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.
The release of Gerry Adams felt a bit like the old days. A Unionist protest outside the police station, a rally of a press conference at a Republican club with Adams, Gerry Kelly and Martin McGuinness on the podium. Whether or not Adams will be charged with involvement in the 1972 murder of Jean McConville
Peter Hain has become a disgrace. Earlier this year it appeared that the Former Northern Ireland Minister was one of the people responsible for the cock-up over letters of amnesty for ‘on-the-run’ terrorists. Now he has gone several steps further. Just last month Hain was just telling everybody who has lost a relative during the Troubles
In one sense the arrest of Gerry Adams for questioning in relation to the murder of Jean McConville is not a surprise. On the other hand it is astonishing. I cannot think how many times over the years the connection between Adams and the McConville case – appalling even by the standards trawled during the
My colleague Nick Cohen has a piece asking ‘Are you fit to be British? Take the UKIP test.’ In it he cites a number of horrible and silly and things said by people in UKIP before he himself descends into rudeness. Stuart Wheeler is apparently a ‘cadaverous gambling tycoon’. ‘Cadaverous’? As in old? I suppose it
As so often (in my opinion) Tony Blair is almost right. In a wide-ranging speech at Bloomberg this morning he roamed over Syria, Libya, the Middle East and the West’s withdrawal of interest, let alone engagement, in the region. But it is Blair’s comments on Islam that are most interesting, are already garnering headlines and merit
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Freddy Gray discuss the return of God” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]What was your reaction recently when it emerged that thousands of unborn foetuses had been burnt by NHS trusts? And that some had been put into ‘waste-to-energy’ incinerators and so used to heat hospitals? Revulsion, I would imagine. But why? I
Melanie McDonagh wrote a piece on Friday objecting to ‘those pundits who find Mr McGuinness’s presence anywhere intolerable.’ As one such pundit I would like to exercise a right of reply. Not to pick a fight with Melanie – who was very nice about my book on ‘Bloody Sunday’ and whose judgement for that reason, among
I know that the official line is delight at the ‘progress’ allegedly represented by the presence of Martin McGuinness, in white tie and tails, standing to toast the Queen’s health at a banquet in Windsor Castle. But what an odious sight. Firstly because the idea that this constitutes some important step is all post-hoc prevarication. The
Readers will know that I am interested in the subject of post-Good Friday agreement ‘justice’ in Northern Ireland. Having been one of the few people to have followed the possibilities of justice over Bloody Sunday, I also recently wrote about the apparently one-sided amnesties which the last Labour government appears to have given to Republicans
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Julie Bindel discuss monogamy in gay marriages” startat=665] Listen [/audioplayer]As inexorably as night follows day and push comes to shove, so the words ‘Tory’ and ‘scandal’ seem destined to conjoin with ‘Brazilian’ and ‘rent-boy’. Yet the main response to the allegations about Mark Menzies MP last weekend was neither laughter
The UK government has announced a long-overdue investigation into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. I am delighted. Why Britain should continue to act as an Argentina-like sanctuary for Islamic fascists I have never understood. I hope the investigation will be deep and wide-ranging. But of course if the government really wants
A number of interesting things have happened recently: The Law Society has provided legal guidance to ensure that Muslims in Britain can have their wills judged according to Sharia. BBC Newsnight hosted an in-studio row between three Muslims over whether one Muslim should be allowed to say or do anything that is deemed religiously insensitive
As there is an intermittent debate over media ethics in this country, might we reflect on the following? The story of the missing Malaysian plane is an unimaginable nightmare for the relatives of those on the plane. Nobody knows what has happened. And after almost two weeks nobody seems any closer to knowing. Yet thanks
Before getting onto the film I should make a few disclaimers. There is a popular view that Donald Rumsfeld was a catastrophic US secretary of defence. I do not share that view. There is also a view that his most famous phrase – about known knowns, known unknowns and so on – was a display
BBC3’s Free Speech programme is a good example of why the channel deserves to be shut down. Aimed at giving a voice to young people it is endlessly dumbing-down, seeks validity through instant Twitter reactions and all in all is a very degrading programme to appear on. I know because a couple of years ago I
I much recommend Nick Clegg’s weekend speech. Since it was given at the Liberal Democrat Spring some people may have missed it. There is hardly a line that cannot draw a laugh. My favourite passage is this subtle reference to UKIP: ‘An ungenerous, backwards looking politics has emerged in Britain. The politics of blame has found
Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies
listen to ‘Lord Trimble on the Downey letters: ‘There needs to be a proper inquiry’’ on Audioboo
I was robbed! News has just come in that despite making the shortlist I failed to win ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ in any of the categories. Proving once again that Ayatollah Khomeini was a big fat liar when he said there are ‘no jokes’ in Islam, the Khomeinist ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ last night named President
If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity. At the
