Islam

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Charles Moore has it just right on Woolwich

From our UK edition

There is a terrific piece in today's Telegraph by Charles Moore which I very much recommend. It is titled 'Woolwich outrage: we are too weak to face up to the extremism in our midst'. In the piece Moore rightly criticises our societal inability to deal with Islamism. In particular he criticises the switch of attention which took place immediately after the murder of Drummer Rigby thanks to bogus claims of an 'anti-Muslim backlash'. Moore also addresses the follow-up fib that a threat equal to the jihadis - or even the primary threat to our society - comes from the English Defence League. Incidentally, I saw that, whilst over for the G8 meeting, last night David Cameron had a joint press conference with the first minister and deputy first minister of Northern Ireland.

Friday

Halla Diyab

Syria: Assad’s axis of evil

From our UK edition

A few days ago in northern Aleppo, 14-year-old Mohammad Qataa was shot dead by armed fighters who accused him of blasphemy. The Free Syria Army denied any connection to the savage act, calling it an act of ‘terrorism’ committed by rebels linked to al-Qaeda. This is not the first time that a Syrian civilian has been accused of insulting Islam. On March 21 the prominent Sufi scholar Sheikh Muhammad al-Bouti was assassinated inside a mosque in Damascus because of his views about the violence in Syria. The FSA has denied these attacks and so has the Assad regime. So who are these rebels shooting people and chopping off heads in the name of Islam? Some could be the very individuals that many in the west would like to arm.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Of course spooks snoop. More power to them

From our UK edition

Can I just share with you my satisfaction that the CIA has access to my emails and all the social media sites I visit from time to time? This has been a big story in the liberal press: US fascist spooks can access loads of details about you through the online stuff you’ve been doing. It never occurred to me for a single second that they wouldn’t. And if they hadn’t been doing that, I’d want sackings all round. They’re SPIES, for God’s sake. What are they meant to do?

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Turkey redux

From our UK edition

It must be boring for you too, returning to the same complaint, over and over again. Report on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News about the trouble in Turkey. Not a single mention, in the three minutes, of the words Islam, or Muslim, or Islamification. You had to infer everything. Without prior knowledge of what was going on, you would have been utterly mystified as to why people were unhappy. You noted that all of the protestors were young, middle class, educated and the women fashionably unveiled; well spoken, good English and so on. And you would have wondered then who the alleged ‘50 per cent’ who support the Prime Minister might be; what are they dressed like? Is this an argument about poverty, or what? Not a mention of the causes.

Thursday

The Spectator

We need to talk about Syria

From our UK edition

There can be little doubt that Britain is edging towards intervening in Syria. President Bashar Assad’s bloody ruthlessness seems to be paying off: his forces are retaking former rebel strongholds (the strategic town of Qusair was reclaimed this week) and the more he believes he can win, the less likely he is to negotiate. From a distance, there seems to be a case for the West to move quickly to help the rebels, and create a more level playing field. The aim would not be to prolong the conflict, but to make a negotiated peace settlement more likely. The Prime Minister made the case in the Commons this week.

Norman Stone

What’s eating Turkey

From our UK edition

  Ankara ‘Islam, politics, economics — choose two’ is a great line, said by one of my Turkish students, and it would make a good exam question. Tayyip (the name means ‘very clean’ in Arabic — cf. ritual washing) Erdogan (meaning ‘strong hawk’, a Turkish nationalist reference) came to power in 2002 with a very good press. This was to be what the world wanted — a Muslim version of German or Italian Christian Democracy — and for years he gave it that. The rival parties destroyed themselves in silly bickering and corruption, and Erdogan’s party was very successful, with reforms in health and housing that improved the lives of ordinary Turks no end.

Tuesday

Shiraz Maher

Countering Terrorism in Britain and France, by Frank Foley – review

From our UK edition

Have you ever wondered why we’re stuck with the radical cleric Abu Qatada? It’s a question the last four Home Secretaries will have asked as they battled, and failed, to deport him. Now Theresa May is learning just how stubborn the old curmudgeon can be. Indeed, the whole issue of deporting terror suspects is a difficult one. In the nine years that followed the 9/11 attacks, France deported 129 individuals considered to be threats to national security, while we removed just nine. The intransigence of British judges is not new. Long before the ‘War on Terror’ brought matters of international security to public attention, the French had been pursuing Rachid Ramda, an Algerian wanted for masterminding the 1995 Paris Metro bombings, through British courts.

