Douglas Murray

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 into a busy pedestrian area in Berlin. In the immediate aftermath the media were understandably wary. It could be a Glasgow-like accident or it could be a deliberate act. Struggling with this conundrum the BBC plumped for ‘Lorry kills nine at Christmas market.’ Naughty lorry. To date the attack still doesn’t have a hashtag that’s stuck. There was an early push for ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but for some reason it didn’t catch.

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 male Muslim to stab.  As always we’ll learn more about this in the coming days.  But in the meantime, here are some things that we are very unlikely to hear. It is very unlikely that anybody will argue that we should investigate and analyse the foreign policy views of the knife-wielding maniac at Forest Hill.

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 a push-over and the new government was said to have been wary about releasing the report in its current state. One can see why.  Although it will take some days to read and absorb the entire 200-page document, it is clear from the executive summary that Casey has pulled few punches.

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 that he was ‘racist, homophobic, misogynist’, from the Conservative Marcus Fysh that he was ‘the orange prince of American self-publicity’ and from the SNP’s Gavin Newlands that he was not only ‘racist, sexist and bigoted’, but ‘an idiot’. So perhaps now that the giggling has subsided, we can get down to a more realistic assessment of the man and his views.

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 see that Begg is indeed an extremist. On Friday I mentioned that industry of clueless klutzes and sinister beards who make up much of the ‘interfaith’ racket in this country. Paragraphs 33 and 34 of the judgement in the case of Begg vs Beeb might serve as the purest distillation of this phenomenon.

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 any good at all.  So for instance in her inaugural Globe production of A Midsummer Night's Dream she chose not only to change the setting of the play (which is sort of up for grabs) but to render the work gibberish in the process.  The love-potion became a date-rape drug, thus helping to make the character motivations and plot not 'more relevant' but simply inexplicable.  She also chose to change the language.

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. Anyhow, before they knew it the phone-video had made its way onto social media and from there to The Sun. Soon sinister Muslim spokespeople were reminding everyone that their religion was to be ‘respected’ and never to be ‘mocked’. Smith has apparently been getting death threats since then. All of which tells us nothing new about the world’s most intolerant religion.