Brendan O’Neill, Author at The Spectator

Saturday

12 February 2005

A floating, maybe drowning voter

John Harris, the mop-topped commentator from Manchester, better known as a music journalist (and a very fine one) than a political correspondent, is in a pickle. Having voted Labour his entire adult life, he now finds himself horrified by the New Labour project, and by Blair and Blairism in particular, and wonders whether it isn’t time to swear allegiance to another party. In Harris’s childhood home ‘the Labour Party was like Church’, and that morning in 1985 when, as a 15-year-old, he came down to breakfast to find a Labour party membership form next to his cereal bowl it was the ‘equivalent of Confirmation’. In So Now Who Do We Vote For?

Saturday

4 December 2004

Brendan O’Neill

Fighting the ‘good’ fight

Millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group’s origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad against the Soviets. We even know, thanks to the editor of the British-Arab magazine Al-Quds, what Osama likes to have for his dinner (salty cheese and a few fried eggs, since you ask). Yet this, as far as I can tell, is the first book to cover the Islamist venture into the Balkans in the mid-1990s, the period between the Afghan war and 9/11 when Mujahedin forces kept themselves busy by declaring holy war against the Serbs.

Saturday

31 July 2004

Brendan O’Neill

What a load of bllcks

Young men are being bullied into examining themselves for testicular cancer. It’s not very dignified, says Brendan O’Neill, and may do more harm than good Why is New Britain so obsessed with its young men’s testicles? If, like me, you are aged between 15 and 34 you will almost certainly have been advised by a doctor or a magazine feature or a glossy poster in a GP’s waiting room to test yourself regularly for signs of testicular cancer (or the Big TC for short). Health authorities and cancer charities are spending millions of pounds on ‘raising awareness’ of this disease, in order to keep us blokes on full alert for anything abnormal in the underwear department.

Saturday

10 July 2004

Brendan O’Neill

Invasion of the lawyers

Brendan O’Neill says that America’s first gift to Iraq has been the compensation culture and a flood of personal injury claims Whatever you think about democracy and human rights, the Coalition successfully imported one thing from the West into post-Saddam Iraq — the compensation culture. Iraq has become a hotbed of legal claims and counterclaims, of individual complaints and class action lawsuits, for everything from physical and mental injury to destruction of property. Iraqis demand compensation for damage caused to their gardens by American tanks, or for the scrapes and dents to their cars caused by run-ins with speeding Humvees.

Saturday

21 February 2004

Brendan O’Neill

Not a shred of evidence

Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war.

Saturday

13 September 2003

Brendan O’Neill

How we trained al-Qa’eda

For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11 attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked – the role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into the roving Islamic terrorists of today.