Islam

I am far abroad at the moment but have just learnt the sad news from home of the death of George (Lord) Weidenfeld, at the age of 96. As a publisher, philanthropist, convener, guru and friend he was one of the most extraordinary people in 20th and 21st-century Britain. Born in Vienna in 1919, he fled the Nazis and came to the UK in the 1930s where he was housed and looked after by a Christian family. Throughout the extraordinary life and career that followed he constantly acted on the gratitude he felt towards the country and people that had taken him in. Only last year he set up a

The new Charlie Hebdo cover is feeble. God with a machine-gun, looking over his shoulder, and the line ‘The Assassin is still at large’. It makes Richard Dawkins look nuanced. Religion is to blame? All religion? It feels dishonest, timid: a refusal to face the fact that it’s a particular form of religion that is the problem. In fact satire in general is pretty feeble, when it comes to religion and terrorism. Satire is good at attacking established power, and religious terrorism is obviously an intensely marginal thing – far more marginal than satire itself. There is a wider target: Islam in general, but in the West this too is

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year the greatest Greek writer since Homer turns 80 (but we’ll keep quiet about that for the moment). Our world is so stuck in reverse that a woman who was stabbed in Miami during the Art Basel shindig, and was bleeding and begging for help, was mistaken for an artwork and ignored. The woman survived but will art? Conceptual art must be the biggest con since Bernie Madoff and then some. And speaking of con artists, I’ve never had any respect for Mark Zuckerberg, someone who is reputed to have copied

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Iranian human rights activist Maryam Namazie was harassed by members of the Goldsmiths University Islamic Society on Monday night, while speaking to the university’s Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society. Namazie, whose talk was about ‘Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of Isis’, has been branded an ‘Islamophobe’ by members of the Islamic Society for her criticism of political Islam and aspects of Islamic theology. Footage of the talk has been posted on YouTube, and makes for depressing viewing: a group of young men in the front row aggressively interrupt Namazie throughout, shouting ‘Safe Space!’ and one of them eventually unplugs the projector when a cartoon of the Prophet