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.
I know that the official line is delight at the ‘progress’ allegedly represented by the presence of Martin McGuinness, in white tie and tails, standing to toast the Queen’s health at a banquet in Windsor Castle. But what an odious sight. Firstly because the idea that this constitutes some important step is all post-hoc prevarication. The
Readers will know that I am interested in the subject of post-Good Friday agreement ‘justice’ in Northern Ireland. Having been one of the few people to have followed the possibilities of justice over Bloody Sunday, I also recently wrote about the apparently one-sided amnesties which the last Labour government appears to have given to Republicans
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Julie Bindel discuss monogamy in gay marriages” startat=665] Listen [/audioplayer]As inexorably as night follows day and push comes to shove, so the words ‘Tory’ and ‘scandal’ seem destined to conjoin with ‘Brazilian’ and ‘rent-boy’. Yet the main response to the allegations about Mark Menzies MP last weekend was neither laughter
The UK government has announced a long-overdue investigation into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. I am delighted. Why Britain should continue to act as an Argentina-like sanctuary for Islamic fascists I have never understood. I hope the investigation will be deep and wide-ranging. But of course if the government really wants
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
