Peter Rhodes: Time for fire and brimstone?

MY apologies to those of you who turned to this blog yesterday expecting to discover what Rhodes thought about the Paris massacres. Truth is, Rhodes needed at least another 24 hours to mull it over and still doesn't know what to think. I am torn between two opinions, the liberal and the biblical.

THE liberal is the one that goes, we in the West are partly to blame for the madness of the Middle East. We must therefore sit down and talk with Islamic State, just as we have talked to other psychopathic murderers in the past, from the Mau Mau to the IRA, to work out some long-term settlement and a happy ending.

The biblical view is that there can be no happy ending. The tribes of the Middle East have been smiting each other for thousands of years; the killing began long before they saw a British, French or American face. The borders of Islam have always been marked by blood and today's militant Islam is incapable of living at peace with itself, let alone with its neighbours. It has nothing to discuss and there is nothing to negotiate because its aim is our utter destruction. The "hostages" taken in a Paris theatre were no such thing; they were taken not for bargaining but for slaughter. We should therefore do the Old Testament thing and smite our enemies with a vengeance. For every one of us they kill, we kill 1,000 of theirs. Every suicide vest detonated in the West will be repaid a thousand-fold, not merely with precision smart bombs but with every weapon in our armoury, including the ones that no-one likes to mention. The biblical solution is to rain fire and brimstone on Islamic State and turn its strongholds into puddles of molten sand.

I SUSPECT the actual response of the West will be somewhere between the liberal and the biblical solution and will achieve little. I fear we have no more than 10 years before IS or its successors gets its hands on a nuclear warhead. And then what?

I WOKE on Sunday to hear the BBC reporting that two of the Paris killers may have slipped into Europe as refugees from Syria and that this possibility had earlier given "cause for concern." Oh, really? And when, during all its reporting of the migrant crisis, did BBC News even hint that some migrants might be terrorists?

THROUGHOUT its coverage, the migrants were portrayed by the broadcasters as helpless, desperate family groups fleeing the unspeakable – even when the cameras showed hundreds of young, unaccompanied men. Sometimes it looks more like an invasion than a refugee crisis and yet Auntie Beeb stuck firmly to her agenda. On September 8 I reported on a particularly silly BBC dispatch which, even as the cameras showed us the usual crowd of fit young males, began with the description: "Women, children and at least one man in a wheelchair." Journalism should be about what you see, not what you think you would like to see.

IT emerged yesterday that French police stopped a suspect after the massacre and did what French police always do. They checked his papers and, finding them in order, sent him on his way. There are still politicians in Britain who believe that if we all had ID cards, our country would be safer. A dangerous delusion.