Douglas Murray

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.

One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘the conceptual penis as a social construct.’ This was an academic paper which proposed that: 'The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.' This gobbledegook was presented in an academic journal, was peer-reviewed and published in Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax. A big, beautiful brilliant hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immersed themselves in the academic BS of their time.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the interesting question of whether or not the former chief strategist to the President of the United States is too fringe a figure to be allowed to speak in public. A lot of very prominent people seem to think that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be given a platform. And among two venues to have recently invited him, the New Yorker promptly disinvited him from their festival under fire from political heavyweights including former ‘funny man’ Jim Carrey. By contrast, the Economist managed to hold firm, surviving the withdrawal of a British blogger and going ahead as planned with their live interview.

In July I did two live events in Dublin and London with Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. At each of these venues (the first at the 3Arena in Dublin, and the second at the O2 Arena in London) there were something in the region or eight or nine thousand people in attendance. All of which makes them some of the biggest speaking events in recent history. In fact the Guinness Book of Records is apparently looking into the whole business. Anyhow, after a couple of months of delay, videos of these events are now emerging online. They are available at various venues, notably at Pangburn Philosophy’s YouTube channel here (for Dublin) and here (for London). I suspect they will get a fair amount of online views in the days to come.