By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 18 April 2017
The 22 March attack outside Westminster by Khalid Masood is the most significant act of Islamist terrorism since the 7 July 2005 bombing by al-Qaeda of the London public transport system. Masood’s attack highlights a number of historic trends in British jihadism and starkly poses the question of the extent of IS’s penetration of the United Kingdom. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 2, 2016
An article in the twenty-second edition of al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) newsletter, released on 15 March 2016, explained why the group has not made fighting Israel a priority.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 19, 2015
A Black September terrorist appears on the balcony in the Olympic Village in Munich, September 1972 (photo via AP)
The Black September group was formed in September 1971, ostensibly as a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but in reality the PLO retained control of Black September and used it to carry out terrorist operations that raised the Palestinian organisations’ profile, without staining the PLO with these atrocities. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 26, 2014
On March 14, 2014, Anthony Wedgewood Benn (“Tony Benn”) died aged 88. Though, as his assumed name in later years suggests, Benn presented himself as a populist, he was in fact of very elite stock: born in 1925, his grandfather was a Liberal MP, as was his father (until he joined Labour in 1927), and his mother was a leading early feminist campaigner. Benn was entitled to a hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate, which he objected to. Ever one for publicity, after the Peerage Act of 1963 was passed on July 31 of that year, allowing renunciation of peerages, he became the first peer to renounce his title, 22 minutes later. Benn mixed with figures like David Lloyd George and Mohandas Gandhi, and attended the exclusive Westminster School, which is “something he tried to hide in future biographies,” before going on to be a fighter pilot in the RAF.
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