Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray

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.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Keep up the good work, Simon Hughes

From our UK edition

As a rider to my earlier blog I wish to put in the following as evidence. It became plain to me some years ago that people who have absolutely no political point tend to revert disproportionately to grandiose claims regarding their opponents (both real and imaginary). It gives them a passing sensation of importance which helps them through their daily routine of futility. For a brief moment they feel there might be a point to it all – and themselves. We recently saw Nick Clegg seek to conceal his extreme want of meaning by branding those who disagree with him as ‘bigots’. Thus Nick transforms himself in his own eyes from a man with no point at all to a man of meaning – fighting against ‘bigots’ everywhere, or at least somewhere.

Douglas Murray

Lib Dems in Brighton: the prattling of the pointless

From our UK edition

Are there any words in the English language more soporific or depressing than: ‘Liberal Democrat Party Conference’? My paucity of blogs in the last few days can be put down solely to this fact. Even the many fascinating and disturbing things occurring in the world are somehow made damp by the knowledge that this annual general meeting of the bogus is going on. I suppose it comes down to one thing in particular. There is simply no purpose in the Liberal Democrats. There never has been. It is just a collection of people who for various reasons – understandable dislike of the other parties, hilarious opportunism or simple ignorance – wandered into a party and then tried to agree on what the people they find themselves among could be said to agree on or believe in.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Freedom betrayed

From our UK edition

I have a piece in the magazine this week on the disgraceful behaviour of Hillary Clinton and other US officials in the latest round of cartoon wars. During the last week the US Secretary of State turned into a film critic, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – head of the most powerful and expensive military in history – relegated himself to a telephone-salesman offering up his country’s founding principles at a knock-down price, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney decided that his job included condemning the work of amateur directors. But it gets worse. The same Jay Carney has now decided that his remit extends to commenting on what French journalists should or should not publish.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Mitt Romney’s ‘gaffe’ is nothing of the sort

From our UK edition

The papers today are full of the latest alleged ‘gaffe’ by Mitt Romney. It has become a staple of US election coverage that any Democrat’s foreign policy fumble is a ‘mis-speak’ while any Republican saying something even mildly contentious – as opposed to wrong – is a world-class clanger which shows them to be unfit for office. Today’s Romney ‘gaffe’ relates to his reported comments on the Middle East. This is not exactly a region in which the Obama administration has covered itself in glory.  But even as Obama’s policy failings are being felt, it is Romney who is being lambasted for, among other things, his claim that ‘the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace.

Douglas Murray

Free speech betrayed

From our UK edition

In Benghazi the ‘spontaneous protestors’ arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and killed the US ambassador. In Kabul the crowds chanted ‘Death to America’. American flags were torched from London to Sydney. But in Washington the Obama administration showed that they weren’t taking any of this personally. It wasn’t about them, but about an excerpt from an amateur film on Youtube called Innocence of Muslims. As they say, keep telling yourself that. If there is one thing people ought to have learnt from a decade of groundhog jihad, it is that there is always a film, novel or cartoon — always an excuse to riot and loot and burn. The odd thing is not that there are people who seize these excuses, but that Western leaders keep supplying them.

Friday

Douglas Murray

The Muslim Brotherhood’s rank hypocrisy

From our UK edition

Western media and governments which are currently white-washing the Muslim Brotherhood should take note of the following, a classic example of the organisation’s traditionally forked-tongue way of working. Ahram Online carries the story which relates the recent rioting across North Africa and the Middle East. After the attack on the US Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday, the Muslim Brotherhood’s official English-language twitter yesterday tweeted: ‘We r relieved none of @USEmbassyCairo staff were harmed & hope US-Eg relations will sustain turbulence of Tuesday’s events.’ The US Embassy tweeted their thanks in the following way: ‘Thanks.  By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds?  I hope you know we read those too.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

