have this mentality, but a distressing number do.

 

The police have been subjected to a 30-year inquisition and revolution, in which old-fashioned coppers have been pushed aside (and into retirement) by commissars of equality and diversity. Deprived of their proper occupation, preventive patrolling on foot (long ago abolished), they have become officious paramilitary social workers. These new police are obsessed with the supposed secret sins of the middle class, and indifferent to the cruel and callous activities of the criminal class.

They are also in the grip of a dogma that excuses ordinary crime by blaming it on bad housing and ‘poverty’ (in one of the world’s most advanced welfare states).

Only a small part of this crime even reaches the courts any more. Much of it is dealt with, if at all, by empty ‘cautions’ and laughable ‘restorative justice’. The police can then concentrate on what really bothers them. Yet when they turn sternly on the middle classes, they act like continental examining magistrates, who assume everyone is guilty before trial (and sometimes even say so) and demand that suspects co-operate in their own prosecution.

They can arrest, noisily and in large numbers and at miserable times of day, to punish people who have never been found guilty of anything. In most cases, these people would have come willingly to an interview. They can seize property vital to people’s livelihoods, and hang on to it for months. They can grant supposed ‘police bail’, so allowing them to keep their chosen victims under suspicion for years.

When these things mysteriously become public, they can deny responsibility, and who can prove otherwise?

This is oppressive, dangerous and scandalous. The treatment of Lord Bramall may be the last warning we get that it has gone too far, and the best chance to turn the police back into the friends of the public, and the enemies of crime and disorder.

******

Picking a fight we cannot win

Do you really think the Russian deep state couldn’t have murdered Alexander Litvinenko secretly, in such a way that we could never have traced it to them?

The oddest thing about this case is the use of a violently radioactive, totally traceable poison, and the conduct of the two alleged killers, whose revolting deed was mismanaged in a way that would be comic if a man had not died as a result.

Meanwhile, the two suspects prance about in public (I once met a smirking Andrei Lugovoi in Moscow, as he strolled through an expensive hotel).

This is surely a gesture of angry contempt, against which Moscow knows we are more or less powerless to react effectively. We might wonder why. Maybe it has something to do with our courts refusing to extradite people such as the Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev, regarded in Moscow as terrorists, and then giving them political asylum.

Whether this decision was right or wrong (and I don’t know enough to say), you can see why it might annoy them. Despite being an increasingly insignificant country, we have got ourselves involved with some big and nasty people in a rather rough neighbourhood. I hope it’s worth it.

******

At least poor Leo's not on the 6.22 from Paddington

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not as good as they say. I longed for subtitles and the only character whose dialogue I clearly understood was the grizzly bear. She said ‘Grrrrrr’ as if she meant it.

But if you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot. After what seems like about nine hours, unable to get to the lavatory, confronted with incessant cold, revolting meals of raw offal, charmless travelling companions, your uncomfortable journey frequently interrupted by unexplained disasters or pure spite, the 6.22 from Paddington begins to seem like paradise. Even when, as recently happened to me, you are turned out of the train by ‘Great Western’ on to a freezing platform halfway through your journey home and told it is for your own good.

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. If you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot.

****

The Government wants you to support the renewal of the absurdly elaborate and huge Trident missile system. I see that the Defence Ministry organised, as a complete coincidence, a press trip to show off the red Scalextric-type nuclear trigger I was allowed to play with aboard HMS Repulse 30 years ago. Well, Israel, a more fearsome nuclear power than us, facing a greater danger, doesn’t waste its money on such a luxury item.

Spending £100billion on Trident, and neglecting your conventional forces as a result, is like spending so much on insuring yourself against abduction by aliens that you can’t afford cover for fire and theft.

*******

My thanks to all of you who remembered my friend Jason Rezaian, unjustly imprisoned in Iran, in your thoughts and prayers, and who wrote to the Iranian authorities urging his release. After more than 500 days in a Tehran prison, and some nervous final hours as diplomats ensured his wife was able to leave the country with him, Jason is now free again, and recovering in a US military hospital. I am sure that you played your part in securing his release.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

Notes on Vigilance. Should we be more worried about Saudi, and less worried about ISIS?

