In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC's yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.
Clicky... When we first moved here we lived in an apartment below an intelligence officer from the British Base.... He had some amazing stories as you can imagine...
One of the things he said was that combating the paddies was quite easy... It was easy to put yourself in their shoes and imagine how they might attack a potential target... you could then put countermeasures in place to stop them...
He said that the nightmare with the Islamists is that it is impossible to put yourself in their shoes - their thinking is so bizarre and depraved that it is very hard to imagine what they will attempt next....
