Douglas Murray

Each week before June 23, I would like to nominate a ridiculous comment of the week. With the amount of folk around claiming that Britain’s exit from the EU would herald World War III, pestilence, famine and every other horseman of the apocalypse, there is no shortage of candidates. At the beginning of last week I rather assumed that David Cameron would win for attempting to posthumously recruit the British dead of Two World Wars to  the cause of the EU, claiming that the fallen had laid down their lives solely in order that Britain should not to be sovereign.  But then the PM’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, stepped up in the middle of the week and pronounced that voting to ‘Leave’ the EU would be ‘not British’.

Is Turkey part of Europe? For most of our civilisation’s history, to have even asked such a question would have been to invite derision. The Ottomans were kept out of Europe not by some early-onset prejudice, but by the armies of Europe having to beat back their repeated invasions. The question became slightly more plausible a century ago with the rise of Ataturk and the modern Turkish state (one of the only successful efforts to reconcile the Islamic religion with state power). For a brief period around the turn of the millennium, some serious people (including the British government) supported Turkey joining the EU. But today, the question has become academic — first because Turkey’s liberal trajectory long ago halted and began rolling backwards.

It’s been a terrific week for integration Britain.  First the National Union of Students (NUS) elected what the BBC joyously headlined as its ‘First black Muslim woman president.’ Wahey!  Another victory for diverse Britain.  But amid the preliminary bunting some people still remembered that Malia Bouattia is principally known for two things: a reportedly extreme opposition to some things Jewish, and an equal opposition to measures which protect the country which gave her and her family sanctuary when they fled from Algeria.  Ms Bouattia denies being an anti-Semite and insists she is, instead, simply anti-Zionist.

At the end of last month, a German comedian appeared on German television and read a poem mocking Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. Jan Böhmermann’s satire was directed, among other things, at the laws President Erdogan has been using to lock up his critics. Turkey — which David Cameron is still fighting to bring into the EU — now has some of the world’s most repressive speech laws. Numerous journalists have been arrested for ‘insulting’ President Erdogan and he has even been known to ban Twitter in the country when corruption allegations against him and his family have surfaced online. Yet until Mr Böhmermann came on the scene, one might have expected these lèse-majesté laws to remain in Turkey. Not so.

Here is a story that needs little extrapolation. A male left-wing politician in Norway – Karsten Nordal Hauken – has spoken out about his rape, a few years ago, at the hands of a Somali refugee.  The self-professed feminist and ‘anti-racist’ was subjected to a brutal anal attack in his own home. The culprit was subsequently caught and sentenced to more than four years in prison, though he is now free and due to be deported back to his native Somalia. All of which has occasioned Hauken to speak out about how guilty he himself feels.  Guilty because he says that he is ‘responsible’ for the Somali rapist being returned to Somalia. He explains that ‘[I] had a strong feeling of guilt and responsibility.

Hardly anything is less likely to keep people reading than to mention an exciting evening in Toronto.  But stick with me. Because last Friday night in Toronto there was a debate (organised by the Munk debates, which can be watched in full here) on the great migration crisis which pitted Louise Arbour and Simon Schama against Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn.  Regular readers will know my views of Simon Schama on this matter, so I was looking forward to watching this exchange in the hope of seeing him get what in technical debate-speak is known as his ‘arse handed to him on a plate’.

Well at least we all know the form by now.  This morning Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they haven't previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack. The standard response now goes as follows.  First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains.  Briefly there is some shock.  On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing 'Imagine there's no countries’.  Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn as ‘inappropriate’.

On Monday night I took part in a discussion on free speech in London for the think-tank Policy Exchange. The other speakers were ‘feminist comedienne’ Kate Smurthwaite, a student called Kitty Parker Brooks and the wonderful Munira Mirza.  Jess Phillips MP failed to show up, which was a shame because I wanted to decide for myself whether she is the free-thinking future-leader acclaimed by Julie Burchill or the PC-party-line clutz who recently compared New Year’s Eve in Cologne to any night in Birmingham. Anyhow, the argument I made was that two things are putting huge pressure on free speech and giving enormous impetus to the censors on campuses and elsewhere.  These are social media and mass migration.