COMMENTARY

Macron: No More Mr. Nice Guy

At 9 a.m. yesterday morning, a 21-year-old called Brahim Aouissaoui entered Notre Dame Basilica Church in Nice carrying a bag of knives. Just a few minutes later, three people had been stabbed to death. A 60-year-old woman — unnamed at time of writing — had been decapitated. The mayor of Nice subsequently said that “everything points to a terrorist attack.” Aouissaoui was shot by responding French police and is currently under arrest. Read the full article here.

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COMMENTARY

Our counter-extremism policies are ripe for reform – and now is the perfect time to do it

It is 15 years to the day since the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings in London. These were the first Islamist terror attacks that the UK had experienced, leaving 52 dead and around 700 injured. Since then we have had a Labour Prime Minister declare that “the rules of the game are changing” and –  after suffering a spate of Islamist terror attacks in 2017 – a Conservative Prime Minister warn that “enough is enough”. Yet neither party was quite able to back up tough words with policies to match. Read the full article here.

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COMMENTARY

Terrorism After the Pandemic

“Europe has now become the epicentre of the pandemic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared back in March. The warning from the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) was stark, but not all countries in the continent reacted with urgency. Some countries were yet to go into lockdown. But an unlikely voice concurred with Ghebreyesus. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’s (ISIS) Al-Naba newsletter warned supporters not to set foot in the “land of the epidemic.” That might seem like good news, but there are already plenty of Islamic State—and those animated by a broader jihadist ideology—already living in...

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