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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We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4, in which the future foreign secretary Boris Johnson was named as the winner of Douglas Murray’s ‘President Erdogan Offensive Poetry’ competition I’m pleased to announce that we have a winner of The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, and here
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Since my Tuesday piece on the Berlin attack – when, as the BBC is still saying, a lorry ‘went on a rampage’ in the city – a number of readers have asked if I could give them this week’s lottery numbers. It is true that much of what I predicted has already come true. For instance, I anticipated that
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Well the year isn’t finished, but thanks to what looks to be the combination of the world’s most peaceable religion, a truck and a temptingly bustling Christmas market in Berlin I’m going to have reprise my most frequently written piece of recent years. So here we go again. On Monday night a truck was driven
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A man was arrested on Monday of this week after stabbing a man on a passenger train at Forest Hill station in London. Reports of the incident say that the knife-wielding assailant had shouted ‘Death to Muslims’ and ‘Go back to Syria’ among other things. Some reports suggest that he may have been looking for a
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This morning’s Sun carries the story that all British soldiers involved in killings in Northern Ireland during the three decades of the Troubles now face investigation. More than 1,000 ex-service personnel ‘will be viewed as manslaughter or murder suspects in legal inquiry.’ According to information received by the paper, 238 ‘fatal incidents’ involving British forces
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Dame Louise Casey’s review into ‘opportunity and integration’ is finally out. Commissioned a year ago by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and finished some time ago, there were fears that this review would remain ‘on ice’. Casey – who also led the government’s review of the Rotherham child-grooming scandal – is nobody’s idea of
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Anybody who has observed Germany in recent years may have noticed that the country’s politicians have gone a bit nuts. For instance, it isn’t just Chancellor Merkel but a broad swathe of the German political class, who believe it wise to invite an additional 1-2 percent of the population into the country in a year
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Even in its twilight years the Guardian remains the gift that keeps on giving. As the tin-shaking below the pieces grows stronger (generally presenting the publication as the only barrier between the reader and incipient fascism) the pieces remain reliably ridiculous. Yet even by these standards, Monday produced perhaps the Guardian’s worst shake-down effort to date.
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My editor has received a letter of complaint. The SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh writes: Dear Fraser, I read Douglas Murray’s blog on Friday “Where’s the proof that Donald Trump is homophobic?” with great interest. It’s fantastic to see the Spectator embracing the zeitgeist and embracing “post-truth” politics in its own right by now ignoring facts
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Did anybody see Question Time last night? The panel largely seemed to be competing to out-outrage each other about Donald Trump. And in their great Trump-off most of the guests continued to do that sawn-off shotgun ‘phobes’ thing. Trump as a ‘misogynist, homophobic, racist, Islamophobe’ etc. You would have thought after the second election in
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For 18 months, Donald Trump was amazingly useful to British politicians. Whatever their party, he provided them with the most magnificent means with which to polish their liberal credentials. In January, when the British Parliament spent three hours debating a public petition to ban Trump from entering the country, we learned from Labour’s Rupa Huq
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For 18 months, Donald Trump was amazingly useful to British politicians. Whatever their party, he provided them with the most magnificent means with which to polish their liberal credentials. In January, when the British Parliament spent three hours debating a public petition to ban Trump from entering the country, we learned from Labour’s Rupa Huq
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There have been two fascinating developments in the case of Shakeel Begg, the Imam of the Lewisham Islamic Centre. As I described here on Friday, Begg sued the BBC for describing him as an extremist, only for the judge in the case to last week dismiss the claim and confirm for the whole world to
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Shakeel Begg is an influential extremist who is also chief Imam of the Lewisham Islamic Centre. His radical views are readily available and well-known. But despite these downsides a chap like him also possesses certain considerable advantages. Not least is the fact that he lives in a society which is only very slowly waking up to the threat
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I have never met Donald Trump, but I knew his parents. A fact that makes me feel about 100 years old. Which was actually nearer the age Fred and Mary Anne Trump were when, as a teenager, I made my first trip to New York. I remember riding backwards in their limousine on the way
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The exit of Emma Rice from her position as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe is a happy day for Shakespeare and a happy day for the Globe. Rice – for those who haven’t followed her work – is one of those directors who thinks that Shakespeare doesn’t quite cut it and needs serious intervention to be
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Both Brendan and I have written about the strange martyrdom of Louis Smith. But here is an ugly coda. As readers may recall, the Olympic athlete got drunk at a friend’s wedding and, along with a friend, ended up doing a joke version of the Muslim call to prayer. Something to do with Aladdin apparently.
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At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect
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After voting for Brexit earlier this year did you come over all homophobic? I mean after you did all the obvious stuff like beat up a few ethnic minorities and burn a Torah. A piece in the Guardian at the weekend explains that ‘Homophobic attacks in UK rose 147 per cent in three months after Brexit vote.’ It
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It is a shame that ‘subversion’ of the state is no longer a crime in Britain. One result of it not being so is that people have become blind to the idea that it is even going on. The other day I wrote about the ‘academics’ who had signed a letter to the Guardian insisting
