Douglas Murray

Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, like the recent attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, our society falls into the usual platitudes. The attack gets condemned, by most people. The ideology behind the attack is fudged so that it becomes as non-specific as possible. What almost never gets any time in the discussion is the question of answers. It is easy to say ‘We must never give in to terror’ or ‘We must defend the right to free speech.’ But personally I like to get more specific than this. Imagine if you were the UK government, say, and had some power actually to do something about it. That brings me to the matter of Sayed Ata’ollah Mohajerani.

The attack on Salman Rushdie on-stage in New York is deeply shocking and sadly not surprising. People have been calling for his death for over three decades, ever since the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. That novel led to a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and the Iranian government putting a bounty on the British author´s head. They were encouraged in this by Muslim leaders in Britain. The repercussions for Rushdie were swift. Rushdie himself went into hiding, protected by the security services of the British state at the behest of Margaret Thatcher´s government. He stayed in hiding for many years, during which time there were numerous attempts on his life, including from an Iranian agent who blew himself up in London.

It’s possible that I owe Joe Biden some sort of an apology, however mealy-mouthed it might be. Last week I mentioned here the weird prevarication from the US government and its supporters over whether or not the US is technically in a recession. It arose from the news that the US had two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. Biden’s critics – myself included – leapt to declare the US in recession. According to the Bank of England, the UK is heading for a recession too, so there should be no especial shame in accepting the fact and then trying to deal with it. But then last Friday the US jobs figures landed and it became clear that the situation in the country is curiouser than we might have predicted. Everybody was expecting a contraction in the economy.

One problem of being mugged, I am told, is not just the event itself but the dreams of violence that follow. If a thug relieves you of your wallet and you hand it over without a fight, for some time you will keep dreaming about what you might have achieved had the mugger confronted you when you had a gun or chainsaw to hand. Or if you had studied martial arts and could do over the punk in the style of Jackie Chan. I must admit that similar dreams now haunt me whenever I see the Just Stop Oil protestors. Needless to say, their cause is wrong as well as irritating. Everyone in this country is suffering a cost of living crisis. Everyone looks at their energy bills and wonders ‘How did that happen?

In this most holy month of Pride I have been making my observances by thinking about shame. After all, shame is the reason that ‘Pride’ has taken on the meaning it has in recent years. If gay people were once made to feel shame for their sexuality then the counterbalance was apparently to encourage them to feel pride in it. A preferable countermove for some of us would have been simple equality, making sexual preference morally neutral: neither worse nor better. But no, somebody decided on pride, and pride it now is. However, there are several things that this leads to – not least a turn against the use of shame. In recent years, ‘shaming’ people has become something which you should never do, and not only in the realms of sexuality.

As a general rule, you should never talk about a film you haven’t seen. But The Lady of Heaven is proving a tricky film to catch. Plus whole crowds of people are talking about it without having seen it, so perhaps my joining in won’t do too much harm. Although it sounds like it might be some work of Vatican kitsch, The Lady of Heaven is actually about another religion. A boy in modern-day Iraq loses his mother and through doing so learns the story of Fatima, one of the daughters of Muhammad. And here is where an apparently sweeping historical drama enters tricky terrain. For not all cinema audiences have taken the film to heart. The citizens of Bradford, for instance, turn out to include a surprising proportion of film critics. Like me, they have not actually seen the film.

Anyone who has passed through an education in the past decade will have encountered the term ‘toxic masculinity’. It is one of the many charming phrases that our age has come up with to pathologise ordinary people. Brewing for some decades, the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ was brought into the mainstream in the last ten years by fourth-wave feminists intent on portraying half of our species as ‘problematic’, to use another of the delightful watchwords of our era. The simple assertion of the ‘toxic masculinity’ crowd is that specifically male behaviours are a problem. The most extreme aspects of male misbehaviour are portrayed as though they are routine.

I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking back this week through the vast underground vaults at Spectator HQ I see that centuries ago in April 2020 I explained the problem with us humans as a species. As I said back then, someone always shags a monkey. There are almost eight billion of us on this planet today, and the likelihood that we’re all going to make judicious decisions all the time is vanishingly small. The mating decisions of the species alone are notoriously prone to trial and error. And the entire future of our species rides perpetually along this cliff edge. Last month I read in the Indian press of four men arrested by police in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Their crime?

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It is six years since Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by somebody who appeared to be a sort of aspiring Nazi. Back then, various campaign groups and newspapers in this country had no problems with claiming that guilt for that attack could be liberally spread around. Some said that everybody on the political right bore responsibility. Others claimed that anyone who was leading Britain’s ‘Leave’ campaign in the EU referendum shared the blame. It was different in October last year, when Sir David Amess MP was murdered – also in his constituency.

I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious scandal? Ten years ago Andrew Mitchell MP actually had a scandal involving a gate and caused the dashing of one of my greatest hopes. This was the hope that some day a scandal would emerge involving a gate, and that when hacks tried to call it ‘gategate’ we would finally realise how silly all this was, and do away with the cliché entirely. No such luck. In recent weeks alone we have had ‘partygate’ and ‘beergate’. In fact, reading the news I sometimes wonder whether our media is not simply looking for the next thing they can affix ‘-gate’ to. Because we do seem quite amazingly distracted.