Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
Those of us who believe in freedom of expression have felt mighty lonely this week. We have watched as, one by one, our fellow opponents of cancel culture have given into the temptations of censorship. Many on the right in particular appear to have fallen under the spell of suppression. Gone is their devotion to
One of the most curious things following Hamas’s massacre of the Jews on 7 October was the silence of Britain’s fascism-spotters. You know these people. They see fascism everywhere. Everything from a fiery speech by a Tory politician to millions of ‘gammon’ going out to vote for Brexit reminds them of the 1930s. The minute
‘We are the victims… therefore nobody should blame us for the things we do.’ Who do you think said this? Some blue-haired campus activist who’s convinced they’re suffering from structural oppression? A trans campaigner, perhaps, who thinks being misgendered is an act of violence? Maybe some other social justice type who feels victimised by everything
So now we know what a ‘globalised intifada’ might look like. That’s what people chanted for on the streets of London on Saturday. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada’, they yelled. And now it’s happening, in Dagestan, where last night there was a violent hounding of Israelis arriving in the country by mobs
We have seen many grim images over the past two weeks. Images of the apocalyptic, Isis-style violence visited upon the people of Israel by Hamas. Images of destruction and grief in Gaza as Israel hammers Hamas for its crimes against the Jewish people, as is its right. And yet it is an image from London,
I knew the police had lost the plot, but even I didn’t expect them to start issuing chin-stroking theological justifications for jihad. It happened on Saturday during the ‘March for Palestine’ in London. Protestors chanted for ‘Muslim armies’ to commence ‘jihad’ against Israel. To most ears, it will have sounded menacing, threatening even. To the
For more than a year, English footballers took the knee in solidarity with a petty criminal who was murdered by a cop in Minneapolis. Yet after the racist slaughter of more than a thousand Israelis, the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust, England’s Football Association can’t even be bothered to light up the
I have a question about the events of the past few days: where is Antifa? Where are those self-styled anti-fascists who love to rage against anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of the 1930s? Jews in Israel have been rounded up and murdered. Disgusting anti-Semites are on the streets of Sydney screaming, ‘Gas the Jews!
Leftists love to fantasise about how heroic they’d have been when Jews were being rounded up in the 1930s. ‘I’d have said something’, they insist. Well, Jews are being rounded up again. They’re being kidnapped, humiliated, paraded through the streets, slaughtered. And leftists are definitely saying something. They’re saying: ‘Good’. These are war crimes. They
Tyranny is a sneaky thing. It often scurries in on the back of controversy. It is often when people are angry about something that authoritarians spy an opportunity to take a potshot at liberty. And, boom, before you know it politicians are on TV calling for entire media channels to be shut down. This is
Justin Trudeau’s government sees fascists everywhere, except when one is standing right under their nose. That’s the brilliant if bleak irony of the Canadian parliament’s standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old veteran of the Ukrainian military who, it turns out, fought under the Nazis in the Second World War. It was an extraordinary sight,
It is often on the back of public fury that dangerous new precedents are set. Authoritarianism can sneak in when we’re all hopping mad about something or someone. So mad that we don’t even notice that society’s rules are being rewritten in an illiberal way. I fear it’s happening again, with YouTube’s demonetisation of Russell
Has cancel culture finally met its match? Have the new blacklisters who hasten to erase anyone who gives voice to a view that displeases them finally had their comeuppance? The roaring success of Róisín Murphy’s new album, Hit Parade, suggests it’s possible. The digital inquisitors tried to silence the queen of new disco over her
Of all the smug, bitter things the Guardian has published over the years, its review of Róisín Murphy’s new album has got to be one of the worst. Ms Murphy is a musical genius but a wicked woman, the review essentially says. Why? Because she committed the blasphemy of criticising puberty blockers. Switch off her
In the past they would put a witches’ bridle on women who yapped too much. Any woman judged to be a gossip or a hysteric or just too darn opinionated risked having this iron muzzle attached to her head to keep her babbling tongue in place. That’d shut her up. Today, more subtle methods of
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any madder, you find out the following: at the Co-operative bank, if you’re a murderer of women you can keep your account, but if you accurately describe women as adult human females, you can’t. According to news reports, the Co-op bank, which prides itself on being super-ethical, allowed
Imagine if the Mayor of London was a Tory and his website featured an image of a black family alongside the words: ‘Doesn’t represent real Londoners.’ Imagine if this right-leaning mayor had weird rules on ‘branding’, one of which was that images of young black families should not be used in mayor-related publicity because these
So, let me get this right: at the Edinburgh Fringe, comedians who make jokes about killing and raping women are welcome, but comedians who defend women’s rights are not? How else are we to explain the surreal situation where Frankie Boyle, notorious cracker of misogynistic gags, is having the red carpet rolled out for him at the
‘My breasts were taken away from me (and) the tissue was incinerated.’ Every word of destransitioner Chloe Cole’s testimony to the US Congress was harrowing. But it was her calm, frank description of a doctor’s destruction of her breasts when she was just 15 years old that haunts the mind. Such a sinister violation of
Hold on: I thought it was the wimpish new left that loses its rag over ‘offensive’ culture. Aren’t snowflakes usually self-styled radicals, with multicoloured hair and pronouns in their bios, who rage like overgrown children against movies or books or jokes that rattle their fragile sensibilities? Yet now it’s men on the right, blokes who
