Douglas Murray

I have been travelling in the Middle East for the last few weeks and slightly regret returning to the maelstrom of ancient animosities and unbridgeable sectarianism that is modern Britain. But in my absence I see that one of the worst tropes of our time has been stalking unhindered across the land. That is, of course, the latest push to make an equivalence between anti-Semitism and the crock term ‘Islamophobia’. It is not just in the UK that this play has been made. In America over recent days people have been able to follow the progress of the new Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, with her supporters deciding to deflect attention from her expressions of anti-Semitism by claiming ‘Islamophobia’.

Of all the points made on the case of Shamima Begum, the most relevant has been utterly absent. That is, who might actually be responsible for this appalling young woman being who she is and where she is. In recent days the government’s own extremism commissioner, Sara Khan, has made an uncommon set of interventions. In each of these she has insisted that Begum must return to the UK and that not doing so will ‘play into the hands of the extremists’. Some of us are becoming a little jaded about the number of things said to risk ‘playing into the hands of extremists’. Over the last two decades one might easily have come to the conclusion that the only thing that doesn’t ‘play into the hands of the extremists’ is allowing the extremists to win.

Some years ago I was introduced to one notion of how to tackle dishonest and insincere accusations of racism. It was not just that there should be a social cost to making a dishonest claim, but that the cost should equal that borne by somebody who is accurately and correctly identified as a racist. Without such a disincentive there is no reason (other than decency and honesty, which may sometimes be in short supply) for people not to level such accusations insincerely in order to beat away any and all critics. Since Monday night I have been wondering, amid much else, whether some similar aspiration could be encouraged regarding hate crimes. In recent days and weeks there has been much comment on the case of Jussie Smollett.

Today is the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s issue of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing the novel The Satanic Verses. In the run-up to this anniversary there has as usual been much discussion of the controversy, but very little about the novel itself. This is consistent with the pattern of the last three decades. Of the two Satanic Verses that exist – the controversy and the novel – people were always familiar with the former and deeply unclear about the latter. To this day very few people seem interested in what is between the covers of the book that stirred the Ayatollah’s ire.

The first successful prosecution in the UK for the crime of female genital mutilation (FGM) has been widely covered. Not least because the laws that made this barbaric practice a crime have been on the books since 1985 without a single successful prosecution until this week. So the fact that a 37-year old mother from east London was convicted of the crime at the Old Bailey this week is significant. But there is something about this case that still needs to be noted. Campaigners against FGM are rightly saying that they hope that this prosecution will lead to more people coming forward to report the crime.

The centenaries of the Great War came to a close in November with commemorations of the 1918 Armistice. But one final British centenary associated with that conflict has just passed. Few people on the mainland will be aware of it, though it has certainly been marked in the Outer Hebrides. It is the commemoration of the worst peacetime naval disaster since the sinking of the Titanic. And one of the most terrible, poignant and final tragedies to have come from the Great War. On the evening of 31 December 1918, a vessel was boarding passengers at the Kyle of Lochalsh. His Majesty’s Yacht Iolaire had been requisitioned by the Admiralty to transport some of the hundreds of Royal Naval Reservists heading back to the Isle of Lewis and Harris after four years of service.

We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Douglas Murray on Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson: In the magazine this week I have written a piece about the Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson. He has been in the UK over the last week to talk about his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Among many other things – much more of which I go into in the piece – his visit showed up the UK’s broadcast media in a very bad light. On Saturday morning, Peterson made an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme. They gave him a hurried four minutes at the end of the show.

The traditional Christmas market is one of the great sights in any European capital at this time of year. But as with all traditions it evolves over time. A few evenings ago, I went to visit the Duomo in Milan and walked through the beautiful Christmas market in the square surrounding it. It was all there: the Christmas lights, the chalet-like huts selling warm food and drink, the fake snow. And, of course, the crash barriers. For since December 2016, when Anis Amri hijacked a truck in Berlin, shot the driver and then ploughed the vehicle into the local Christmas market (killing eleven more people) crash barriers have become a necessary feature of any European Christmas market.

This is a good time to bury bad news. And sure enough it turns out that a cross-party group of MPs and peers that includes the failed MP Baroness Warsi has chosen this moment to try to persuade the government to adopt their own definition of ‘Islamophobia’. Long-time readers will know that I have no sympathy for this term. The most succinct summary of the problem is often erroneously attributed to the late Christopher Hitchens. It is that, Islamophobia is ‘a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.’ That ‘Islamophobia’ was created by fascists is provable: the term was conjured up and pumped into the international debate around politics and religion decades ago by the Muslim Brotherhood.

In between the small amount of other news this week there has been a certain amount of attention on the plight of the Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi and her family. Bibi has spent most of this decade on death-row in Pakistan. Her crime is that a bigoted Muslim neighbour of hers made up a crock accusation against her and said she had blasphemed against Islam. In the last week there has been some attention on the fact that various countries are looking into giving asylum to Bibi and her family – Britain among them. But it appeared earlier this week that the UK would not be offering this genuine asylum seeker any asylum because there were concerns about – ahem – ‘community’ relations within the UK should she be allowed to move here.

There are times when you wonder whether our culture is too stupid to survive. The thought has kept occurring over recent days as I have watched the cooked-up furore over the appointment of Sir Roger Scruton to chair a British government commission looking into beauty in architecture. What are Scruton’s qualifications for this unpaid job? Well, he has written two exceedingly influential books on architecture, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1980) and The Classical Vernacular (1995), as well as numerous papers and articles on the subject. He has spent more than half a century thinking about the question.