Douglas Murray

I do love the Guardian. As the years go by almost no publication continues to give me such constant amusement. This week has been no exception. A couple of days after first reading it I still remain almost impossibly amused by the paper’s lead, front-page story from earlier this week. The banner headline read ‘Boris Johnson claimed Islam put Muslim world “centuries behind”.’ As the sub-header for Frances Perraudin’s piece put it: ‘Anger as 2007 essay lamenting ‘no spread of democracy’ in Islamic world comes to light.’ Comes to light, eh? Must be some under-the-counter pamphlet, previously hidden-from-public-view stuff.

The New Statesman has apologised to Sir Roger Scruton. In a statement published on its website, the magazine has admitted that in April this year its deputy editor, George Eaton, tweeted out ‘partial quotations’ from an interview with the philosopher ‘including a truncated version’ of a quotation. The New Statesman has further admitted that the effect of this quote-tampering was that: The views of Professor Scruton were not accurately represented in the tweets to his disadvantage.  We apologise for this, and regret any distress that this has caused Sir Roger. It is good of the New Statesman to finally admit what any fair observer has known for months.

I hope readers will forgive me for returning to a subject I addressed here recently. It was a reflection on the current confusion over who in our society is allowed to speak and who is not. Back then I referred to the oddity of the YouTuber Carl Benjamin being forced to live with his worst ‘joke’ forever while Jo Brand appeared to be able to be forgiven for hers in no seconds flat. Incidentally, since the comedienne advocated an upgrade in the contents of the trend for ‘milkshaking’ it has indeed been stepped up a gear.  Last weekend in Portland, Oregon so-called ‘anti-fascists’ reportedly laced their offerings with skin-corroding substances to attack a journalist.

The pace of outrage is such these days that before anybody has thought through any one outrage we are all expected to have moved onto the next one. So while everyone is still trying to work out the precise etiquette when female protestors carry out an orchestrated protest at a black tie event, perhaps readers will indulge me if I return to a previous outrage. People with a long memory will remember the dispute from not much more than a week ago regarding the comedian Jo Brand and her comments on a BBC platform in which she jokily encouraged milkshake-throwers to upgrade to throwing acid at "unpleasant characters". Reasonable people divided in a number of ways over this.  Some people said that Jo Brand was inciting violence.

One of the most enjoyable videos to watch on YouTube features Colonel Gadafi. I am not referring to those snuff videos which cover the internet in which the Libyan leader is shown getting the sharp end of the Libyan peoples’ emotions. Rather I refer to the Colonel’s seminal, though too infrequently referenced, address to the academics and students of the London School of Economics in 2010. On that occasion the Libyan dictator was given a truly magnificently fawning, indeed rather flirtatious, introduction by a female academic. She also read out a message of support from the then-director of the LSE who made some joshing jokes about how good it would be if Gadafi could only bring some Libyan weather to London.

One of the words that has become increasingly useless over recent years is ‘radicalisation’. As more and more terrorist attacks took place across the West in recent years the word got trotted out with some utility. Al-Qaeda and Isis fighters were reported to have been ‘radicalised’. Soon a whole arm of dubious expertise grew, purporting to be able to trace the various ‘paths’ to radicalisation. But at some point in the present decade the word became used, not just as a term of faux-science, but as a way to dismiss almost any position against which a certain individual or group of individuals were opposed. Voters were said to have been ‘radicalised’ before putting a mark in the box beside the name of Donald Trump in 2016.

Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob. It is now four years since the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt was fired by University College London (among other institutions who were lucky to have him). That happened after one member of the audience at a conference in Korea tweeted something he had said about working with women and professed outrage at the comment’s alleged sexism. None of the institutions which dropped Hunt asked if there was any case for the defence.

In American law there is a concept called ‘the fruit of the poison tree’ which means that if the source of some alleged evidence is rotten, or has been wrongfully obtained, then everything coming from it is also recognised as tainted. After this past week I would suggest a similar concept enters the lexicon in British journalism. Perhaps we might call it ‘the fruit of the Eaton mess’. I refer of course to the ‘interview’ with Sir Roger Scruton that George Eaton – deputy editor of the New Statesman – published last week. The interview led not only to Scruton’s firing from an unpaid government-appointed position, but to a set of excruciatingly inaccurate pieces in the rest of the media.

Civilisation only ever hangs by a thread. Today one of those threads seems to have frayed, perhaps snapped. It is impossible to watch the footage coming out of Paris, all that can be done is to groan and turn away. It is not possible to watch the spire of Notre Dame collapse. It is not possible to watch the great cathedral consumed by fire. Evelyn Waugh once said that in the event of a fire in his house, if he was able only to save his children or his library, he would save his library because books were irreplaceable. Only at a moment such as this is it possible to concede the slightest truth in that remark. Almost anything could be borne rather than the loss of this building. There will be recriminations, of course.

It isn’t easy getting around the Gulf these days. The blockade on Qatar means no direct flights from most of its neighbours, so I spend hours of layover looking at the great mountain ranges of Muscat from the antiseptic tedium of my transfer terminal.     My main reason for coming to the region is to speak in Doha for the newly revived ‘Doha Debates’. After my speech, a more than usually aggressive interviewer demands to know why Britain and other European countries have not taken in more Syrian migrants. The Emir’s sister and others are in the audience and I cannot pass up the opportunity to poke my hosts in the eye. I ask how many Syrians have been made citizens by Qatar.