Douglas Murray

This feature is a preview from this week's Spectator, out tomorrow: I am sure we’re all in agreement that watching videos of adults abusing children is wrong. At least outside the halls of BBC light entertainment (historically speaking) such a consensus must exist. So how has it become not just right, but seemingly virtuous, to watch and then promote pictures of big bearded men chopping off children’s heads? The proliferation of torture and beheading porn is one of the social media horrors of our day. Every minute millions of people around the world send links to videos and photographs. And as world news gets darker, even if you don’t seek them out, such images find their way to you.

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, some mild objections, a soupçon more sanctions, but otherwise nothing. Everyone knew which government might have handed powerful surface-to-air missiles to eastern Ukraine’s rebels. But nobody seemed willing or able to do anything much about it. There was also a time when whole swaths of the map being overrun by Islamic groups who make al-Qa’eda look like Quakers would have caused concern to the civilised world.

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? Not strong enough for Sayeeda, it would seem. It was not hard to see this coming. Not just because Warsi’s Twitter activity in recent weeks has mainly consisted of pumping out support for Hamas-run Gaza and berating supporters of Israel for saying things she disagrees with, but also because she has shown a career-long sympathy for Hamas and other Islamic radicals.

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, but I don’t think I have heard this said even once. Which is strange. When reporting from a dictatorship like Gaza it used to be the norm that reporters would preface or conclude any report with some variant of this formula.  Doing so was a neat way to send the warning to viewers that you were reporting from a place where the authorities were censoring what you could say.

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 that the deaths might distract attention from Israel's war with Hamas.

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 on. The grim details are out. But there is a story behind this story which has not been thought about, though it ought to be. That is the response of Britain’s Muslim communities to these awful revelations. Ever since 9/11 a considerable appeal from the non-Muslim majority in the West has been ‘where are the moderates?

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: Who’s up, who’s down? Who’s in, who’s out? While Westminster spent last week gossiping about which minister’s special adviser said what, in another city, not far away, a very different Britain was unveiled.

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. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s?

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 Hamas video?  Well, among other things she said that the idea that Hamas promote a culture of death is 'offensive'. And best of all she said that 'the idea that Palestinians use children as human shields is racist'.

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 was necessary. One was the European Court of Justice verdict from earlier this year that meant that this country and a large number of internet providers were at risk of entering a legally grey area. Far from being an ‘extension’ of powers, this bill is about the retention of powers which had been accepted until the European Court ruling put this into question.

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. Apart from their old stars, that is, or the higher-ups who covered for them or fingered the wrong paedos. Really, the police should have stepped in years ago. Except they were probably busy being racist. So who will speak up for the kids? Once it could have been a bishop or something. Though not after what we now know about the Catholics. And the Church of England’s not much better. Frock-wearing paedos. Thinking about it could drive you to illness.

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 a couple of weeks. And yet nothing seems to have happened. That was April. This is July. The Nigerian security forces continue to appear incompetent. The foreign dignitaries who signed up to the social media campaigns haven’t done much more. And the newspapers, 24-hour media and assorted celebrities seem to have just, well, moved on. Still. Another week. Another fad. Ping. Pong.