My trains returned to ‘normal’ this morning, which means that the ‘train manager’ now once again urges us commuters twice daily to ‘report suspicious behaviour’ . Apart from telling us (after it’s too late to get off if you’re on the wrong train) where we are going in tedious detail, or shouting at us about ticket restrictions, they love this stuff about ‘suspicious behaviour’.

Of course, there never is any. Then only thing that would make regular passengers suspicious on my line would be a train that arrived on time, and didn’t stop in Reading so long that the becalmed passengers became liable for council tax.

Fat businessmen who *don’t* shout into their mobile phones, and football fans who *don’t* sing loudly and tunelessly and laugh mirthlessly on Saturday evenings would also be suspicious.   

But I digress.

The reason I am annoyed by this appeal for vigilance is that I think it is propaganda, designed, by constant repetition,  to make us think we live in dangerous times (sometimes the warning is prefaced by the words ‘in view of recent heightened security alerts’ ). No doubt there is a possibility of terrorism. Who can deny it?  

 

And I think a certain level of vigilance is always reasonable. I have done since the days when IRA bombs in London were quite common (one, in Harrods,  killed a colleague of mine on the old ‘Daily Express’, mainly because he bravely did his job and went towards the danger to see what was going on).

 

From time to time one would hear the detonations, and worry about everyone one knew and cared about, until one knew they were safe.  That’s why I recently chided an idiot for leaving his tatty unlabelled backpack unattended for long minutes in a station concourse while he went outside to smoke. I’d asked everyone nearby if the thing was theirs and nobody had claimed it. If he hadn’t turned up at that minute I would have ‘alerted the authorities’ as asked.  

But in truth the danger is pretty small. And I am tired of it being exaggerated to get us to give up our freedoms, and to submit to searches, surveillance and bureaucracy.

I’m also tired of the way so many of my colleagues fail to see that terrorism is called terrorism for a reason. The whole point of it is to make  us frightened of a force that actually isn’t that powerful.  Simon Jenkins is quite right to refer to our ‘nationalising’ of episodes of murder which – horrible as they are  - don’t threaten our national existence, our general security or our economy. This is exactly what the perpetrators wish us to do, to treat their wretched, shameful crimes as military actions and dignify them as if they were major strategic blows. We can mourn the deaths of their victims perfectly well without doing this.

 

We also elevate the standing and importance of these petty crooks by going on and on about how these crude killers are ‘trained’. What training, precisely, does it take, to murder unarmed civilians in a concert hall or on a beach or in a restaurant, when you have a sub-machine gun and they have nothing? And in answer to Douglas Murray’s claim that the Charlie Hebdo killers showed evidence of training by the way they bypassed the magazine’s building security, even bank-robbers, often not the brightest of people, know how to do this sort of thing. They don't need to be trained in Syria. 

These terrorists can be relied upon not to attack actual soldiers on duty or military installations, for they know that if they did they would be cut to pieces.

The main characteristic that these people need is not 'training' but a total lack of normal human kindness and mercy.

This is why it is so significant and worthy of inquiry that those involved (as I have repeatedly shown here with incontrovertible facts) are almost always long term drug abusers, out of their minds on potent psychotropics (I have heard it suggested that the ISIS killers in the Middle East are also drugged, and find it easy to believe,  but I have yet to see hard evidence of this).

But rather than examine this, we use the activities of these people as a pretext for ‘security’ measures and irrelevant military adventures in the Middle East, whose main purpose seems to be to entangle us in permanent conflict.

But with whom and for whom? We rightly gag with disgust and shout in horror at the beheadings and other murders of ISIS, but the behaviour of the British government after Saudi Arabia’s mass executions at the weekend has been nearly as muted as our demands for law and freedom in China.

 

Many British media outlets initially and understandably concentrated on the fact that one of the 47 executed was Adel al-Dhubaiti, the murderer of a BBC cameramen Simon Cumbers and would-be murderer of the reporter Frank Gardner. This is an important story, especially since Mr Gardner has declined invitations to forgive the wholly unrepentant al-Dhubaiti.

