Douglas murray

Yesterday it was Sydney. Today it is Peshawar. Yesterday a coffee shop. Today a school. Yesterday a lone gunman. Today a gang of them. If anybody wondered about the global and diffuse nature of the challenge that Islamic fundamentalism poses, the last 24 hours have given another demonstration of the problem. Yet what is amazing, after all these years, is how unconcerned many people remain with working out what is going on. How could the Taliban have chosen to attack a school in Peshawar? Why did Boko Haram steal the Nigerian schoolgirls? Why did the Sydney attacker fly that flag? Why do Isis fly theirs?  The Western world in particular seems to be made up of not only exceptionally slow, but actually reluctant, learners.

'We need new laws' is a phrase most often heard from people who haven't much bothered to investigate whether laws which are already on the books can be used. For some time I have suggested that it is inexplicable that laws like those which can be used against people for membership of a proscribed organisation were being almost totally ignored. So the arrest of Anjem Choudary and others for precisely this is doubly pleasing. The banning of the various manifestations of the radical group Al-Muhajiroun was always vaguely farcical. The Home Office would ban one offshoot of the organisation and A-M would respond by starting something of exactly the same beliefs and precisely the same constituent people and parts under another name.

On Sunday there was a rally in London demanding ‘zero tolerance’ of anti-Semitism. About 4,500 people gathered in front of the Royal Courts of Justice. Speakers who addressed the crowds included the Chief Rabbi, Maajid Nawaz and me. Among the things I told the crowd was to expect more and to demand more of their ‘communal leadership’. Long-term readers will know that I’ve never had much time for communal leadership of any kind. I don’t like the groups who claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims – groups which disproportionately represent a politicised and fundamentalist hard-line interpretation of their faith.

The Prime Minister has returned from his holidays, and yesterday wrote an intriguing piece in the Sunday Telegraph about the ongoing struggles in Iraq and Syria. ‘True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources – aid, diplomacy, our military prowess – to help bring about a more stable world’ he wrote, and this morning Defence Secretary Michael Fallon sounded distinctly hawkish about British involvement in Iraq. But what does any of this actually mean? Fraser Nelson tries to get to the bottom of things in our look at the week ahead, while Isabel Hardman wonders whether anyone – including Cameron – knows what our policy is anymore.

Neither Obama nor Cameron seem ready to return from their holidays to debate how best to respond to the events in Iraq. However, in our look at the week ahead, Isabel Hardman argues that the debate shouldn't just be taking place in newspapers, but also in the House of Commons. Could we see a recall of Parliament, asks Fraser Nelson, or is Cameron simply too scared after last year's disastrous debate over Syria? Douglas Murray suggests that however much we may care about the events in Iraq, the only country that can do anything about it is America.

Here comes Boris! After he announced yesterday that he will stand as an MP in 2015, the next Tory leadership fight has just begun. Now that Boris is back in the fray, and making Eurosceptic noises, he has an excellent chance of making it to No. 10 – to assume what he believes is his rightful destiny — the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Freddy Gray presents this week's podcast, and talks to Harry Mount about how Boris's parliamentary campaign might play out. Isabel Hardman also examines the possible constituencies he might pick. The other major political story this week was Baroness Warsi’s shock resignation. But was it political or poisonous? Douglas Murray believes Warsi was over-promoted and incompetent, and is glad to see the back of her.

I wonder if any readers have an answer to this question: Has anybody, throughout this whole conflict around Gaza, heard any reporter inside Gaza, at any time, preface or conclude their remarks with ‘reporting from Gaza, under Hamas government reporting restrictions’?  I don’t watch television news all the time and so may have missed it, but I don’t think I have heard this said even once. Which is strange. When reporting from a dictatorship like Gaza it used to be the norm that reporters would preface or conclude any report with some variant of this formula.  Doing so was a neat way to send the warning to viewers that you were reporting from a place where the authorities were censoring what you could say.

Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Ross Clark looks at the rise of crowd culture. We have succumbed to the lure of the crowd, he says. Lara Prendergast suggests social media is to blame. In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argues that anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. The silence from the political class in the face of this is appalling.

In this week's Spectator, Melanie Phillips suggests that anti-Semitism is on the rise, fueled by the events in the Middle East. Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa, Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, discuss whether this is the case in this week's View from 22 video special. Here's an extract from Melanie's piece. The full article will be available tomorrow: The mask has been torn away. Supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. In Paris, predominantly Muslim mobs screaming ‘death to the Jews’ have repeatedly tried to storm synagogues, torched cars and burnt Jewish-owned shops to the ground.

Peter Clarke, a former counter-terror chief, has published a report today which reveals that an 'aggressive Islamist agenda' was pursued in 'Trojan horse' schools in Birmingham. He has found evidence of a coordinated plan to impose strict Islamic teaching on pupils. This piece by Douglas Murray was originally published in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 June 2014: Who’s up, who’s down? Who’s in, who’s out? While Westminster spent last week gossiping about which minister’s special adviser said what, in another city, not far away, a very different Britain was unveiled.

In this week's View from 22 morning review, Douglas Murray, James Forsyth and Mary Wakefield discuss the weekend's main stories. Can Europe really enforce sanctions on Putin, in the wake of the shooting down of MH17? And what has been the fallout over the weekend from Cameron's reshuffle?