Douglas Murray

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.

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 that Britain should not have a counter-terrorism policy, a view which is increasingly echoed at the top of the Labour party.  Interestingly enough, since pointing out that the letter’s signatories included people who are not only not academics, but extremists, I have learnt a most interesting thing.  A signatory informs me that letter was not just signed by that friend of ‘Jihadi John’, Asim Qureshi, but was in fact organised by him.

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’.