Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
In March of this year the Turkish government complained about an item on German television which was critical of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A fortnight later – to prove that Germany was a free country – Jan Boehmermann read out a poem that was rude about Erdogan on his evening comedy show. Not only did the
Mark Twain once said that if you give a man a reputation as an early-riser he can sleep in till noon. The same is true of calling someone ‘a moderate’. Call someone ‘a moderate’ and they can rant like a fascist any day of the week without reprimand. President Rouhani of Iran has been called
Incidents of ‘Islamophobia’ are really getting out of hand in Britain. In fact there has been such a wave of attacks that it’s amazing that politicians and commentators across the political spectrum, (not to mention all those supposed ‘anti-fascist’ groups) aren’t grand-standing like crazy. Perhaps their problem is that this wave of attacks does not
Here is one of those stories that matters even though it preoccupies the Guardian. Last week the celebrated novelist Lionel Shriver gave an address at the Brisbane book festival. It was heralded as being about ‘community and belonging’ but ended up being about ‘fiction and identity politics’. In particular Shriver (the author, most famously, of We Need
The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has announced that the French police and intelligence services have identified 15,000 people across France who are either ‘radicalised’ or in the process of becoming radical. In response to this Nicolas Sarkozy (who is of course in campaigning mode) has given an interview to Journal du Dimanche in which
Here’s a strange thing. In a TV interview on Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton said that Isis want Donald Trump to become President of the United States. In her words, Isis are currently saying, ‘Please, Allah, make Trump president of America’. Personally I have no idea which ticket Isis will be campaigning for, come November. But
Why do people always fall from grace for the wrong reasons? I had always hoped that if Keith Vaz finally fell from whatever form of grace he could lay claim to, it would be for really good reasons. Regular readers will know that my detestation of him dates back to 1989 when as a young MP
Private Eye used to run a column called the ‘Neo-philes’, listing some of the endless cases of hacks saying ‘X is the new Y’ (‘This season green is the new black’ and so on). So let me put in an early entry for the return of any such column by announcing here that ‘The Burkini
So farewell then Anjem Choudary. At least for a few years. Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis. He now faces up to ten years in prison. There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of
Earlier this week the Times had a leader column entitled ‘Protect Prevent’. As a defence of the government’s counter-extremism strategy it was all well and good, but it missed a very crucial point. It said: ‘The success of Prevent has been undermined, however, by a failure of public relations. The government failed to cast it as
It is almost two months since Omar Mateen walked around the Pulse nightclub in Florida, gunning people down while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. During the assault Mateen spoke to American law enforcement and swore allegiance to Isis. Frustratingly Omar Mateen failed to call the group ‘so-called Islamic State’, thus betraying a woeful lack of linguistic sensitivity among his
A few months back, after the Brussels terrorist attacks, I pointed out on Coffee House that there is a certain routine after any such atrocity. One part of it is that, after a couple of days pause, we always get the ‘Muslim good news story’. This is the part when after a couple of days of everyone
How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of Middle Eastern appearance tried to abduct a soldier near his base in Norfolk for what was unlikely to have been an interfaith dialogue session. But Britain’s geographical good fortune, relative success in limiting weapons and
Update: This piece was written yesterday and so is already out of date. This morning two armed men entered a church near Rouen during Mass. They took the priest, two nuns and a number of congregants hostage. It appears that they slit the priest’s throat before themselves being killed by French security forces. Nobody can think of any possible motive,
A couple of weeks ago I watched a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest in the centre of London. It was a Sunday and the assembled group of perhaps 1,000 people marched up and down Oxford street a couple of times. This was shortly after the shootings of five police officers in Dallas, Texas while they policed
Last Friday I noted that you don’t have to go back many months to get the latest mass-casualty terrorist atrocity in Europe these days. But even while people were still trying to find ways to portray the Nice truck driver as a victim of urban-planning laws we had the next attack. Yesterday it was an ‘Afghan
The BBC headline says it all: ‘The killing of 84 people celebrating Bastille Day is the worst attack on France since the 13 November attacks.’ These day in Europe you don’t have to reach back many months to find carnage even exceeding that in Nice last night. We still don’t have many details about last
A specific nightmare keeps occurring to me. It is an episode of Prime Minister’s Questions in which Jeremy Corbyn and Andrea Leadsom face each other across the dispatch boxes. Unlike most of the world, including most of the Conservative party, I had heard of Andrea Leadsom before a week last Friday – indeed had spent
There is a moment at the start of most authors’ careers when it is hard to get anything published, and there is a moment towards the latter stage of some authors’ careers when it is hard to stop everything being published. A.S. Byatt is in the latter stage of her career, and however great the
Well I might as well say publicly what I’ve been saying to everyone who will listen privately for the last week. It seems to me that our country will regret the distraction and levity we have shown this past week. For those who campaigned to leave the EU, June 24th was not an opportunity to
