Douglas Murray

I have just returned from two hours of broadcasting on the BBC World Service. It is an odd time to be inside the BBC, not least because reporters from the organisation itself, as well as its rivals, are standing outside the studio doing pieces to camera about what is going on inside. Anyhow – having dealt with some web and print-press troubles in my last post, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the BBC's troubles. 1) The first is that the Newsnight McAlpine story is devastating. How any news organisation, let alone the publicly-funded (and compared to its commercial rivals extremely well-funded) BBC could have run such an amateurishly flawed piece of investigative journalism is appalling.

Differences between the US and the UK are often commented upon. But the storm ‘Sandy’ this week has highlighted one in particular. It is no criticism of either President Obama or Governor Romney to say that it seems strange to me to see them hugging and otherwise comforting people who have lost their homes and in some cases all their possessions. I keep testing – and then mentally blocking – the images of a similar thing happening here. I am trying to imagine my mental state had my house and few possessions been washed away only to see, emerging from the mist, the figure of Gordon Brown. He would be surrounded by legions of cameras and reporters, of course, otherwise there would be no point in him being there.

The politics of poppy-wearing shift slightly each year. The unofficial rule used to be that poppy-wearing began at the start of November. In recent years this has crept forward further and further into October, largely, I think, because of politicians and the BBC. The BBC lives in terror of someone appearing on one of its programmes without a poppy and thus sparking a round of ‘BBC presenter in poppy snub’ stories in the papers. If you appear on the BBC during this period you will find people on hand to pin a poppy on anyone not already sporting one. To my mind this slightly misses the charitable, not to mention voluntary, purpose of the exercise. But politicians have also fuelled this poppy mission-creep. Each year they begin to wear their poppies earlier.

I have a piece in this week’s magazine on the fall of Barack Obama. I’m not saying he may not still win, just that even if he does he will be a diminished President. It’s available online here.

Yesterday 10,000 Muslims travelled from across Britain to the London offices of Google to demonstrate that they do not understand anything about the country they live in. The protest was one of a number planned against a film uploaded onto Youtube some months back. One of the organisers, Sheikh Masoud Alam, described the film thus: 'This is not freedom of expression, there is a limit for that. This insult of the Prophet will not be allowed.' Sadly, for him, the Sheikh is wrong.  What he terms ‘insult’ of a historical figure is most certainly allowed and judging by the quality of their argument, it seems unlikely Mr Alam and friends will persuade anyone of the contrary anytime soon.

I am starting to believe that this country is no longer interested in news, only gossip. Sometimes the gossip is about a celebrity, sometimes a celebrity politician. Twenty-four hour news-channels suggest that the removal of a dead entertainer’s gravestone constitutes ‘breaking news’. We have just had three party conferences so empty and insular that the outside world did not intrude meaningfully on one of them. But whilst we sink tittering beneath the waves the rest of the world is going about its business as usual. Rachid Ghannouchi was allowed to live in this country for years. He used his time preparing for an Islamist takeover of his home-country of Tunisia. After the ousting of Presiden Ben Ali he duly came to power.

If readers have a couple of hours to spare can I recommend watching a debate which took place in America last week? Not the predictably unenlightening Presidential one, but a discussion of one of the most important and complex dilemmas of our time. Organised by the excellent Intelligence Squared US, the motion is: ‘Better Elected Islamists than Dictators’. It includes three excellent speakers, Zuhdi Jasser, Daniel Pipes and Reuel Marc Gerecht. The discussion is interesting in part because the side arguing for the motion do not like Islamists and the side against the motion do not like dictators. As Daniel Pipes pithily sums up at one point, ‘nobody likes anybody’. The question, though, is what we do about it.