Simon's Blog

This weekend has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that our so called opinion formers, whilst claiming access to a higher level of understanding, know just about as much as people walking the street.  On Saturday morning I posted an appeal to reject easy answers and this now seems to have been more prescient than most of my comments.   Again and again I have read the views of columnist  with nothing really to say about what happened in Paris other than to peddle their own well worn theories about what we should and should not have done in the past and what we should do in the future.  Surprisingly one of the more  lucid analysis of the world situation came in a letter to the Daily Mail:

Source:  http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/letter-to-daily-mail-gives-excellent-explanation-of-war-with-isis–lkdXgHvQrg

We have also seen the Paris attack as a means to show yet again that Jeremy Corbyn is unfit to be Prime Minister.  Now I am no Corbyn fan and don’t think that he would make a good Prime Minister but that is at least five years away when goodness only knows  what situation we will be facing. The one thing you can say about Corbyn is that he has been consistent in his views on these matters – which is more than can be said of most politicians.

The letter for me encapsulates everything I was trying to say on Saturday – there are no easy answers to Islamic extremism, whether it is the modern bete noire  ISIS or those golden oldies al-Qaeda (So last year) or whatever blanket name we are given next.  ISIS currently hold territory in the more deserted part of eastern Syria but are probably no bigger than al-Qaeda were in Afghanistan at the turn of the century.  Destroy ISIS and it will morph into something else until we wake up and realise that bombs and guns don’t provide an answer to something which is as complicated as the human condition.  However whatever the answer is it won’t be easy.