Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
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For many years, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, has been one of my closest enemies. In Switzerland and France this Islamist dauphin had a slightly hard time establishing his reputation. This was not just due to his poor scholarship (the basis of which lay in a fawning book about his
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The German public have, as predicted, kept ahold of nurse. But it is the breakthrough of the AfD into the German Parliament that is causing headlines around the world. Of course the four-year old party’s electoral success is also unsurprising. In elections last September the AfD were elected to representative roles in most of the
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It’s all a long time ago now isn’t it? All of three days since someone put a bomb on a London Underground train and then stepped out of the carriage. Thankfully the detonator went off without managing to trigger the main bomb, which isn’t a mistake we can hope for every time. 30 people were injured on
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I’ve been in Los Angeles for the last week, and it takes a special set of occurrences for someone to return to the UK from LA and think that Britain is getting a bit weird. Yet we appear to have managed it. While I was away there was the row about Jacob Rees-Mogg expressing his
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Four years ago, I pointed out here that today’s anti-fascists appeared to be getting rather fascistic. The occasion for that observation then was a group of ‘anti-fascists’ surrounding a man in Scotland and screaming at him to go back to where he came from. For some reason that action was deemed ‘anti-fascist’ rather than ‘fascist’ because
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People sometimes accuse me of being an immovable pessimist about our continent’s future. And I normally reply with the simple truth that when the facts are pessimistic, I am pessimistic. Allow me to highlight three recent causes for pessimism. In my recent blog on the now routine, nay mundane, acts of terrorism occurring in Europe,
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It’s just over a week since 15 people were killed in an Islamist attack in Barcelona, Spain. It appears that the person who organised the cell involved in that attack was an Imam called Abdelbaki Es Satty. In the days that have followed we have also learned that the country only narrowly avoided a far
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I sometimes wonder whether news like this from last week… and news like this from this week… … will ever get joined up. Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. Meantime I see that the lights were turned off on the Eiffel Tower again last night, this time to pay tribute to the dead in Barcelona.
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There are some foreign words so expressive that you long to absorb them into your own language, to add breadth, colour and depth. ‘Asshat’ (or ‘ass-hat’) for instance. This fine north-Americanism denotes a person who has their head so far up their own ass [Eng: arse] that they are literally wearing their ass as a
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So here’s an interesting thing. Footage so striking that even the BBC has run with it. This is the film of a migrant boat landing on a beach in the south of Spain. In recent years for a whole variety of reasons, Spain has avoided the worst of the migrant crisis. Perhaps that’s why these
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I have been out of the country for a little while, doing my bit to support the Greek economy. I return to find a most surprising subject for the latest two minutes of hate. Lest anyone think I’m just carrying water for a friend I suppose I should say at the outset that I don’t
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Anyone who has followed the free-speech wars in America over recent years will know that by now, basically, nobody can speak anywhere. Especially at centres like that one-time home of free speech, Berkeley, California, you now cannot speak in public if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re gay or straight and if your
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Freedom House is a remarkable and largely admirable organisation. Over the years it has done some great work challenging governments with a tendency towards the authoritarian. Yet its attacks on the government of Hungary are increasingly off-kilter. Regular readers will recall that the Hungarian government differs from the German government in believing that it is
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Last weekend Daniel Barenboim brought the Staatskapelle Berlin to perform at the BBC Proms for a cycle of Elgar’s symphonies. As Elgar only finished two of the things, it is among the easier symphonic cycles to pull off. But the Staatskapelle played beautifully over two nights at the Albert Hall, with moments of outstanding musicianship.
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Imagine if some far right militia had just taken to the streets of Germany. Imagine that the militia covered their faces with balaclavas. Imagine if they smashed up buildings, set light to cars and otherwise made the centre of a major German city resemble a war-zone. Would it not attract attention? Would it not also,
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In what I promise won’t become a regular feature, I thought it worth issuing an update under the heading ‘I told you so’. It relates to two recent, connected pieces of news. The first comes from Italy where the government is now threatening to close its ports. The ongoing influx of migrants from Africa is
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These are difficult times across Europe. From the endless iterations of the eurozone crisis to the Brexit negotiations beginning in earnest — these and many more challenges will face our continent for years to come. But underneath them all, lies a whole set of other ructions: subterranean events which lead to subterranean public concerns and
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Well this is interesting. I had got used to the standard response to terror. I had thought that when 22 young people get blown up by a suicide bomber in Manchester we were meant to say that it made ‘no sense’, that it ‘wouldn’t change us’ and that ‘love’ must overcome ‘hate’. I thought that
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So it seems that it has happened again. A third terrorist attack in as many months on London’s streets. Once again using a vehicle. Once again aimed at Londoners. Except that this time it seems the terrorist himself is not a follower of Isis. Indeed, reports suggest that the attacker may have been a non-Muslim
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One of the interesting things about ‘diversity’ is that it allows almost anything to happen. Consider Naz Shah, the MP for Bradford West. As I have said before, there is something strange about Bradford, because the city has managed in recent years to elect representatives of three parties. These include the Labour party (Naz Shah),