I think he is quite right to take this view. I am amazed at the current view that Christianity requires unconditional forgiveness of those who trespass against us, even if they show no sign of remorse. I don’t believe anyone living at the time of the Gospels would have even imagined forgiveness without repentance, any more than they could have imagined dawn without the sunrise.  

I would not expect to be forgiven by anyone for something I hadn’t repented of, and I expect the same.

And The Gospel according to St Luke  (Chapter 17, verses three and four) seems to support me. Christ says : ‘Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him and *if he repent* forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a  day, *and seven times in a day turn again to thee saying ‘I repent’*, thou shalt forgive him’. (emphases, of course, my own)

But again, I digress.

It’s an interesting part of the story, but I suspect that the great majority of those shot or beheaded by the Saudi state on Saturday were not unrepentant murders. And the execution by Riyadh of a government opponent and Shia Cleric (in a very Sunni country),  Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a blatantly political execution, seems to have been much more typical of this mass slaughter. It has provoked fury in Iran, led to a breach in diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh,  and brought the region closer to open international conflict than it has been for years.  Who knows how it will end?

Shouldn’t we be much, much more interested in this than in the headline-seeking ISIS film?

Shouldn’t be we, in general, be much more interested in and perturbed by Saudi Arabia than we are? And perhaps a bit less focussed on Islamic State, whose power and wealth are so much less? Oddly, ISIS wants our attention. Saudi Arabia, normally closed to western media and so uncommunicative it makes the Sphinx look garrulous, definitely does not.  Shouldn’t this make us wonder whether we are getting this right?

The initial reaction of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was very telling. Its press office issued a ‘line’ on Saturday stating that  

‘The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.  The death penalty undermines human dignity and there is no evidence that it works as a deterrent.

‘The Foreign Secretary regularly raises human rights issues with his counterparts in countries of concern, including Saudi Arabia. We seek to build strong and mature relationships so that we can be candid with each other about those areas on which we do not agree, including on human rights.’

Apart from its generally limited and understated nature, and its obvious desire not to single out Saudi Arabia for particular criticism, nature, this is an astonishing thing to have said.

There have, it is true,  been subsequent, fuller statements* as the inadequacy of this response has become more and more obvious. But this was the first reaction of the government department charged with Britain’s standing abroad.

I am seeking clarification, but this ‘line’ appears to mean that the FCO  is equally exercised about the execution after due process in a free country with separation of powers, invigilated by a free press, of a convicted murderer in, say, Texas as it is by the political snuffing out of a government critic in a despotic unfree monarchy, Saudi Arabia. Can this really be true? But what else does the very categorical statement, with its use of 'all' and 'every', otherwise mean? 

*A junior and obscure foreign Office Minister, Tobias Ellwood, was produced on Sunday to say  

‘I am deeply disturbed by the escalation in tensions in the last 24 hours in the Middle East.

The UK is firmly opposed to the death penalty. We have stressed this to the Saudi authorities and also expressed our disappointment at the mass executions.

We have discussed with the authorities in Riyadh, and expect that Ali Al-Nimr and others who were convicted as juveniles will not be executed. The UK will continue to raise these cases with the Saudi authorities.

We are deeply concerned to hear of the attack yesterday on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. It is essential that diplomatic missions are properly protected and respected.

There are those who will wish to exploit the situation and raise sectarian tensions higher. This would be against the wishes of the vast majority of those in the region. I urge all parties in the region to show restraint and responsibility.’

The coverage of the Islamic State video on Sunday night and Monday morning must have delighted the cynics who made it. And while we let these not-very-clever manipulators make our flesh creep with their filmed murders of helpless prisoners, and their vague threats, we ( as a nation and a government) seem utterly unable to make sense of our national relationship with Saudi Arabia. It's time this became important. 

"The EU is the Continuation of Germany By Other Means"

Here is a talk I recently gave to the Keele World Affairs discussion group, at Keele University, on ‘The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means.’

