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
It was a shocking, abominable murder. But the fear remains that this may not be the action of hatred-obsessed psychopaths, but the beginnings of a long-drawn-out saga of Muslim revenge.
The nature of the British state and the government’s contempt for personal freedom come to a head with new laws proposed for the Queen’s Speech next month. It was already known that the government intended to bring forward a law to allow the police and MI5/6, without a warrant, to access data from every phone call, email, text message and internet browsing. Now the government is proposing to add secret courts to total surveillance. 
Vincent Tabak often looked at online strangulation pornography prior to his murder of Joanna Yeates. Despite that, the operators of the websites that cater for this particularly repulsive fetish are not on trial as accomplices to murder.