Douglas Murray

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth.  I cannot recommend this book - newly translated from the German - highly enough.  It challenges and indeed changes nearly all received wisdom about the leading figure behind the genocide of European Jews during World War II. The title of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s omnipresent and over-praised account of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil.  I would say that Stangneth’s book not merely surpasses but actually buries Arendt’s account.  Not least in showing how Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s role-play in the dock in Jerusalem.

Shin Dong-hyuk really shouldn’t need defending.  The thirty-two year old was born in, and grew up in, the North Korean gulag system.  And as he has related in his book Escape from Camp 14, and in public appearances, what he saw on an average day in his childhood constituted more horror than most people will see in their collected nightmares. At one point he overheard his mother and brother talking about an escape attempt from the highest-security category camp they were in.  He informed on them, as he had been educated to do.  Subsequently, along with his father, he was forced to watch their execution by prison camp guards.

As I write a siege is ongoing in a Kosher shop in Paris.  In France, Belgium and across Europe in recent years, Jews have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist attack.  They always are.  Last year saw the largest upsurge of anti-Semitic hate crime on record even in the UK. But it is the continent that has seen the worst and growing litany of attacks.  In 2012 Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse.  In May last year three people were shot dead by an Islamist gunman at the Jewish museum in Brussels. During the twentieth century Judaism on the continent of Europe was almost wiped out.  In twenty-first century Europe the remaining Jews are once again the target.

listen to ‘Douglas Murray discusses the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine’ on audioBoom.

The £31 million al-Sweady Inquiry is in. And it describes claims that up to 20 Iraqis were killed and mutilated by British troops after a battle in 2004 as "without foundation": ‘Sir Thayne Forbes said Iraqi detainees who alleged they were tortured and abused - and subjected to mock executions - had given evidence that was "unprincipled in the extreme" and "wholly without regard to the truth".’ The detainees in question were fighting as ‘insurgents’ at the time. But once they were detained they used the now familiar route of claiming they had been abused by their captors. This is not only an al-Qaeda tactic. The Iraqi insurgents (from the Mahdi army) also knew that they could simply take advantage of their enemy’s increasingly self-defeating playbook.

On Thursday I was on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ to talk about the CIA and torture. It is, for many reasons, perhaps the most gruesome subject possible. And not just because of the hideous allegations involved, but also because it is one of those subjects which people wantonly lose their reason over. Like a small number of other subjects in our society at the moment, it is one which people try wilfully to simplify, usually in order to show the world what a moral person they are and, by contrast, what immoral people their opponents are. I will use this post to set out some of my own views and certain objections to what seems to be the status quo debate on all this. Didn’t this week’s report showed the CIA to be torturing on an industrial scale?

I see that Isis have begun the holiday season by 'executing' (or murdering) a man who they say was homosexual in Syria/Iraq. They did this in the traditional manner, by throwing him off a tall building and then stoning him to death. They have helpfully provided photos of the process online. An accompanying statement from Isis reads: 'Following the example of Muslims Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq (ruled 632-634), the Islamic court in Al-Furat province sentenced  a man who performed acts of the people of Lot [i.e.,homosexual acts] to be cast off the highest place in the town and then stoned to death. Allah’s command [is valid] in both the past and the future.

An interesting story in today’s papers: ‘Russia’s last politically independent TV station will be forced to close at the end of this month after the state-owned company that transmits its signal said it would be taken off the air.’ This comes at the same time, as our cover story last week showed, as Putin’s propaganda station in London – Russia Today – has increased its operations and profile within the UK. Unlike the Kremlin, I am generally in favour of as diverse a media as possible.

If anyone ever wondered what the over-promoted, incapable and incompetent Baroness Sayeeda Warsi was planning to do in retirement, now we know: provoke British Jews on Twitter. Today, after four Jews, one a British citizen, were butchered while praying in Israel, Sayeeda Warsi used the opportunity to taunt British Jews. Not just the Zionist Federation but a former British Jewish communal leader as well. https://twitter.com/SayeedaWarsi/status/534626779122892800 https://twitter.

I suppose this is the inevitable end-point of the 'nothing to do with Islam' meme. Another American citizen has had his head chopped off by a gang of men aspiring to instigate the teachings of Mohammed as they see them. And what does the President of the poor victim's country say? Here is Obama on the murder of Mr Kassig: 'ISIL's actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith'. So not only can this latest beheading not have anything to do with the religion of Islam. It actually has more to do with Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism. I hope that all Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Hindus feel suitably guilty of this crime.