Some of you may be interested

 

http://kwaku.org.uk/Archive/Video/Peter%20Hitchens.html

 

Cameron has guns, bombs and a plane - and not one good idea

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

So far there is little sign of serious thought about the Paris atrocities. We are to have more spooks, though spooks failed to see it coming, and failed to see most of the other outrages coming, and the new ones will be no more clairvoyant than the old ones.

 

France and Belgium are reaching for emergency laws, surveillance, pre-trial detention, more humiliation of innocent travellers and all the other rubbish that has never worked in the past and won’t work again.

 

David Cameron (in a nifty bit of news management) takes the opportunity to announce that he will henceforth be spared from flying like a normal human being, in an ego-stroking Blaircraft paid for by you and me. Austerity must have been having a day off.

 

Actually, if grand personages like him had to shuffle through the security screens, belts off, shoes off, shampoo humourlessly confiscated, like the rest of us, these daft and illogical rules would have been reviewed long ago.

 

British police officers dress up like Starship Troopers, something they’ve obviously been itching to do for ages and now have an excuse to do, the masked women involved looking oddly like Muslim women in niquabs.

 

It’s not the police’s job to do this. If things are so bad that we need armed people on the streets, then we have an Army and should deploy it. If not, then spare us these theatricals, which must delight the leaders of ISIS, who long for us to panic and wreck our own societies in fear of them.

 

Next comes the growing demand for us to bomb Syria. Well, if you want to. Only a couple of weeks ago all the establishment experts were saying that the Russian Airbus massacre was obviously the result of Vladimir Putin’s bombing of Syria.

 

Now the same experts say it’s ridiculous to suggest that our planned bombing of Syria might bring murder to the streets of London or to a British aircraft.

 

Perhaps it’s relevant to this that Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who survived the Bataclan massacre in Paris, said he heard one fanatic in the theatre say to his victims, ‘It's the fault of Hollande, it's the fault of your President, he should not have intervened in Syria.’

 

There may be (I personally doubt it) a good case for what’s left of the RAF to drop what’s left of our bombs on Syria. It may be so good that it justifies risking a retaliation in our capital, and that we should brace ourselves for such a war.

 

But I think those who support such bombing should accept that there might be such a connection, and explain to the British people why it is worth it.

 

I am wholly confused by the Cameron government’s position on Syria. It presents its desire to bomb that country as a rerun of the Parliamentary vote it lost in 2013.

 

But in 2013, Mr Cameron wanted (wrongly, as it turned out) to bomb President Assad’s forces and installations, to help the Islamist sectarian fanatics who are fighting to overthrow the secular Assad state.

 

This is more or less the exact opposite of what he seems to want now. Far from being a rerun, it is one of the most embarrassing diplomatic U-turns in modern British history.

 

Or is it? Does Mr Cameron in fact intend, somehow, to return to his original purpose, and to use the RAF to aid the anti-Assad rebels – who are the sort of people he would arrest if they turned up here?

 

If ISIS was our real target, then this would be absurd. But is ISIS our real target? If so, we would abandon all scruple, and side with the Syrian Kurds, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Russia and Assad to defeat it. For they are by far its most effective opponents.

 

After all, when we fought the Hitler menace, we allied with another monster, Stalin, to do so.

 

Mr Cameron also called ISIS ‘the head of the snake’, and the origin of  all these horrors. But again, is this true? Or is ISIS in fact an outgrowth of the burgeoning, richly-funded spread of extreme, puritanical, intolerant, violent Islamism, whose head is not in Raqqa but rather further south?

 

I hope that if Mr Cameron brings a plan for war to Parliament, there will be enough informed and wise men and women there to question him thoroughly on these points, and vote against him if they are not convinced.

 

Trickery and propaganda do not invariably arrive in the same shape. Just because we all now know that Anthony Blair defrauded us into a dangerous war with WMD, we shouldn’t be too sure that we won’t be just as easily fooled by his equally smooth and persuasive heir.

