Douglas murray

Today a quick game of ‘spot the difference.’ First, here are some photos, released yesterday, of Isis pulling down the crosses on ancient churches and desecrating Christian holy sites in Mosul, Iraq. They admit to doing this because they wish to destroy all records of pre-Islamic civilisation and because, they say, they are following Islamic law. And then secondly we have Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti speaking at a conference in Kuwait on Tuesday. There Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, called for the destruction of all churches on the Arabian peninsula. He explained that this is necessitated by Islamic law. So perhaps the first part of the game should

I’m with Rod on the wannabe jihadi brides going to Syria.  The whole official approach demonstrated by the BBC et al is just the same as the government-sponsored videos that crop up on YouTube urging people not to join Isis: a sort of ‘please don’t go, we’re better together’ pleading. But if we really do want to stop young people going out, why not put a bit more grit into it?  A bit more stick as well as carrot?  Why waste this massive amount of airtime just to say that these poor girls didn’t know what they were doing, are nice girls really etc. Why not use it to actually

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth.  I cannot recommend this book – newly translated from the German – highly enough.  It challenges and indeed changes nearly all received wisdom about the leading figure behind the genocide of European Jews during World War II. The title of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s omnipresent and over-praised account of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil.  I would say that Stangneth’s book not merely surpasses but actually buries Arendt’s account.  Not least in showing how Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s role-play in the dock in Jerusalem.  For whereas

Shin Dong-hyuk really shouldn’t need defending.  The thirty-two year old was born in, and grew up in, the North Korean gulag system.  And as he has related in his book Escape from Camp 14, and in public appearances, what he saw on an average day in his childhood constituted more horror than most people will see in their collected nightmares. At one point he overheard his mother and brother talking about an escape attempt from the highest-security category camp they were in.  He informed on them, as he had been educated to do.  Subsequently, along with his father, he was forced to watch their execution by prison camp guards.  He

As I write a siege is ongoing in a Kosher shop in Paris.  In France, Belgium and across Europe in recent years, Jews have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist attack.  They always are.  Last year saw the largest upsurge of anti-Semitic hate crime on record even in the UK. But it is the continent that has seen the worst and growing litany of attacks.  In 2012 Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse.  In May last year three people were shot dead by an Islamist gunman at the Jewish museum in Brussels. During the twentieth century Judaism on the continent of Europe

On Thursday I was on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ to talk about the CIA and torture. It is, for many reasons, perhaps the most gruesome subject possible. And not just because of the hideous allegations involved, but also because it is one of those subjects which people wantonly lose their reason over. Like a small number of other subjects in our society at the moment, it is one which people try wilfully to simplify, usually in order to show the world what a moral person they are and, by contrast, what immoral people their opponents are. I will use this post to set out some of my own views and certain

An interesting story in today’s papers: ‘Russia’s last politically independent TV station will be forced to close at the end of this month after the state-owned company that transmits its signal said it would be taken off the air.’ This comes at the same time, as our cover story last week showed, as Putin’s propaganda station in London – Russia Today – has increased its operations and profile within the UK. Unlike the Kremlin, I am generally in favour of as diverse a media as possible. The problem with Russia Today is that it seems to have fooled an astonishingly diverse number of silly people into thinking that what they

Iraq and Syria are lost causes: Western intervention can’t help. Well, at least that was the motion put forward on Wednesday evening at a Spectator debate, in association with Brewin Dolphin, and chaired by Andrew Neil. Here is the full audio of the debate: Part 1: listen to ‘Debate audio, part 1: Iraq and Syria are lost causes; Western intervention can’t help’ on audioBoom