Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
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There was a time when having almost two hundred of your citizens blown out of the sky was a big deal for a western democracy. But when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine last month, killing 193 Dutch citizens and a couple of dozen other Europeans, the response was conspicuous public mourning,
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[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Tim Stanley discuss Baroness Warsi’s resignation” startat=462] Listen [/audioplayer]I have never issued a call for violence before, and I’m certainly not going to start now. But I wonder if people might consider the following, purely hypothetical situation. In her resignation letter over the UK government not being anti-Israel enough for
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Farewell then Sayeeda, Baroness Warsi. The most over-promoted, incapable and incompetent minister of recent times has finally done the nation one service and resigned. This morning she announced on Twitter that she can ‘no longer support government policy on Gaza.’ That would be government policy that now includes reviewing all arms export licenses to Israel?
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I wonder if any readers have an answer to this question: Has anybody, throughout this whole conflict around Gaza, heard any reporter inside Gaza, at any time, preface or conclude their remarks with ‘reporting from Gaza, under Hamas government reporting restrictions’? I don’t watch television news all the time and so may have missed it,
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I suppose viewers of Jon Snow’s Channel 4 News don’t expect impartial journalism, any more than viewers of Fox in the States expect their political opponents to get a particularly fair hearing. This is, after all, a journalist whose first reaction when the Malaysian airline plane was shot down over Ukraine was to express concern
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The Trojan Horse reports are in, and they make for damning reading. ‘An aggressive Islamist agenda… a coordinated, deliberate and sustained action to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamist ethos’. Teachers who claimed that the Boston marathon bombing and the murder of Lee Rigby were in fact hoaxes and an ‘Attack on Islam’. And so
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Peter Clarke, a former counter-terror chief, has published a report today which reveals that an ‘aggressive Islamist agenda’ was pursued in ‘Trojan horse’ schools in Birmingham. He has found evidence of a coordinated plan to impose strict Islamic teaching on pupils. This piece by Douglas Murray was originally published in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 June 2014:
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Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill. They marched though the centre of the city before congregating to scream outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington. It was interesting to watch this rather non-diverse crowd pass. Most of the women seem to be wearing headscarves or the burka,
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The Hallett Review was published yesterday. This is the review ordered by the Prime Minister in February after the collapse of the trial of John Downey. Readers will remember that Downey was about to face trial over the 1982 Hyde Park bombing – in which four British soldiers were murdered – when his lawyers produced
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Is Israel drifting away from the West? That was Hugo Rifkind’s claim in his column in the magazine last week. Hugo wrote: ‘Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place.
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CNN recently came across a video of Hamas officials calling on civilians in Gaza to volunteer to become ‘human shields’ so that Palestinian civilian casualties can be maximised. Fascinatingly a CNN news anchor has put this fact to a Palestinian ‘spokeswoman’ in a live interview. And what was the response of this ‘spokeswoman’ to the
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Isabel wonders whether it is a good thing that all main parties allied in passing emergency surveillance legislation into law yesterday. While it’s true that legislation passed without any significant political objection can be bad news, this is one case where that rule does not apply. There are a number of reasons why the legislation
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Who would trust MPs? Until recently most of us thought they were just in it for the expenses. Now it turns out they’re in it to abuse kids too. We know because we’ve read it in the papers. Not that they’re any better, tapping Milly Dowler’s phone. Still, at least you can trust the BBC.
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Whatever happened to ‘Bring Back Our Girls’? I only ask because it’s now three months since Twitter and all other social media, Michelle Obama, Christiane Amanpour, David Cameron etc. joined a hashtag group to ask Boko Haram to give back the hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls they had kidnapped. It almost filled the news cycle for
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A video has just emerged of the new ‘Caliph’, otherwise known as the leader of the Islamic State (aka ISIS). Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is shown leading Friday prayers earlier this week at the Great Mosque in Mosul. For all those people who think that American power is the problem in the world, or that everything would
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Who on earth would argue for a regime which hangs homosexuals, stones rape victims and sponsors terrorism across three continents? Who would act as a spokesperson or advocate of such a dictatorship? Well one answer appears to be ‘certain British Parliamentarians.’ In particular Labour MP Jack Straw, Conservative MP Ben Wallace and former Conservative Chancellor
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President Obama said recently that the United States cannot simply play ‘whack-a-mole’ in the Middle East. The only appropriate response to which is to say, ‘Yes you can.’ We can all understand why the President might be feeling a little tired over all this. For nearly six gruelling years he has been calling the troops
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I have a nominee for idiot of the week. I had never heard of him until yesterday, but he is one ‘Andreas Krieg’ who the Daily Mail has referred to as ‘a Middle East security analyst at King’s College London in Qatar.’ Mr Krieg was quoted in a story on the violence in Iraq, Syria,
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There is a tendency in Britain to think we are alone in our national madness. So I thought I would cheer everyone up on this lovely weekend by pointing out that one of the big stories in the Netherlands this week has been whether or not a pro-ISIS demonstration should be allowed in the Hague. The demonstration
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In January, Douglas Murray explained in The Spectator how relations in the Middle East were becoming increasingly tense. With northern Iraq now in turmoil, following the advance of Islamist militant group Isis, Douglas’s insight seems prescient. Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a
