27 November, 2023

In the headlines

Hamas says it wants to extend the ceasefire deal with Israel before it expires later today. Israel has said the four-day pause, which has so far seen 39 Israeli hostages released in exchange for 117 Palestinian prisoners, will be extended by one day for every 10 additional hostages freed. The United Arab Emirates planned to use its role as host of the COP28 climate summit this week to strike new oil and gas deals, according to documents leaked to the BBC. A UAE spokesman didn’t deny the claims, saying “private meetings are private”. Irish author Paul Lynch has won the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland descending into totalitarianism. While some past winners vowed to use the £50,000 prize money on luxuries such as a swimming pool (AS Byatt) or “something perfectly useless” (Ian McEwan), Lynch said it will go towards his mortgage.

Comment

Wilders: the first of many? Carl Court/Getty

The biggest demographic shift since the Anglo-Saxons

There is a certain type of commentator who delights in telling the British “just how much better things are on the continent”, says Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph. These dreary souls are desperate to portray Europe as an “enlightened haven of liberal values” compared to “rainy Brexit island”. One FT columnist confidently wrote before the recent Dutch election that in Holland they “don’t do wild political leaps. Not like certain countries I could mention.” A few days later, Geert Wilders, flaxen-haired veteran of the anti-immigrant far right, secured a shock victory. Whatever die-hard Remainers might prefer to believe, a rightward shift is gathering pace across the continent, as establishment parties fail to confront the strength of feeling over mass migration. “There are surely many more Wilderses to come.”

Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, in Britain we have the choice of two parties who “can’t, or won’t, reduce migration”, even though voters repeatedly express an “overwhelming desire to do so”. And while the roots of our immigration explosion go back to Tony Blair, there is perhaps no one more responsible than Boris Johnson. As PM he “immediately loosened the rules”, aggressively liberalising student visas and non-EU migration. As one writer has noted, that led to Britain’s “most significant period of demographic change since the Anglo-Saxon migration”. The irony for cheerleaders of open borders is that this is eroding many progressive social mores – thanks to its high rate of migration from socially conservative countries, London has become the most homophobic region in Britain. Westminster is “hermetically sealed off” from the true views of the electorate on this issue. “But for how much longer?”

Photography

The winners and finalists in this year’s Ocean Photographer of the Year awards include shots of a gentoo penguin leaping from the water in Antarctica; a cormorant frozen above a vast shoal of fish in Mexico; a close-up of an open-mouthed lizardfish – and its last meal – in the Philippines; and a squid whizzing through jet-black water in Cornwall. See more here.

Inside politics

Over the past couple of months, two convincing AI-generated audio clips have circulated on social media of politicians “saying things they never said”, says Josiah Mortimer in Byline Times. One was purportedly Keir Starmer bullying Labour staffers; another had Sadiq Khan seemingly declaring “I don’t give a flying shit about the Remembrance weekend”. Perhaps “the most worrying part” of this is that the Met Police had to drop its investigation into the Khan clip, as there don’t seem to be any laws expressly making political deepfakes illegal.

Quirk of history

Fleming in 1963. Mirrorpix/Getty

Every year, says The Times, Norway sends a Christmas tree to Trafalgar Square in gratitude for Britain’s help during World War Two. According to biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, the tradition was started by Ian Fleming. To celebrate the safe return of a Norwegian commando after a raid on his occupied homeland, Fleming, then working in naval intelligence, arranged a knees-up at the Savoy. After much roistering, the group piled into two jeeps and found that the commando had brought back a pair of pine trees to give to King Haakon VII of Norway, who was seeing out the war in Berkshire. A well-refreshed Fleming suggested they stick one up there and then – and so they did, tying it to a balustrade in Trafalgar Square.

Comment

Hamas militants with a captured Israeli tank on October 7. Hani Alshaer/Anadolu Agency/Getty

What does Hamas really want?

The reaction in the West to the October 7 massacre has made me realise something, says Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast: most Westerners “still don’t understand the problem of jihadism”. Many insist Hamas was motivated mostly by politics – by a desire for Palestinian statehood. But that’s delusional. What motivated the jihadists was jihad: the doctrine that Muslims must conquer the world and that paradise awaits those who sacrifice their lives to that end. These people don’t care if they die. On the contrary, they see martyrdom as the passage to a better existence. They shout Allahu Akbar (“God is great”) as they murder women and children because they think murder is what their god wants. There are plenty of good arguments to be made against the way Israel is conducting the war. But the “historical context” is basically irrelevant, because this is a fight between civilisation and “the permanent enemies of civilisation”. As many point out: “If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.”

Hamas’s ideology is obviously “violent and anti-Semitic”, says Eric Levitz in New York Magazine. But the idea that they are motivated solely by jihad is “at least as mindless” as claiming that they are motivated solely by politics. Just because some jihadists commit atrocities for “purely metaphysical reasons” doesn’t mean they all do – a group can share a broad worldview without having identical motives. And unlike the “transnational” aims of ISIS, Hamas’s jihad has always been in service of a “narrow, nationalistic project”. Besides, insisting that its terrorism is wholly unrelated to Israel’s actions merely “abets the most reactionary elements within Israeli politics”, as it suggests that nothing Israel can do would make the slightest difference. Religious fundamentalism is a “blight on humanity”. But not all conflicts are as simple as good versus evil.

Gone viral

X/@TheGregMurphy

A tear-jerking Christmas advert for a pub in the town of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, has racked up almost eight million views on X (formerly Twitter). The two-minute video shows an old man visiting a gravestone with flowers, then getting ignored by passers-by on the street as he tries to greet them. He eventually enters Charlie’s Bar, where he’s given a pint of Guinness at a table beside the fire – and immediately makes friends with a couple and their dog. It ends with a quote often misattributed to WB Yeats: “There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t yet met.” Watch the full ad here.

Letters

To The Economist:

Although David Kirke is justly famous as the inventor of bungee jumping, I must take issue with the description of him as the pioneer of cluster ballooning in 1986 (Obituary, November 11th). Several people before Kirke accomplished this feat, most notably “Lawnchair Larry” Walters in 1982. With 42 weather balloons attached to his lawn chair, Walters rose to a height of 16,000 feet and was spotted by two commercial airliners. He drifted across part of Los Angeles before bursting several balloons with a pellet gun to slowly return to earth.

Keith Van Sickle, California

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s a “lunar halo”, a rare visual phenomenon spotted in the skies over parts of England on Saturday evening. The radiant ring, caused by the refraction of moonlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere, can be a sign that rainfall is on its way. Click here for more images.

Quoted

“I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”