Richard Dawkins and me: A reply to my many critics

In the Spectator last week, I described how Richard Dawkins had become a space-filler for empty-headed pundits with no idea what else to write about in these slow summer days.

The standard form was to upbraid him for being an Islamophobe because of a series of remarks he had tweeted about Islam in general and the behaviour of Islamist conservatives in particular. Some were crass, others reasonable. A few writers chose to add a variant, which has been chugging along for years now, and asserted that ‘militant atheism’ was as bad as ‘militant religion’. If I had had the space, I would have pointed out that militant atheism has a precise meaning. Communist regimes were militantly atheist. They closed churches, temples, mosques and synagogues and murdered or imprisoned the faithful because of their faith. Modern China, with its harrying of Falun Gong and determination to arrest the members of Christian house churches, remains militantly atheist, although less militant than it was at the height of Mao’s dementia.