Islam

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Why is the BBC letting the Islamic Human Rights Commission set the agenda?

The farcically named 'Islamic Human Rights Commission' has featured here many times before. The last time was earlier this year when this Khomeinist group decided to award their 'Islamophobe of the Year' award to the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo. At their 'awards ceremony' for this the IHRC even joked about what a shame it was that none of the staff of Charlie Hebdo were around to collect the award. Today the IHRC has thrown a smoke grenade into the public debate by issuing 'findings' claiming that the UK government's counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies are having a 'negative impact' on British Muslims. The 'work' is the usual confection of non-research and pre-ordained 'findings' that you would expect from such an ideologically driven group.

Wednesday

Kate Chisholm

The films the Arab world doesn’t want you to see

‘I want a woman to be President,’ declared one of the ambulance drivers interviewed by Sherief Elkatsha for his film Cairo Drive. I don’t think he was joking. He was fed up with the struggle to do his job in the chaos of the Egyptian capital’s streets clogged by 14 million vehicles. Elkatsha’s feature documentary took five years to make and takes us from 2009 through the Tahrir Square uprising up to the most recent elections purely through looking at the traffic, the lifeblood of the city. He set out to give us voices, not tell a political story, and this lies behind many of the films shown in last weekend’s BBC Arabic Film Festival, held in the radio theatre at Broadcasting House.

Monday

Nick Cohen

The left is no longer a happy family

The far left controls the Labour leadership because the centre left did not take it seriously until it was too late. For a generation indeed, Labour and much of the rest of liberal-left Britain has lived with the comforting delusion that there was no far left to fight. The left, on this reading, was one family. It may have had its troublesome teenagers. Their youthful high spirits may have made the little scallywags 'go too far' on occasion. But everyone was still in one family, still on the same side. The old notion that the far left was the centre left’s enemy died away as the Labour party gave up on argument about what it was and what it wanted to achieve, and entered its long period of intellectual stagnation.

Thursday

Tom Holland

Of gods and men

Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a single divine Creator. ‘I was alone in the emptiness,’ the god proclaimed, ‘and could find no place to stand.’ Nevertheless, beside him, he could feel the gods that were yet to exist. ‘They were with me, these deities waiting to be born. I came into being and Becoming became.’ The gods emerged, to reign first on earth and then in the heavens, and history began.

Kate Chisholm

Battle fatigue

Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated, on radio, on digital, online? It was so weird to switch on Radio 4 on Sunday morning (which just happened to be St Crispin’s Day, the day on which the battle was fought) to discover that even Sunday Worship was being devoted to commemorating one of the bloodiest battles in that most bloodthirsty period.

Patrick Marnham

France’s new reactionaries

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’. The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How can multiculturalism both cause and cure racism?

In recent weeks there have been two prominent examples of what some people in Britain term ‘Islamophobia’. The first involved a woman on a London bus shouting to two identifiably Muslim women that they should ‘go back to their own country.’  She goes on to call them ‘Fucking Isis bitches’. The whole ugly scene was recorded by another passenger and widely trailed around the internet, subsequently leading to a woman’s arrest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfQryY7Jvy4 The second incident was also filmed on a passenger’s phone and took place on a London bus a few days later.

Wednesday

Ed West

The new East-West divide: multiculturalism vs sovereignty

We all know that relations with Russia are at their lowest ebb since 1991, when Boris Yeltsin brought down Communism during one of his alcoholic blackouts. What’s becoming increasingly clear, though, is that there is a new ideological cold war – and I’m not sure we’ll win this one. The German approach to dissent over these past few months has been revealing. Earlier this month, a leading eurocrat chided the Hungarians for refusing to accept that ‘diversity is inevitable’, using that strange Marxist language these people love. Another accused that small central European country of being ‘on the wrong side of history’. Meanwhile Angela Merkel compared those who lock others out to the Communists who once locked their own people in.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Can politicians say ‘crusade’ again? David Cameron thinks so

One thing grabbed my attention from David Cameron’s speech, long ago in the middle of last week. ‘We need a national crusade to get homes built.’ I’m as interested in housing as the next mother with a practically homeless grown-up daughter, but it was the word crusade that astonished me. I did not think a politician could use it now. Just after the atrocities of 11 September 2001, George Bush said: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.’ Some listeners feared this was confirmation of a ‘clash of civilisations’. But, from the Muslim side, some objections were ill-founded historically. English-speaking warriors who set off in the 11th and 12th centuries to free the Holy Places did not call themselves crusaders.

The Spectator

Britain should not mistake its allies for friends

It would be hard to dream up a more absurd piece of political satire than an agency of the British government called Just Solutions International winning a contract to train prison officers in a country that has executed 175 people in the past year, many of them in public beheadings for offences such as sorcery, witchcraft, adultery and political activism. That it sought this contract in the first place is a sign of the great void at the heart of our foreign policy. This week, the Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, pulled out of the deal with Saudi Arabia — thereby attracting the ire of the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, who called him ‘naive’ for doing so. That is a word better applied to Mr Hammond.

Friday

John R. Bradley

Giving the Nobel peace prize to Tunisia’s ‘quartet’ perpetuates a dangerous lie

Tunisia is preposterously touted as the one success story of the nightmarish revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars, jihadist invasions and Islamist terrorist atrocities in the name of an Arab Spring we are still told represents a thirst for Western-style freedom and plurality. The decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to the country’s National Dialogue Quartet, for apparently helping the country's transition to democracy, dangerously perpetuates this myth. The Nobel Committee says that the National Dialogue Quartet was... ...

