Salut!

Minding our language: the dignity of Antoine Leiris and Lassana Diarra

If you read French, the book is available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vous-naurez-pas-ma-haine/dp/2213701296?ie=UTF8&redirect=true&tag=salusund-21. If not, wait for the English translation ...

More from my column on words*, which appears regularly in the National, Abu Dhabi. I hope these words speak for themselves ...

Whether they occur on European streets or North African beaches, at Middle Eastern markets and Pakistani schools, terrorist atrocities are invariably followed by words that are wise or noble, angry or defiant.

Amid all that politicians, religious leaders and commentators have said about the Paris attacks on November 13 last year, Antoine Leiris’s response to the murder of his wife, one of 130 killed that night, famously combined three of those adjectives.

Paris and Brussels ISIL terror: how one network caused such bloodshed in two capitals

If anyone knows to whom this should be credited, please tell me

It takes no great courage to kill lots of civilians going about their daily lives. ISIL killers may be drugged up beyond caring about their own fate, or they may have been lured by the promise of gifts in paradise. Whatever the motivation, they are murderous lowlife. But I fear we must be prepared for more of the same, while always taking care to show we will not be cowed and can rise above tragedy and grief to fight for decent values.

For The National*, I tried to trace the links between the Paris and Brussels attackers, their connections to other terrorist activity in both France and Belgium, and the existence of a single network responsible for much of the carnage caused or planned and foiled. Here is the main article, accompanied by an exemplary graphic devised from my data by Hussain Al Moosawi and other colleagues in Abu Dhabi, notably the foreign editor Jonathan Lessware (I cannot show it, but there was also a substantial rogues' gallery summarising what we know of the various attackers and accomplices, dead or alive...