 

The Terror Link Nobody Wants to Talk About

 

What do modern terrorists have in common? Yes, they are fanatical Islamists, usually (but not always) from ethnic minorities.

 

But there’s something else very interesting. They are invariably on mind-altering drugs, usually cannabis. The Bombay killers took cocaine and steroids. Anders Breivik took steroids. At least one of the Boston bombers , the Tsarnaev brothers smoked cannabis (one heard voices in his head, one of them was without doubt a dope dealer) , Lee Rigby’s killers. Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo,  smoked (a lot of ) cannabis. Omar El-Hussein, the Copenhagen killer, had twice been arrested for cannabis offences. Seifeddine Rezgui, the Tunisian beach killer, was a cannabis user. Ayoub el-Khazzani, who tried to kill passengers on the Amsterdam Paris train, is a convicted dope user. The Charlie Hebdo killers, the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly,  were known cannabis users. The killers of two Canadian soldiers, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, were cannabis users.

 

And now we know that the same is true of the November 13 killers, Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam,were heavy users of marijuana. Abdelhamid Abaaoud had likewise ‘drifted into a life of thievery and drugs’. Omar Ismail Mostefai was on police records for buying illegal drugs. As for Hasna Aitboulahcen, who was blown to pieces in the St Denis siege, she ‘hung around with drug dealers’.

 

Don’t try to avoid the significance of this information by accusing me of saying things I don’t.  The point here is that drug abuse appears to be a common factor. So why completely ignore it?  If the police of North America and Western Europe stopped turning a blind eye to it, they might be a lot more use in the struggle to defend us all from terror.

 

An exquisite skyline swamped by concrete

Approval has now been given for the building of a vast new concrete slab in the heart of London, 22 Bishopsgate. You may like this sort of thing or not.  But once it is built it will be hard to tell London’s skyline from that of Chicago. This doesn’t seem to me to be a gain. In a generation, Christopher Wren’s lovely forest of spires and domes, which belonged to Britain and the world, has been shouldered aside by temples of greed. I am astonished that this has happened with so little protest.

 

What's so funny about this unpleasant story?

Alan Bennett has for many years dug into the darker side of suburban Britain, giving a faintly tragic, even sordid,  tinge to what most of us think is normal and reasonably happy. How strange, then, that the new film by and about him ‘The Lady in the Van’ , makes an oddly cheerful comedy about what looks to me like a rather unpleasant story. Did none of his rich, left-wing north London neighbours shun him for allowing a smelly, bad-tempered nuisance to park in his front garden for years?  If so, they aren’t in the film.

PETER HITCHENS: Really want to beat terror? Then calm down and THINK

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Could we please skip the empty bravado? This is a time for grief above all else, and a time to refrain from soundbites and posturing. France – our closest neighbour, oldest friend, beloved rival, what Philip Sidney called ‘that sweet enemy’ – France is stricken, and we should weep with her.

Over the past 40 years or so, most of us have heard quite enough politicians and others pledging to stand firm against terror, hunt down the vile perpetrators, ensure that it never happens again, and the rest.

Then there have been the emergency meetings of grandly titled committees, the crackdowns, the increased surveillance, the billions spent on spying and snooping, not to mention the various wars on terror which have certainly killed a lot of our troops, but never seem to make us any safer. It is remarkably hard to defend yourself against an enemy whose language few of us speak, yet who speaks ours and can move freely in our world, and who is willing, even happy, to die at our hands – or his own – if he can kill us first.

Meanwhile, many of the demands of terror, from the IRA to the Palestinians, have been quietly met. And the extraordinary connections between our supposed ally Saudi Arabia and the worst terrorist incident of all – September 11, 2001 in New York – have been politely ignored.

It’s also worth remembering, as we mourn alongside the French, how many stupid things have been said about them. Remember the long period of macho chest-thumping in which they were idiotically derided as ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and it was claimed you couldn’t find any French military victories on the internet?

This was stupid at the time, especially from Americans, whose country would never even have existed if the French (modestly aided by some Americans) hadn’t defeated us British at Yorktown, perhaps the most significant French victory in the history of the world. How does it sound now?

