Douglas Murray

A nation rejoices! After a campaign waged from the political right and left, the UK can now finally welcome back Shaker Aamer. This is the man generally described as ‘the last British resident’ in Guantanamo. As he returns to these shores we can confidently predict that he will now be accorded the same human-rights hero status previously accorded to such luminaries of that scene as Moazzam Begg. Of course Aamer’s supporters claim that he was only in Afghanistan in 2001 because he was carrying out ‘voluntary work for an Islamic charity.’  Another case of someone just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Funnily enough Shaker Aamer is an old friend of Moazzam Begg.

In recent weeks there have been two prominent examples of what some people in Britain term ‘Islamophobia’. The first involved a woman on a London bus shouting to two identifiably Muslim women that they should ‘go back to their own country.’  She goes on to call them ‘Fucking Isis bitches’. The whole ugly scene was recorded by another passenger and widely trailed around the internet, subsequently leading to a woman’s arrest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfQryY7Jvy4 The second incident was also filmed on a passenger’s phone and took place on a London bus a few days later.

Regular readers may recall the charming group ‘Cage’. This is the organisation which made headlines earlier this year when Mohammed Emwazi (aka ‘Jihadi John’) was outed as one of their associates. The response of ‘Cage’ was to extol what a ‘beautiful’ young man Jihadi John was, and claim that if it weren’t for Britain’s security services their friend would never have thought of cutting off infidel heads in the Syrian desert. After that PR low, the Charity Commission suggested that UK charities like the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust might be unwise to continue shelling out hundreds of thousands of pounds to the group. There are strict rules in the UK about the activities of charities.

The British government has published its counter-extremism strategy, unencumbered by the Liberal Democrats who held a similar strategy up for five years of coalition. There is much to be said about this strategy, a strategy which is to my mind the most advanced, careful and rigorous counter-extremism strategy anywhere in the Western world. While the US government remains unwilling to even identify the major source of extremism in the world today, the UK government is taking a lead in being willing to both identify and tackle Islamist extremism as the major source of concern, while acknowledging that other concerning types of extremism also exist. Crucially the strategy strengthens the powers of Ofcom, the Charity Commission and other bodies to do the job they need to do.

The things people say in anger are generally the most revealing things of all.  So it was on last night’s Question Time when a clearly very angry Simon Schama confronted Rod Liddle of this parish on the question of migrants. I’m sure Rod himself will have something to say about this, but I thought it very striking that in a debate over whether the UK should take in millions more economic migrants and asylum seekers, Simon Schama chose to level two insults in particular at Rod. The first was that Rod is a ‘hack’ who writes for the newspapers.  Of course Simon Schama clearly regards his own voluminous contributions to the press on both sides of the Atlantic as being on a far higher plane.

I am in Copenhagen at the moment - of which more anon.  But before fleeing these shores I had time to pop in to see something I want to recommend to any readers in the London area. For the rest of this weekend you can still see the 2015 Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall Galleries, just by Trafalgar Square.  This is the festival's seventh year and it is going from strength to strength.  The exhibition has a simple mission - which is to display the work of artists who are thinking seriously about freedom, what it means and how you lose it.  In previous years the organisers have run into a bit of trouble with the cultural commissars of our time.

John McDonnell's Question Time 'apology' was no such thing and I am amazed to see anybody for fall for it. It was obviously insisted upon by Labour party spin-doctors. But as the words themselves show, it was not an apology. Sure, he apologised for causing any offence or upset, but not for the fact that he was wholly and utterly wrong. And wrong not only to have praised people who spent three decades shooting people and planting bombs in public places but wrong on the facts too. I cannot think how he can get away with this, but it seems like he will, not least because his boss has done so by mounting the same defence. Because of course McDonnell has adopted the Jeremy Corbyn tactic I have written about previously here and here.