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.
A number of interesting things have happened recently: The Law Society has provided legal guidance to ensure that Muslims in Britain can have their wills judged according to Sharia. BBC Newsnight hosted an in-studio row between three Muslims over whether one Muslim should be allowed to say or do anything that is deemed religiously insensitive
As there is an intermittent debate over media ethics in this country, might we reflect on the following? The story of the missing Malaysian plane is an unimaginable nightmare for the relatives of those on the plane. Nobody knows what has happened. And after almost two weeks nobody seems any closer to knowing. Yet thanks
Before getting onto the film I should make a few disclaimers. There is a popular view that Donald Rumsfeld was a catastrophic US secretary of defence. I do not share that view. There is also a view that his most famous phrase – about known knowns, known unknowns and so on – was a display
BBC3’s Free Speech programme is a good example of why the channel deserves to be shut down. Aimed at giving a voice to young people it is endlessly dumbing-down, seeks validity through instant Twitter reactions and all in all is a very degrading programme to appear on. I know because a couple of years ago I
I much recommend Nick Clegg’s weekend speech. Since it was given at the Liberal Democrat Spring some people may have missed it. There is hardly a line that cannot draw a laugh. My favourite passage is this subtle reference to UKIP: ‘An ungenerous, backwards looking politics has emerged in Britain. The politics of blame has found
Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies
listen to ‘Lord Trimble on the Downey letters: ‘There needs to be a proper inquiry’’ on Audioboo
I was robbed! News has just come in that despite making the shortlist I failed to win ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ in any of the categories. Proving once again that Ayatollah Khomeini was a big fat liar when he said there are ‘no jokes’ in Islam, the Khomeinist ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ last night named President
If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity. At the
I spent yesterday evening in Birmingham with the residents of ‘Benefits Street’, assorted pundits and politicians. It was a slightly rowdy debate for Channel 4, and can be seen here. Since a number of controversial things came up perhaps I can deal with them in order. ‘The programme shouldn’t have been made.’ I felt very uncomfortable
George Monbiot had a moving piece in yesterday’s Guardian in which he reflected on the UK government’s efforts to arrest and charge returning British subjects who have gone to fight the Assad regime in Syria. As Monbiot said in his very opening: ‘If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war
I have been honoured to receive a number of awards in my career. Yet one which I have especially yearned for has so far eluded me. Now it seems finally within my grasp. Since I began writing I have dearly hoped to catch the eye of the judges for the ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ title. There
On Thursday night I spoke at the Oxford Union on the motion ‘This House believes post-war immigration into Britain has been too high.’ In many ways this is an easy debate to explain and win, notwithstanding the fact that Lord Singh, Nadhim Zahawi MP and Monica Ali were lined up in opposition. The Conservative Prime
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray discuss Islam’s 30 year war with former solider Thomas Tugendhat”] Listen [/audioplayer]Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain
On Friday a Taliban suicide bomber detonated in downtown Kabul in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant which was popular with foreigners. Two accomplices then went into the restaurant and gunned down the people inside. The victims included a Labour party candidate for the forthcoming European elections, the IMF’s country director and a young Afghan
‘What are people in your country saying about Holland these days?’ one Dutch friend recently asked me. I hadn’t the heart to reply that no one was talking that much about his country. But the question seemed typically Dutch. Endlessly outward-looking and interested, yet charmingly insular and with a slightly off-kilter view of itself. The
Today’s Times has a lovely example of positive spin. The headline is: ‘Rise in Muslim birth rate as families ‘feel British’. The story which gives rise to this headline is that: ‘Almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim, a breakdown of census figures shows. ‘The percentage of Muslims among
There is a new series of BBC Radio 3’s discussion programme ‘Belief’. Some readers may be interested in this episode in which I am interviewed by Joan Bakewell. It was recorded before Christmas and went out a few days ago. In any case, I much recommend the other programmes in the series, particularly those with
‘Did Israel spoil Christmas again?’ I only ask because the claim that they did is becoming a modern tradition in Britain. The softest and most commonplace expression of the claim comes from those vicars or congregation members who claim that they find it ‘hard’ to sing ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ nowadays because of how
The ‘guilty’ verdict has been delivered in the trial of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale for the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in May. An interview with the soldier’s parents has just been released in which they say that their son died in the cause of protecting the rights of our democracy, including the freedom
