Douglas Murray

One of the nicest things in life is the discovery that one-time enemies are in fact terrific, brave people who you might have been wrong about and have grown to respect. For instance, when I was growing up I had a rather marked dislike of Germaine Greer. Then, in recent years, I discovered she was one of the only adults left in the room. Likewise Trevor Phillips. When he was head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission we often used to find ourselves at loggerheads. I recall a panel many years ago when, sitting in the green room beforehand, one of the other panellists asked me what I did. Trevor butted in, with sad accuracy, ‘Douglas’s job is to try to make me lose my job’. He was always enormously likeable, even when we were in disagreement.

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 the target was Nigel Farage and the mob proclaimed themselves to be ‘anti-fascists.’ To which one might add that North Korea is officially titled ‘The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’.

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 worse assault, and that the cell who were subsequently involved in a shoot-out with police had been planning to blow up a set of Spanish monuments including Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece, the church of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Last night there were only two attacks in Europe. In the centre of Brussels a Somali-born man shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘Allah is Greatest’) attacked soldiers with a machete before being shot dead.

I sometimes wonder whether news like this from last week... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boon6MkE7UI and news like this from this week... [caption id="attachment_9919952" align="alignnone" width="730"] The scene at Las Ramblas following the attack in Barcelona[/caption] ... 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. It’s the 11th time the Eiffel Tower has shut its lights down this year.

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 hat. It is a term for which there is no precise equivalent in our English demotic. But it is useful, and I recommend its adoption. The specific cause of this recommendation is that I can think of almost nobody who claims to be any type of ‘community representative’ or ‘leader’ who is not a complete and utter asshat.

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 images have broken through where the daily images from Italy this summer have not. Anyway, it’s hard to think of a more vivid encapsulation of the ongoing suicide of our continent than this one. If you believe Angela Merkel, the European Commission and most of our political class, the people storming that Spanish beach are doctors, engineers and physicists fleeing the terrible civil war in Morocco, and just desperate to lend their skills to our continent.

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 skin is white or not. Now to the great list of categories of people who should not be allowed to speak in America we can add scientists. Richard Dawkins is, by any standards, one of the most famous scientists on the planet. His books have brought writing about science to a world-wide audience.

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 not desirable to invite the entire developing world to come and live in your country. The Hungarian government – led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban – also differs from the views of Hungary’s wealthiest son, George Soros, who along with the numerous NGOs that he funds has spent recent years undermining the borders of Europe, and specifically the borders of Hungary.