IN PERSPECTIVE… In the second week of September, large numbers of innocent occupants were killed in the bombing of big city buildings at the instigation of Islamist terror groups run and financed by Arab Muslims. New York in 2001. Of course. And Moscow two years before. Responding to a wave of anger and revulsion, staring at the prospect of a centre that could not hold, of a state no longer able to protect its citizens, the President ordered the armed forces to move in and to bomb and blast the perceived source of the terror. That’s how Bush saw it and did it in Afghanistan; that’s how Putin responded two years before, in Chechnya. We all know the differences. But what are the similarities? It was three decades earlier, in the third week of September 1970, that the Jordan Army went into the Palestinian refugee camps, bombing and blasting. They killed 5,000 people. That was Black September. The historical times of the first black September were very different to those of the second and
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head