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Facebook posts about the migrant crisis should be the least of Angela Merkel’s worries

So the German Chancellor has just been caught on microphone talking with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was overheard confronting Zuckerberg over incendiary posts on the social network, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, amid complaints from her government about anti-immigrant posts in the midst of Europe's refugee crisis. On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported. The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that "we need to do some work" on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. "Are you working on this?

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

‘Health and safety concerns’ are now being used to censor anti-Isis artwork

On Saturday I wrote a blog recommending readers catch the ‘Passion For Freedom’ festival’s final hours in London.  Thank you to all the readers who did and helped make it a packed-out show.  One further detail about the show came up afterwards in the Guardian and I mentioned it at the start of my talk at Denmark's free speech conference on Saturday. That is the fact that one of the artist’s work was removed from the show on the advice of the British police.  The work in question – entitled 'Isis Threaten Sylvania', featuring the children's toys Sylvanian Families - is certainly anti-Isis, but it is hard to see it as ‘potentially inflammatory’ as the police insisted.

Tuesday

Qanta Ahmed

A memo for Dr Ben Carson: Islam and Islamism are conjoined but distinct | 29 September 2015

Like so many of the conjoined twins Dr Ben Carson has skilfully separated, Islam the monotheism, compatible with democracy, and its impostor, Islamism, the totalitarian ideology, incompatible with democracy, while intricately conjoined, couldn’t be more distinct in personality. Dr Carson’s assertion that American Muslims are unfit to hold the Presidency is explained only by his ignorance - not only of US constitutional history but of Islam and Islamism. His inability to conceive of an American Muslim as a pluralist liberal democrat shows the doctor’s inability - or unwillingness - to separate Islam from Islamism. Dr Carson’s assertions are hardly new.

Qanta Ahmed

A memo for Dr Ben Carson: Islam and Islamism are conjoined but distinct

Like so many of the conjoined twins Dr Ben Carson has skilfully separated, Islam the monotheism, compatible with democracy, and its impostor, Islamism, the totalitarian ideology, incompatible with democracy, while intricately conjoined, couldn’t be more distinct in personality. Dr Carson’s assertion that American Muslims are unfit to hold the Presidency is explained only by his ignorance - not only of US constitutional history but of Islam and Islamism. His inability to conceive of an American Muslim as a pluralist liberal democrat shows the doctor’s inability - or unwillingness - to separate Islam from Islamism. Dr Carson’s assertions are hardly new.

Monday

Douglas Murray

Denmark’s free speech conference kept the spirit of Charlie Hebdo alive

This has been a terrible year for free speech. In January, after the atrocities in Paris, the whole world was ‘Charlie’, for about an hour.  Then the violence and intimidation did the job they usually do (though we like to pretend otherwise) and by July even Charlie wasn’t Charlie anymore. So I was delighted earlier this year when the Free Press Society of Denmark asked me if I would be willing to come to Copenhagen this September to take part in a conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the original ‘cartoon crisis’.  I have spoken for this excellent group of doughty Danes before, and they have certainly shown more courage than the rest of the European media class combined.  Not that they don’t pay a price for their bravery.

Brendan O’Neill

Free speech can’t just apply to those you agree with

Finally, the Stepford Students, those safe-spaced, spoilt-brat censors of anyone who thinks differently to them, have had their comeuppance. Following an outburst of Twitterfury, Warwick Students’ Union (WSU) has backed down on its ban on Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born secularist and stinging critic of Islamobollocks. Having initially said Ms Namazie could not darken Warwick’s campus with her dangerous arguments against, err, religious intolerance and in favour of liberty and democracy, WSU has now said she is welcome. Anyone who thinks universities should be sites of open and sometimes rowdy debate should welcome WSU’s climbdown as a strike for freedom and a blow against the stiff, prim, censorious misanthropes who govern 21st-century student life.

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

There was nothing illiberal about Ben Carson’s ‘Muslim president’ comment

Republican hopeful Ben Carson was asked on television whether a president’s religious faith matters. He said that a president’s faith should be compatible with the Constitution of the US. Asked whether that included Islam, he denied it. ‘I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.’ He has been accused of Islamophobia and of disregarding the Constitution itself, which states that 'no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office'. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for Carson to withdraw from the race. His answer was clumsy, but not essentially wrong.

Wednesday

Agnieszka Kolek

Few feminists dare criticise Islam. To see why, look at the ones who do

Over the weekend, a Muslim conference held near Paris was interrupted when two Femen activists stormed the stage during a talk given by two fundamentalist preachers. The focus of the talk was on the role of women in Islam and, according to Inna Shevchenko - Femen's founder member -  they were discussing why husbands should not beat their wives. The topless activists were then forcibly removed from the stage and kicked aggressively by a number of the event organisers. Irony doesn't even cover it. https://twitter.com/femeninna/status/643192806736007168 It's easy to dismiss this as yet more bare-breasted attention seeking from Femen protesters, and in a way, it is.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 10 September 2015

Presumably Britain has some sort of policy on immigration, asylum and refugees, but instead of struggling to understand it, you can save time by following its media presentation, since that is what seems to concern the government most. Essentially, the line is that Labour lets them all in and the Tories don’t and won’t (‘No ifs, no buts’). When, as at the last election, it turns out that net immigration has been rising under David Cameron, he apologises shyly and sounds tough again. He was sounding very tough until last week, when the photograph of the dead boy on the Turkish beach suddenly turned him all soft.