General Dempsey’s disastrous intervention

From our UK edition

When the Danish Cartoons affair broke in 2005-6 there was considerable pressure on the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to issue a condemnation and apology. Demonstrating considerable statesmanship he nevertheless repeatedly said that ‘You cannot apologise for something you have not done.’ When so-called ‘community leaders’ insisted on seeing him he refused because he, as the Prime Minister, was not responsible for the contents of a Danish newspaper. The Danish press is not only free, but separate, from the Danish government. Rasmussen’s belief was that the sooner anybody who was unaware of this became aware of it the better. Fast forward to 2012 and we seem to have yet another set of eruptions in the cartoon/film/book wars.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Freedom undermined by termites

From our UK edition

I have been reading a new book by Theodore Dalrymple which I highly recommend. Readers of the Spectator will need no introduction to the good doctor, his fresh prose or his startling insight. But even for people like me who read most of what Dalrymple writes, Farewell Fear contains a great collection of unfamiliar — and typically brilliant — writings. I particularly enjoyed the essay 'Of Termites and Mad Dictators'. In analysing the threats to our freedom he says: ‘It is difficult now to imagine a modern university intellectual saying something as simple and unequivocal as 'I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Channel 4 cancels Tom Holland’s history of Islam, but the extremists will not win

From our UK edition

In what may prove to be the most depressingly predictable story of the year, we learn that Channel 4 has chosen to cancel a screening of Tom Holland's programme 'Islam: the untold story' tomorrow night  because of threats to the author and presenter. If there is a reason why so many stories and facts to do with Islam remain 'untold' it is simply because of this. None of the people who threatened Tom Holland even have to mean it — the threat is enough to ensure that Channel 4 don't go ahead. I don't blame them, and have seen this happen too many times, in too many different countries, to be surprised.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Britain must resist Iran’s terror groups

From our UK edition

These two stories are unlikely to make big news, but they should. Speaking in Amsterdam on Wednesday night, the Dutch Foreign Minister, Uri Rosenthal, urged fellow European Union members finally to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. Rosenthal said ‘The Netherlands has made another appeal to European Union members to place Hezbollah on the EU list of terrorist organizations.’ Commenting on Hezbollah’s involvement in the violence in Syria Rosenthal added, ‘You see what happens when this organization is allowed to operate freely.’ Then earlier today the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, announced that his country is to suspend diplomatic relations with Iran and expel Iranian diplomats from Canada.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Iran: Jews make Gays

From our UK edition

An article in an Iranian state-controlled newspaper has claimed that the Jews are spreading gays. According to Mashregh News the ‘Zionist regime’ (with the help of the US and UK) is deliberately spreading homosexuality to pursue Zionism’s real goal of world domination. Quite how you can dominate the world through gays, I don’t know. It’s true that the very hard to spell Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first openly lesbian head of state in Iceland a few years ago. And only last year Elio Di Rupo became the first gay Prime Minister of Belgium. But if Israel is in fact the force behind this then it seems to me one of the worst run Zionist operations of recent years.

Monday

Douglas Murray

George Galloway’s awfulness

From our UK edition

George Galloway's awfulness falls into two categories. First there is the serial dictator-licking. This is a man so profligate, not to say promiscuous, in his affections that he has in succession fawned over Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Then there is the personal vileness — pretending to be a dirty cat on live television (still, after all these years, impossible to watch), explaining his curious notions of when rape is, and is not, rape, and using vulgarly dismissive terms about disabled people. The strange thing about this is that though the former is, I suggest, in the great scheme of things the worse stuff, it is always the latter that gets him into trouble.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The history of Islam is not off-limits

From our UK edition

I’ve only just got around to watching Tom Holland’s documentary for Channel 4 from earlier this week: ‘Islam: the untold story.’ It had some good things in it, despite suffering from the two problems all documentaries now suffer from: attention-grabbing statements at the end of segments which are not followed up on, and endless shots of the presenter doing strangely unconnected things (travelling on an elevator, sitting on a bed etc.) But Holland was an engaging and pleasant presenter, and the documentary was something of a landmark in that it finally brought to wider public attention a subject which has been almost completely off-limits in recent years.

Monday

Douglas Murray

Why would Conservatives want to pass the ‘Danny Boyle’ test?