Friday

Douglas Murray

To end “Islamophobia”, we must tackle Islamism

From our UK edition

I thought readers might be interested in this piece from me in the new issue of Standpoint which is just out. It is titled 'Forget "Islamophobia". Let's tackle Islamism'. In the wake of recent attacks there has been an upsurge in claims of 'Islamophobia'. As I explain in the piece, even if such a thing as 'Islamophobia' did exist it would be a reactionary phenomenon. If we dealt with Islamism, then what is rightly or wrongly called 'Islamophobia' would disappear. The whole piece is here.

Rod Liddle

Does William Hague know what he is doing with Syria?

From our UK edition

A week or so after the murder of a British soldier by two psychopathic savages in Woolwich, the Foreign Secretary William Hague is back pleading with our European partners to help the murderers’ brothers fighting the jihad in Syria. I use the term ‘brothers’ a little loosely, sure; it is the term they would use. The photographs of one such jihadi chopping up and indeed eating a Syrian army soldier has not dissuaded Mr Hague from the view that these people are in the main peace-loving democrats who wish for nothing more than an agreeable secular state with the full panoply of human rights for all. He was not dissuaded of this by the jihadis eating people, or attacking Christians, or proclaiming their allegiance to Al Qaeda.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

A guide to understanding Islamist terror in the UK and US

From our UK edition

Readers may like to know that I have a cover piece in this week's magazine titled 'The Enemy Within'.  It is available here for subscribers. (Non-subscribers can subscribe here.) It looks at what - if anything - will change after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich. It is also an account of just some of the difficulties going on inside the British government in the fight against extremism. On a separate but related note, my colleague at the Henry Jackson Society, Robin Simcox was testifying in front of the US House of Representatives last week. His testimony is here. Robin is one of the authors of our latest report on Al-Qaeda related terrorism in the US.

Alex Massie

What enemy within? Britain is not losing the battle against Jihadism.

From our UK edition

To read Douglas Murray's cover story from this week's edition of the magazine (subscribe!) you might think the British government is not only losing the battle against Islamist extremism and Jihadism in this country but that it wants to lose that struggle. I think this is weak but pretty pernicious sauce. But it is the sort of thing that will appeal to some. Especially those with a mania for betrayal. Only the strong and the vigilant and the this-is-how-it-is-chum brigade are tough enough to see the pathetic and craven weaklings currently staffing the government, the legal profession and the civil service for what they really are: the next worst thing to traitors. It is a myth and a bullshit one at that.

Charles Moore

MI5 is wrong: subversion is still a threat

From our UK edition

The website of the Security Service (MI5) says that since the end of the Cold War, the threat of subversion is ‘now considered to be negligible’. Isn’t this a mistake? It seems likely that many Muslim organisations — university Islamic societies, for example — are subverted by jihadists. The infiltrators whip up hatred against the West and create networks, rudimentary but often powerful, of the like-minded. When they have done their work well, they do not need to give direct orders to people like the Woolwich murderers to kill: they have primed their human device, and left it to explode. Such subversion may not be backed by foreign state power, but it still resembles communism in its ability to infiltrate minds and organisations at the same time.

Nick Robinson

BBC’s Nick Robinson: why I said sorry for my ‘Muslim appearance’ remark

From our UK edition

It was my first taste of free love — for the brain. A first visit to what Bill Clinton dubbed the ‘Woodstock of the Mind’. With just one afternoon at the Hay festival, I rolled up at the first thing that caught my eye — a distinguished prof talking about nanotechnology. Bear with me here. I was soon learning that making things nano-sized changes their essential properties. Surfaces can be made which repel water. A single drop can be made bouncier than a children’s rubber ball. So what, you ask.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Nothing to do with Islam?

