Douglas Murray

In March of this year the Turkish government complained about an item on German television which was critical of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  A fortnight later – to prove that Germany was a free country – Jan Boehmermann read out a poem that was rude about Erdogan on his evening comedy show.  Not only did the Turkish government complain but the government of Germany acceded to the prosecution of Boehmermann in Germany. Boehmermann himself had to enter police protection. Happily the fate of poets is different in Britain to that of our kind in Germany and in the wake of the affair I instituted the ‘President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition’ to celebrate this fact.

Here is one of those stories that matters even though it preoccupies the Guardian.  Last week the celebrated novelist Lionel Shriver gave an address at the Brisbane book festival.  It was heralded as being about ‘community and belonging’ but ended up being about ‘fiction and identity politics’.  In particular Shriver (the author, most famously, of We Need to Talk About Kevin) addressed the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’.  As well as being a condemnatory term for wearing a sombrero or eating Thai food, this is also the current term for ‘making things up’ and ‘using your imagination’.  Surely this is something novelists ought to do, you ask? Apparently not.

Here's a strange thing. In a TV interview on Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton said that Isis want Donald Trump to become President of the United States. In her words, Isis are currently saying, 'Please, Allah, make Trump president of America'. Personally I have no idea which ticket Isis will be campaigning for, come November. But I do find this all very confusing. We all learnt from President Obama that Isis have absolutely nothing to do with Islam. Indeed, when the group decapitated the American hostage Peter Kassig a couple of years ago, the Commander in Chief insisted that ‘Isil’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith’. But if Isis are not Islamic, why would they be praying to Allah? Has Hillary 'mis-spoken'?

Private Eye used to run a column called the ‘Neo-philes’, listing some of the endless cases of hacks saying ‘X is the new Y’ (‘This season green is the new black’ and so on). So let me put in an early entry for the return of any such column by announcing here that ‘The Burkini is the new Hizb ut-Tahrir’. After 18 months of terrorist attacks across the continent, this summer French and now German politicians are falling over each other to call for a ban on a new Islamic swimwear garment called the ‘burkini’. This is nonsense piled on top of nonsense. Though I do not doubt he spent some time thinking about it, the inventor of Islam had very little to say about women’s beachwear.

So farewell then Anjem Choudary.  At least for a few years.  Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis.  He now faces up to ten years in prison. There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of the trial of his associate Mohammed Mizanur Rahman.  But now it’s over.  At least for a while.  There is much to say, but allow me one particular reflection for now. Like his mentor and predecessor Omar Bakri Mohammed, Anjem Choudary was always a subject of enormous interest in Britain and abroad.  Indeed you could argue that for some years now he has been Britain’s most famous Muslim.

Earlier this week the Times had a leader column entitled ‘Protect Prevent’.  As a defence of the government’s counter-extremism strategy it was all well and good, but it missed a very crucial point.  It said: ‘The success of Prevent has been undermined, however, by a failure of public relations. The government failed to cast it as an essential part of child protection, allowing the charge of “spying” to gain credence.  Similar policies designed to prevent sexual abuse or physical violence against children would never be open to that charge.’ But this charge of ‘spying’ did not simply ‘gain credence’.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest in the centre of London. It was a Sunday and the assembled group of perhaps 1,000 people marched up and down Oxford street a couple of times. This was shortly after the shootings of five police officers in Dallas, Texas while they policed a protest there. The sight of this American movement coming to London was not without its comic side. The crowd of mainly black young British people chanted a range of things, including ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ (one of the group’s hallmark chants ever since these were erroneously claimed to be the final words of Michael Brown, shot by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri in 2014).

The BBC headline says it all: ‘The killing of 84 people celebrating Bastille Day is the worst attack on France since the 13 November attacks.’ These day in Europe you don’t have to reach back many months to find carnage even exceeding that in Nice last night. We still don’t have many details about last night’s attacker. But we know that the man driving the truck was called Mohammed. Of course that doesn’t mean there is any connection to Mohammed Atta, Mohammed Merah, Mohammed Bouyeri, Mohammed Sadiq Khan, Mohammed Abrini or the most famous Mohammed of all – Mohammed. On the contrary, the striking prevalence of people called Mohammed going nuts and slaughtering everyone is just an unhappy coincidence.