In Paris a young boy tells his father flowers have no power against bullets. His father convinces the child that flowers are far stronger than bullets can ever be.
Whatever we do now, the terrorists of isis expect from us. Worse, they want us to react with hate, bombs and bloodshed. It confirms the stories they tell about themselves and their heroic fight against the crusader.
It's the only language they understand, we're told - forgetting that it seems to be the only language we can speak.
Whatever justification we have for retaliation - and don't think of me as an ageing hippy, we have every right to defend ourselves - will be used to raise our young people against us.
This is as much a war of propoganda as any other, but we have ceded the narrative to isis to tell their stories without reply - except for more bombs and more killing.
A Government minister even said this morning that Syrians will pray for British bombs.
As a young man learned: flowers are more powerful than bullets.
Send a plane - send a hundred planes - all loaded with flowers and petals. Send tulips from Amsterdam, roses from London narcissi from Athens and irises from Paris. Send camomile from Russia with love. Carpet Syria in reds, yellows and blues and tell them what we think of them and their grey zones and black and whites. Let every petal and every bloom remind isis of all the lives they've taken, all the families torn apart in Beirut, Morocco, Paris, London, Nigeria and Iraq.
React in a way they don't expect. And fuck their tiny minds.