From our UK edition

Immediately after the 7/7 bombings the then police-chief Brian Paddick told a press conference: 'Islam and terrorism do not go together.' Now, after Woolwich, the Prime Minister has said, ‘There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.’ Even after all these years our leaders continue to make this terrible mistake. Politicians or police chiefs must not make theological pronouncements. Though undoubtedly guided by good intentions, their line does not help but in fact exacerbates a problem – on all sides. There is a civil war underway in Islam which has gone on in some fashion since the religion’s founding.

Alex Massie

You’re going to lose. It is only you against many.

From our UK edition

If, in the aftermath of an act of would-be terror, the people refuse to be terrorised does it still remain a terrorist act? Perhaps but there's a sense, I think, in which we should not grant yesterday's guilty men the title "terrorist". Murderers, surely, will suffice? There is no need to grant them the war they so plainly desire. This murder in Woolwich was an uncommon act of barbarity; the product too of a kind of mental illness. That does not excuse the act, far from it, and there's no need to be sparing in our condemnation. But, appalled as we may be, it seems important to recognise and remember just how unusual these acts remain. There will, quite properly, be consideration of whether the security service could have done more.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

‘Not in our name’ – British Muslims denounce the Woolwich attack on Twitter

From our UK edition

The Muslim Council of Britain has denounced the Woolwich murder and has been joined by hundreds of Muslims who have taken to Twitter to voice disgust over the idea that Islam could have been be invoked in such a barbaric act. Here are a few of them: I can't tell you how sick I am of having to tweet every time that these are NOT Muslims. This is NOT Islam. These are f***** up barbarians — Sabbiyah Pervez (@sabbiyah) May 22, 2013   The horrific attack in Woolwich had nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with the scum who say they do this in the name of Islam. — Imran Khan (@ImKhan70) May 22, 2013   People killing in the name of God. This is NOT my #Islam at all.

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Writers in a state of fear

From our UK edition

A State of Fear, Joseph Clyde’s new thriller*, stands out for many reasons. Thrillers only work if they are thrilling, and Clyde’s description of the search for the terrorist who planted a dirty bomb in central London keeps the reader fascinated. The best thrillers are more than just page-turners, however, and Clyde presents a convincing picture of what Britain could look like after law and order breaks down and the economy collapses. Like all dystopian novelists, he takes conflicts in the present and imagines how they will play out in his imagined future. Today’s sectarian divisions and the failure of Britain to deal with them, or even admit they exist, clearly fascinate him.

Sunday

Shiraz Maher

Why engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t quite as simple as it seems

From our UK edition

Conventional wisdom has long suggested that we should engage pernicious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in order to defang them. Just talk to them, it is said, and you’ll discover they’re not as bad as they seem. Proponents of this view also believe that to engage reactionaries is to control them. Tell that to members of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who tried to engage the Muslim Brotherhood earlier this week. They invited its Secretary-General, Helmy el-Gazzar, to Washington D.C. where it was hoped he would engage in a discussion about the future of Egyptian politics. They organised his visa, booked him business class flights, and arranged for him to stay in the comfortable surroundings of the Ritz-Carlton.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Why has Abdul Hakim Murad not been sacked by Cambridge University?

From our UK edition

Abdul Hakim Murad is the Islamic name of a convert to Islam called Tim Winters.  He is a lecturer and tutor and director of studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge University.  Over recent years he was the sort of fellow who was forever being produced as a ‘moderate’, enlightened Muslim scholar. I always had doubts about this claim. For instance, a couple of years back, on a BBC radio programme, I pressed him on the fact that all the main schools of Islamic law still mandate the death sentence as penalty for leaving Islam. Abdul tried to pick me up on this. ‘Are you sure of that’ he pressed. I said I was.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Islamophobia is a government priority. What about Islamism?

From our UK edition

According to one of his family members Tamerlan Tsarnaev was, among other things, ‘angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.’ His efforts to refute this charge included planting bombs in the middle of a family sports event in Boston, killing - among others - an eight year old boy. The case brings to mind that of Muzzammil Hassan from western New York. Hassan was the founder of Bridges TV in the US – a station set up to help ‘non-Muslims overcome the negative images they may have of both Muslims and Islam.’ Mr Hassan was subsequently convicted and sent to prison for beheading his wife. Certainly this is not a good week for the ‘nothing to see here’ crowd.