Kate Evans is a dedicated and widely respected sergeant in Avon and Somerset Police. But her ability to do the job she loves has been severely compromised. On 6 August 2025 she was on duty when a 23-year-old man swung a sledgehammer against her back – while she was on her knees. Her spine was fractured and the injuries she sustained affect her to this day and profoundly limit her personal and professional freedom.

Her attacker, Samuel Corner, was a member of the proscribed ‘activist’ group Palestine Action, the group to which Irish novelist Sally Rooney would like to devote her royalties. A standard ‘Roughneck’ sledgehammer costs just under £40 on Amazon – not much more than a boxed set of Normal People, Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World, Where are You. Given Rooney’s sales figures, her generosity could allow Palestine Action to invest in several builders’ yards worth of demolition equipment.

Those inspired to be violent are not principally the wretched of the earth but the comfortably provided for

But this largesse will not be immediately forthcoming, because Rooney and her publishers have decided to remove her books from circulation in the UK in protest at the proscription of Palestine Action. There has been some suggestion by the friends with whom Ms Rooney has conversations that the steps the UK government have taken to deal with this group, and its supporters, are somehow a wicked curtailment of liberty and a backward step for civilisation. Few people have had their liberty as curtailed in recent years as the crippled Sergeant Evans, and if we really want to see what a backward step for civilisation looks like we need only look across the Channel to France, where Palestine Action’s confreres have been turning the public square into a burning battlefield.

Because, make no mistake, the terrible damage wrought to France this week was not principally the work of anguished students unhappy that there was too little time to study Baudelaire in their baccalaureate year or rural voters suffering from out-of-control energy costs. It was the direct result of targeted ideological terror from hard-left and Islamist groups who oppose western civilisation, its values, its political economy and its institutions. The 34-year-old arrested in connection with the arson attack on the beautiful Hôtel de Ville in Limoges was a radical activist already on a terrorist watch list. The thugs who rampaged across Lyon, Paris and Marseille did so under the flag of Palestine – the banner that has become the standard under which the red of the hard left, the black of anarchist groups and the green of Islamist radicals unite in violence. This was the globalisation of the intifada – a Palestine Action of the most vivid kind.

In addition, this was violence foretold, chaos promised. The day after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which more Jewish civilians died on one day than at any time since the Holocaust, Palestine Action’s co-founder Richard Barnard addressed supporters in Manchester. He invoked the name given by Hamas to their massacre – Al’Aqsa Flood. The carnage in the Middle East inspired him to imagine a wider wave of destruction, as he told his audience: ‘When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa Flood, we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.’

We should pay Mr Barnard and his organisation the compliment of taking their words seriously. Those words have consequences – as Sergeant Evans and others who have come face-to-face with Palestine Action’s activism have done. And we should recognise that those who are inspired to be violent are not principally the wretched of the earth struggling to be heard but the comfortably provided for and articulate children of Normal People. Samuel Corner was a former Oxford University student of philosophy and linguistics. However deeply acquainted he may have become with Sartre and Chomsky at Oxford, Mr Corner seems to have failed adequately to grasp the ethical principle of bodily integrity of the innocent.

We should not, however, be surprised that recent Oxford graduates find themselves neck-deep in moral swampland, when so many of our higher-education institutions have become not places of rigorous intellectual inquiry but arenas for competitive self-hatred. Oxford colleges turn their libraries into theatres for ‘decolonisation’ where the ‘wrong’ books are discarded to make way for the ideologically approved texts of the ‘global majority’. Cambridge’s Education Faculty – which trains hundreds of teachers – is run by a woman who thinks our schools are inherently flawed because of their attachment to Enlightenment values. These are supposedly our best universities.

The freedoms we enjoy in the West are built on increasingly fragile foundations. And they are coming under ever more sustained assault. A sledgehammer is being taken to the idea of legitimate authority, tradition and civility. The contemporary radical left has been infused by the ideas of Foucault and the Frankfurt School and sees everything through the prism of power relations. Those who have traditionally exercised power in the West – whether economic, legal or cultural – are seen as illegitimate oppressors. And Israel – as the West’s embattled outpost – is the focus of the most furious demonic energy. The consequences that ideology unleashed have been visited on France this week. There are willing emulators in our country and fellow travellers who admire their ardour. But when they see what destruction is wrought in their name, when our past is put to flame, will they too be forced to ask Beautiful World, Where Are You?