From our UK edition

So the Conservative party’s immigration minister, Damian Green MP, has introduced the idea of the ‘Danny Boyle test.’  In today’s Telegraph he argues that the Conservative party must resist ‘nostalgists promoting a better yesterday’ and that since the Olympics opening ceremony was a demonstration of ‘modern Britain’ it is therefore a ‘test’ that Conservatives must pass. And so the Labour MP Paul Flynn who described the opening ceremony of the Olympics as ‘a Trojan horse’  for the Conservative Party has been proved precisely right.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Has any country got gun laws right?

From our UK edition

Every time there is a shooting in the US there is an eruption of sanctimony from Europe about how crazy the US gun-laws are.  But there are some good reasons for those laws, and many Americans feel gun-ownership to be an important part of what keeps them American. However, the downsides are just awful.  Gun-murder rates in the US are appalling, and though advocates of the US gun lobby always say ‘guns don’t kill people – people kill people’, the fact is that people with guns can kill more people than those without guns.  The Colorado cinema shooter being just one recent example. But nobody has got it right, have they?

Douglas Murray

Dictating terms

From our UK edition

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was set up ten years ago, it was meant to make the world a safer place. The Court and the various UN war crimes tribunals were supposed to pursue and punish war-criminal dictators as a warning to all the others. The idea may have been a noble one but, as Syria now demonstrates, it has proved hideously flawed. Far from deterring brutal dictators, the prospect of ending up like Slobodan Milosevic or Charles Taylor has persuaded some of the worst dictators that they only have one choice: to fight it out to the end. The Assads are only the latest family to prove this point. Before them it was the Gaddafis. As the Libyan regime began to crumble, there were numerous attempts to get members of the family out.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Not ‘the best results ever’: Good news for GCSEs

From our UK edition

For the first year since GCSE’s came in we have not seen ‘the best results ever’.  Which is, of course, a great relief.  As Anthony Seldon, among others, has pointed out, these results suggest a return to credibility in our examination system. But there are already those, including some teachers and teacher unions who are now hinting darkly at ‘political interference’.  They are used to year-on-year grade inflation and expected this to continue forever. I think these people should themselves be asked to pass a simple test.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Appearing on TV with a fevered Assange campaigner

From our UK edition

I had the pleasure of doing Al Jazeera’s 'Inside Story' programme yesterday on Julian Assange's positively pontifical balcony scene at the Ecuadorian Embassy the other day.  I was at pains to point out that: 1 – Listening to Mr Assange a stranger to the case would never have got the impression that he had skipped bail in order to avoid being questioned on serious sexual assault allegations made by two women in Sweden. 2 – Even if the US government were interested in Wikileaks it would not constitute a ‘witch hunt’ but rather a legitimate investigation into the stealing and publishing of secret government communiques.  Witches do not exist.  Someone who stole those cables does.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Poetry by heart

From our UK edition

In the magazine this week I have a piece on learning poetry by heart. Spectator readers will remember that Michael Gove received some flak from teaching unions earlier this year when he suggested that British schoolchildren should be able to recite a poem by heart. In the piece I try to explain why this is a good idea, both as a mental discipline and a way of accessing the best thought and literature. I was never made to learn poetry by heart at school, but I have been trying to remember what the first poetry I taught myself by heart was. I think it may have been portions of Edward Fitzgerald’s version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Its metre and rhyme scheme, and the fact that the stanzas are short, make it ideal to memorise.

Douglas Murray

Have it by heart

From our UK edition

Earlier this year the Education Secretary Michael Gove suggested that primary school children ought to learn a poem by heart. Even if the teaching unions had not objected I would have needed no further convincing. I was converted to Gove’s idea years ago, by Terry Waite. Having haphazardly discovered poetry on my own at state school, it was slightly later that I heard Ronald Runcie’s hostage-negotiator-turned-hostage give a sermon on a cold Sunday evening in chapel. Within ten minutes he had introduced me to a new poem and a new idea, which is a good average for a sermon. The poem was ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’.