Islam

Wednesday

Peter Tatchell

Pakistan’s ISI accused of subverting media freedom

Media freedom is under attack in Pakistan, declared Hamid Mir, one of Pakistan’s most prominent journalists. He had six bullets pumped into him by bike riders in Karachi on 19 April. TV anchor, Raza Rumi, was similarly attacked in Lahore in late March. In May 2011, investigative reporter Saleem Shahzad was murdered following his allegations of links between the Pakistani military and al-Qaeda. These are just three of the many Pakistani journalists who’ve been victims of a wave of threats and violence in recent months and years. Even foreign journalists covering Pakistan from inside the country dare not write about certain issues for fear of being killed, or that their

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

The Middle East’s own 30 Years War has just begun

In January, Douglas Murray explained in The Spectator how relations in the Middle East were becoming increasingly tense. With northern Iraq now in turmoil, following the advance of Islamist militant group Isis, Douglas’s insight seems prescient. 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 themes are emerging. Some years ago, before the Arab ‘Spring’ ever sprung, I remember asking one top security official about the region. What, I wondered, was their single biggest fear? The answer was striking

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: The trouble with religion, alternatives to HS2, and whisky-drinking dogs

A history of persecution Sir: Colin Brown (Letters, 7 June) ignores some good reasons for keeping religion out of society. Small groups of believers are fine, but not totalitarian dictatorships. The early Christians were treated as heretics until 313 ad, when Constantine made what became the Roman Catholic Church the official religion of the Roman Empire. The church promptly started persecuting all other religious groups. In the Middle Ages the Church let loose the Inquisition and decimated civilised communities such as the Albigensians. As for his statement that ‘all religions have provided society with ethical and moral rules’, how ethical were the laws and morals that subjugated women and slaves

Ed West Ed West

Now that Iraq really is threatened by jihadists, should we intervene?

The war on terror has gone not necessarily to our advantage. For the second time in a dozen years the land of Abraham has been invaded by a partly-British army, although this time it is composed not of regular soldiers but of bearded lunatics from Crawley. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an Islamist offshoot so extreme that even al-Qaeda thinks they’ve taken things a bit too far, now controls a huge swathe of Syria and Iraq, roughly in the region of 40,000 square miles, or 4.0 Wales on the International Wales Scale. That makes Sunnistan larger than an independent Scotland and with a great deal more oil.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The Birmingham ‘Trojan Horse plot’ is — like WMD — a neocon fantasy

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_June_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Matthew Parris vs Douglas Murray on the Birmingham Trojan Horse plot” startat=55] Listen [/audioplayer]I can remember where I was when Colin Powell presented to the United Nations his evidence for the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. I was taking a friend to an emergency medical consultation at Victoria station in London and while she saw the doctor I settled down in the waiting room to watch the presentation on TV. I found it compelling. Trusting the then US Secretary of State and believing him to be a good man — as Michael Gove is a good man — I felt confident Mr Powell himself believed what he was

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

A brave man in Iraq needs your help

Canon Andrew White is one of the bravest men you could ever meet. He is the Anglican vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad and has continued his service in that country throughout its recent horrors. He has lost hundreds of members of his congregation but he has remained an extraordinary, humbling and hope-giving presence throughout recent years. But now, with ISIS having taken over Mosul and surrounding areas in recent hours, he says that things are worse than at any point in the last decade. This, Nineveh, is the heartland of Iraqi Christianity. In this heart-breaking call for help, Canon White writes: ‘Iraq is now in its worst crisis

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Britain needs ‘Church schools’ and ‘faith schools’

Following Freddy Gray’s piece yesterday about the pundits’ efforts to exploit the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair in order discredit ‘faith’ schools, I thought you might be interested in the statement below, from the Catholic Education Service, which pretty well sums up the argument. One person the CES may have in its sights when it talks about the charge of indoctrination is the former Education Secretary, David Blunkett, who observed yesterday that: there was a ‘muddle’ in the heart of government when it comes to religious schooling. ‘Our society does need an open, liberal — small ‘l’ — curriculum that embraces all faiths and no faiths, and teaches children to think for

Ed West Ed West

I dread the thought of my children being taught ‘British values’

I’ve been off the past week poncing around Rome in a frilly shirt, and so am naturally gloomy about coming home. Just to make it worse, I return to hear of the death of my childhood hero and news that schools are now going to be teaching ‘British values’, following the Birmingham Trojan Horse scandal. Many are shocked about what happened in the city. After all, who would have thought that importing millions of people from totally different cultures would cause so many problems? You’d literally have to be Nostradamus to see that one coming. And of course, this is nothing to do with the intrinsic weakness of a society

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Labour’s radical schools hypocrisy

I see that the Labour party, and Labour’s shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt in particular, are trying to make political capital out of the ‘Trojan Horse’ Islamic schools scandal. I’ll write more about this in the coming week, but for the meantime let me point out what a steaming pile of political opportunism and hypocrisy this all is. Tristram says that Michael Gove ‘chose not to act’ and is guilty of ‘gross negligence’ on Islamic extremism in schools. Let me remind Tristram of a very recent piece of Labour party history. In 2009 it transpired that the Labour government was funding a school-running group called the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF). At that

