IT’S a week since the Brussels bombings. Has Isis achieved its aims?

First, yes, its bombers caused death and destruction, with many also survivors suffering catastrophic life-changing injuries.

Second, yes, it also created fear: fear of travelling, fear of crowded places, fear of the kind I remember when the IRA was bombing the British mainland in the 1970s and 1980s.

Third, yes, Isis got its revenge for the capture four days earlier of Paris bombing suspect Salah Abdeslam.

Fourth, no, Isis won’t stop western countries bombing Isis territory with its suicide bomb tactics simply because their combined force is far greater than Isis.

And fifth, will they “destroy our way of life”, as David Cameron puts it? No, because as Isis continues to send out more and more suicide bombers, we dig our heels in all the more and refuse to give in.

It’s true that in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity like Brussels we re-think certain aspects of our lives – travel plans, where we will holiday this year, for example – but in the long term it doesn’t fundamentally change the way we live our lives.

Isis believes we should live their ideal way of life: an extreme Muslim lifestyle, where men rule and can set laws according to their own warped interpretation of Islam, where girls and women are simply possessions to be used and abused at will and homosexuals are murdered. simply for being who they are.

But it cannot ever be adopted willingly by Europeans because it goes against just about everything we believe in and have evolved to become. It can only ever be forced upon us.

While Isis has established cells of extremists in many countries, radicalising young people so they are willing to give up their own lives in the destruction of many others, Europe and the USA not only has its combined armed forces to use against it, but also a mindset that it does not understand and does not want to understand.

We like our rights and our freedoms – of speech, of movement, of equality, of culture, of being able to outrage society if we wish without incurring a penalty of death. We don’t want our little girls swathed from head to toe in black garments and hidden from life, our little boys brought up to glorify death, our teenage daughters given to men like chattels at the first sign of puberty, our teenage boys taught to kill. We don’t want silent, uneducated women beaten into submission to murderous monstrous men who wield their beheading knives with impunity.

Isis doesn’t understand that we have already been through all that centuries ago and fought against monarchs, the establishment, the Church and the opposite sex to become what we define as “civilised”.

Our laws, based in Christianity, define our boundaries, which are far wider than those decreed by Isis and it makes us far more tolerant of different peoples, different cultures and different religions, including Islam.

Isis believes we deserve to die – and die horribly – simply because we are Christians, because we are not Muslims, because of the way we females dress, behave and live, because we are homosexual or because we just don’t agree with them.

Why on earth would we choose to give up freedom and choice to live a nightmare? It’s not logical. It won’t happen. But Isis will fight to the death to make sure it does. Let’s not let them win, let’s not let them, inch by painful inch, use their bombs and their psychological warfare to make us shrink back in fear and allow them to take over.

The Argus: A teenager revising

Making a 15-year-old revise for exams is my biggest challenge as a mother yet (apart from when all three did things that nearly killed them).

My son, facing GCSE exams in May, has proffered this worrying justification for his lack of revision: “I have a photographic memory so I don’t need to revise.”

His progress report suggests otherwise – in two subjects at least. He has so far in his life shown no signs of a photographic memory as it doesn’t appear to apply to remembering to move his dirty clothes from the bathroom floor to the laundry basket just outside, or to take dirty pots from his bedroom to the kitchen, or to pick up his rubbish from his bedroom floor.

And yet when I challenge him on the existence of his “photographic memory”, he merely points out that he informed me several years ago – had I forgotten?

I have pressed home the need for him to do well in his exams, pointing out that he will severely reduce his choices in life if he doesn’t, but he just laughs it off. Last week, he told me his science teacher had advised he does 27 hours of revision on that one subject alone during the Easter holidays. I have a horrible feeling that for, oh, about two weeks, he’s going to deliberately suppress his photographic memory and conveniently forget that piece of advice.