Marco Rubio’s blistering speech identified the rot undermining the west
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This is an expanded version of my Times column (£) today
In twenty electrifying minutes last week, America’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, dragged into the spotlight a critical and yet largely unacknowledged factor behind the suicidal trajectory of the west.
His speech opened an international conference in Washington DC on “the resurgence of political terrorism”.
For the past quarter of a century, said Rubio, counter-terrorism had meant the fight against radical Islamist extremism. While that had been brought under a measure of control, the blind spot now was over terrorism by the far- left.
At the beginning of this month, he said, a 72-year-old woman in Greece was murdered by a firebomb in her apartment because her daughter had stood as a parliamentary candidate for the conservative New Democracy party.
In January, an arson attack on the Berlin power grid, reportedly by militant leftists, cut off power for tens of thousands over five days of freezing temperatures which left an 83 year-old woman dead.
One month later, a 23-year-old far-right French activist was beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left assailants.
As Rubio noted, the far-left dominated political violence for most of the modern era. The German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Italian Red Brigades terrorists, the Maoist fanatics of Peru’s Shining Path, the American Weather Underground and many others caused 93 per cent of terrorist attacks in the West between 1970 and 1980.
Now, far-left terrorism is again on the rise and is even more lethal in scale and scope.
In Germany, it jumped last year by more than 40 per cent. In Greece, more than 80 per cent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist groups.
A report last September by the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said that 2025 was shaping up to be the American left’s most violent year in more than three decades...
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