Yet this sort of thing, shouting, table-thumping, threat-making and boasting, is all too often the only outcome of murderous atrocities such as this.

And then there is the rapid casting aside of ancient, wise rules. Our irreplaceable liberty and justice, which took a thousand years to create, are in shreds thanks to hasty and emotive measures that did no good. And now we have the shame of lawless confinement of untried men in Guantanamo, of torture that Englishmen, far fiercer and crueller than we think we are, abandoned as barbaric hundreds of years ago. And we have the horrors of ‘extraordinary rendition’ by secret flights to secret prisons, in which dark things took place. How can we claim to stand for liberty and justice if we do such things?

And we see the dubious and dangerous use of pilotless drones to conduct summary executions of our enemies. Few can be sorry at the death of Mohammed Emwazi (the so-called ‘Jihadi John’), but what precedents are we setting? For the moment, our fanatical foes do not have drones of their own. One day, they will.

Few will be sad about the death of Mohammed Emwazi (Jihadi John) but the drone strike killing will set a dangerous precedent for our enemies, who don't have drones at the moment but will do one day

 

A lot of people exult over this event, and those who quietly suggest that it might violate our own principles of law and justice are jostled to one side by super-patriotic breast-beaters (the same sort who used to jeer at the French for being soft). And listen to the words of the mother of James Foley, one of Emwazi’s victims, who in a short and dignified interview epitomised the difference between our civilisation and those who seek to destroy it.

Diane Foley said: ‘It saddens me that here in America, we are celebrating the killing of this deranged, pathetic, young man.’ It gave her no solace. ‘No! Not at all! If the circumstances had been different, Jim probably would have befriended that man and tried to help him’.

She regretted the concentration of resources on revenge rather than on protecting our citizens and helping the vulnerable. ‘I am sorry,’ she said softly. ‘Jim would have been devastated with the whole thing. Jim was a peacemaker. He wanted to know how we could figure out why, why all this is happening.’

Asked if she got a sense of justice from the drone strike, she replied ‘Justice! No. Not at all. Just sad’.

Should we decry this measured, civilised and thoughtful response as foolish softness? It is surely hard to do so, when the person speaking has endured the public, cruel murder of her son, and yet still finds it in her heart to think and say such things. Could it be that she is wiser than the politicians and the security men?

James Foley was among Emwazi's victims but his mother Diane didn't celebrate the killer's death. She said it was just very 'sad' and that her 'peacemaker' son would have been unhappy about the quest for revenge

 

After all, let us not forget that Islamist terror has grown in strength and reach, not diminished, since we embarked on our supposedly benevolent interventions in the Muslim world. The Iraq invasion, the Afghan intervention, the wild and brainless enthusiasm with which we greeted the disastrous ‘Arab Spring’, the supposedly humanitarian interference in Libya which turned it into a failed state, the aid and comfort we gave to the rebellion in Syria. Not only have these things failed to prevent terror. They have visited a violent chaos on the whole Muslim world, in which fanatical and grisly death cults thrive and prosper.

And alongside them, there is the enormous migration of desperate young men, from Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, many of them Muslim, some of them no doubt easy recruits for the fanatics.

We pretend to understand these nebulous and varied terror groups, for years placing them under the all-embracing trademark of ‘Al Qaeda’, now insisting they are part of a new and greater menace called ‘ISIS’. The truth is there is no mastermind sitting in a cave issuing orders (though of course someone is always willing to claim responsibility for these outrages after they have happened – and who can be sure if such claims are true?).

That is a James Bond fantasy. And it is also why these things would still be hard to prevent if we turned ourselves into a totalitarian state of surveillance, identity cards, perpetual searches of the innocent – like going through an airport, only all the time.

They don’t work by our rules. They can stay off, or below, our grid. They don’t mind if they die. They will get through.

All we will achieve by adopting such methods is to make ourselves miserable without making ourselves safe.

Our task is now first to mourn with our French friends and allies. And after that, to think rather than to shout. Rhetoric and militancy have not done very much for us in the past. Why should it be different this time?