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.
As I may have intimated last week, political conference season is a particular kind of hell. Most of us just are not diverted by faked class warfare or efforts by Ed Balls to be more ‘butch’ than David Cameron. Anyhow – whilst the few remaining members of political parties come together to remind the rest
As a rider to my earlier blog I wish to put in the following as evidence. It became plain to me some years ago that people who have absolutely no political point tend to revert disproportionately to grandiose claims regarding their opponents (both real and imaginary). It gives them a passing sensation of importance which
Are there any words in the English language more soporific or depressing than: ‘Liberal Democrat Party Conference’? My paucity of blogs in the last few days can be put down solely to this fact. Even the many fascinating and disturbing things occurring in the world are somehow made damp by the knowledge that this annual
I have a piece in the magazine this week on the disgraceful behaviour of Hillary Clinton and other US officials in the latest round of cartoon wars. During the last week the US Secretary of State turned into a film critic, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – head of the most powerful
The papers today are full of the latest alleged ‘gaffe’ by Mitt Romney. It has become a staple of US election coverage that any Democrat’s foreign policy fumble is a ‘mis-speak’ while any Republican saying something even mildly contentious – as opposed to wrong – is a world-class clanger which shows them to be unfit
In Benghazi the ‘spontaneous protestors’ arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and killed the US ambassador. In Kabul the crowds chanted ‘Death to America’. American flags were torched from London to Sydney. But in Washington the Obama administration showed that they weren’t taking any of this personally. It wasn’t about them, but about an excerpt from an
Western media and governments which are currently white-washing the Muslim Brotherhood should take note of the following, a classic example of the organisation’s traditionally forked-tongue way of working. Ahram Online carries the story which relates the recent rioting across North Africa and the Middle East. After the attack on the US Embassy in Cairo on
When the Danish Cartoons affair broke in 2005-6 there was considerable pressure on the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to issue a condemnation and apology. Demonstrating considerable statesmanship he nevertheless repeatedly said that ‘You cannot apologise for something you have not done.’ When so-called ‘community leaders’ insisted on seeing him he refused because he,
I have been reading a new book by Theodore Dalrymple which I highly recommend. Readers of the Spectator will need no introduction to the good doctor, his fresh prose or his startling insight. But even for people like me who read most of what Dalrymple writes, Farewell Fear contains a great collection of unfamiliar —
In what may prove to be the most depressingly predictable story of the year, we learn that Channel 4 has chosen to cancel a screening of Tom Holland’s programme ‘Islam: the untold story‘ tomorrow night because of threats to the author and presenter. If there is a reason why so many stories and facts to do
These two stories are unlikely to make big news, but they should. Speaking in Amsterdam on Wednesday night, the Dutch Foreign Minister, Uri Rosenthal, urged fellow European Union members finally to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. Rosenthal said ‘The Netherlands has made another appeal to European Union members to place Hezbollah on the EU
An article in an Iranian state-controlled newspaper has claimed that the Jews are spreading gays. According to Mashregh News the ‘Zionist regime’ (with the help of the US and UK) is deliberately spreading homosexuality to pursue Zionism’s real goal of world domination. Quite how you can dominate the world through gays, I don’t know. It’s
George Galloway’s awfulness falls into two categories. First there is the serial dictator-licking. This is a man so profligate, not to say promiscuous, in his affections that he has in succession fawned over Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Then there is the personal vileness — pretending to be a dirty cat on live
I’ve only just got around to watching Tom Holland’s documentary for Channel 4 from earlier this week: ‘Islam: the untold story.’ It had some good things in it, despite suffering from the two problems all documentaries now suffer from: attention-grabbing statements at the end of segments which are not followed up on, and endless shots
So the Conservative party’s immigration minister, Damian Green MP, has introduced the idea of the ‘Danny Boyle test.’ In today’s Telegraph he argues that the Conservative party must resist ‘nostalgists promoting a better yesterday’ and that since the Olympics opening ceremony was a demonstration of ‘modern Britain’ it is therefore a ‘test’ that Conservatives must pass.
Every time there is a shooting in the US there is an eruption of sanctimony from Europe about how crazy the US gun-laws are. But there are some good reasons for those laws, and many Americans feel gun-ownership to be an important part of what keeps them American. However, the downsides are just awful. Gun-murder rates in
When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was set up ten years ago, it was meant to make the world a safer place. The Court and the various UN war crimes tribunals were supposed to pursue and punish war-criminal dictators as a warning to all the others. The idea may have been a noble one but,
For the first year since GCSE’s came in we have not seen ‘the best results ever’. Which is, of course, a great relief. As Anthony Seldon, among others, has pointed out, these results suggest a return to credibility in our examination system. But there are already those, including some teachers and teacher unions who are
I had the pleasure of doing Al Jazeera’s ‘Inside Story’ programme yesterday on Julian Assange’s positively pontifical balcony scene at the Ecuadorian Embassy the other day. I was at pains to point out that: 1 – Listening to Mr Assange a stranger to the case would never have got the impression that he had skipped bail in
In the magazine this week I have a piece on learning poetry by heart. Spectator readers will remember that Michael Gove received some flak from teaching unions earlier this year when he suggested that British schoolchildren should be able to recite a poem by heart. In the piece I try to explain why this is
