You can understand the thirst for vengeance. On Sunday night, France flew sorties over Syria to strike IS targets in Raqqa, the capital of their ramshackle semi-state. They reportedly hit a recruitment centre and munitions depot. Other facilities on the receiving end of French ordinance were a hospital, a museum, a stadium, and a chicken farm. Still, “something” has been done. IS have had a taste of fire, even if civilians every bit as innocent as the murdered in Paris lost their lives in the French bombing.
Whenever there is an appalling outrage on Western soil, or mass civilian casualties mount overseas, as per the Tunisian beach murders or the bombing of a Russian airliner, politicians and media outlets combine their outrage with simple non-solutions that paint one half of the world in saintly white and the other in sinner’s black. The complexity of the situation, of the drives that fuel IS support here and abroad, which few establishment figures are normally interested in anyway, are painted out. They’re against us, so let’s kill ’em. Alas, turning Raqqa and parts of Sinai and Yemen into the Moon will kill terrorists, but does nothing to address the causes of terrorism. Such is the folly of dressing ourselves in saintly white as against their sinner’s black. Continue reading
This is a sad, bad day for British justice. It seems impossible to combine the view of 8 out of the 10 members of the jury in the Duggan inquest, on the one hand, that he did not have a gun in his hand when he was shot with the decision reached by 8 out of the 10, on the other hand, that it was a ‘lawful killing’ by the police. Moreover there remain far too many unanswered but deeply troubling questions, as Mark Duggan’s mother has herself made clear: 
The exposure of G4S and Serco for stealing from the public purse on an industrial scale is symptomatic of privatised Britain. The findings of an initial inquiry that G4S had ‘overcharged’ tens of millions of pounds on electronic tagging contracts for offenders who had moved abroad, died, returned to prison so they were no longer tagged, or had never been tagged in the first place, are so blatant and so extensive that it cannot conceivably have been due to slip-ups or clerical errors. Of course it remains to be proven, but if confirmed as expected, this is fraud on the grand scale. Yet the way it has been handled by the government with kid gloves tells a very different tale.