Thursday

Tom Stacey

Witness to a stoning

Attending public executions, whether beheadings or stonings, is not my predilection, yet one does come across them in the course of life in Arabia and Pakistan. Beheading and stoning are the accepted penalties for a range of presumed offences in much of the Muslim world, and the all-male crowd — especially the old men — push and shove outside Riyadh’s main mosque after Friday morning prayer for a better view of offenders losing their heads by the ceremonial sword. The seeping cadavers and their heads are left on the tarmac pour encourager les autres. Further east, outside a much smaller mosque in the desert near Hofuf, the miscreants were two women

Wednesday

James Forsyth

David Cameron’s inaction has fuelled the row between Michael Gove and Theresa May over extremism in schools

The row between Michael Gove and Theresa May over how best to tackle Islamist extremism in schools is typical of how tense things get between these two whenever the subject of Islamist extremism arises. Gove wants to wage intellectual war on Islamist extremism, taking on the argument wherever it raises its head. May, heavily influenced by the civil servant Charles Farr, who is very much part of her circle, thinks that a distinction has to be drawn between extremism and violent extremism. But this problem would never have arisen if Number 10 had made the Prime Minister’s writ run on this subject. Cameron in his 2011 Munich speech made clear

Sunday

Douglas Murray

They always come for the Jews

Just over a week ago a gunman opened fire at the Jewish museum in Brussels. Four Jews – including two Israeli tourists – were killed, shot in the face and throat. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said immediately after the killings, and before a suspect had even been identified: ‘This act of murder is the result of constant incitement against Jews and their state. Slander and lies against the State of Israel continue to be heard on European soil even as the crimes against humanity and acts of murder being perpetrated in our region are systematically ignored. Our response to this hypocrisy is to constantly state the truth.’ It looks

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Let Evangelical Protestants be Evangelical Protestants

Pastor James McConnell of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast has gone and done it. He declared in a sermon that: “Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell”. Golly. Not since the Rev Ian Paisley got the boot into the pope as Old Redsocks and indeed as the Scarlet Woman herself have we heard anything quite so robust in the way of religious rhetoric. (Oddly enough, there was something almost lyrical about it; he had lovely cadences.) But the anti-popery tradition is precisely the context these remarks should be seen in. Evangelical Protestantism has a thing about false prophets; it also has a thing about

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Farzana Iqbal was murdered by Muslims applying ‘sharia’. Why does the BBC not report these facts?

Farzana Iqbal, aged 25, was stoned to death by members of her family in broad daylight on the steps of a courthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, because she had married a man with whom she was in love. This was an “honour killing” and perpetrators use sharia law to justify their murders. Some 1,000 women are killed in this manner in Pakistan each year and an overwhelming majority of the population seems to be in favour of them. Some 91 per cent of honour killings worldwide are “Muslim on Muslim” crimes. In Pakistan, laws introduced in the 1970s, by Zia-ul-Haq, and based on punishments recommended in the Koran and Sunnah, mean

Andrew J.

If we have to let generals run Egypt, must we pay for them, too?

The polls have closed, and the result was never in doubt. With a whopping majority, Egyptians have chosen Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to be their next president. Much like his several predecessors going back to 1952 when army officers overthrew King Farouk, the new president brings to office ambitious plans to whip his countrymen into shape. What Egyptians need, Sisi believes, is discipline. He has volunteered for the role of drill sergeant-in-chief. ‘Will you bear it if I make you walk on your own feet? When I wake you up at five in the morning every day? Will you bear cutting back on food, cutting back on air-conditioners?’ We

Ali A.

Baghdad’s rise, fall – and rise again

The history of Baghdad more than any other city mirrors the ebb and flow that has marked Islamic history and civilisation. The rise and fall of empires and dynasties, the splendours of Islam’s high culture and its decline, the periodic tensions and ease that affected relations between nations and peoples, sects and faiths have all been played out in the teeming neighbourhoods, palace precincts, market areas, great mosques, educational centres and military compounds of this remarkable city. Unlike its rival Damascus, the capital of the first Muslim empire, the Umayyads, which had been established for centuries before the arrival of Islam into Syria, Baghdad was pre-eminently a city of the

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Abu Hamza embodies Britain’s self-destructive madness

A jury in the US has taken less than two days to find Abu Hamza guilty on multiple terrorism charges. He can now expect to spend the rest of his life in prison. During the 1990s and later, Abu Hamza was one of a number of extremist clerics given apparent free-reign to operate in the UK. The effects of that teaching are still being felt. One of the killers of Lee Rigby asked in court to be called ‘Mujaahid Abu Hamza’. But even if we can now ignore the man himself, the Abu Hamza story deserves to be remembered because of what it tells us about our society. If anyone is

Friday

Alex Massie

Why has fascism failed in the United Kingdom?

Because, well, just look at them. These Young Spodes are not quite the Master Race are they? And this is the problem with extremism: it cannot avoid being ridiculous. I know there is never room for complacency but it’s hard to feel threatened by these Pythonesque boobies. Nor is the absurdity limited to the white right. The problem for Muslim extremists in Britain is they swank around the place in their kaftans claiming to be voice of the people (or “their” people) unaware that the people (including “their” people) neither recognise them nor want anything to do with them. In time, thanks to the good sense and humour of the

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Hamas TV teaches children to kill ‘all Jews’

Anyone who hasn’t seen Hamas TV is missing a treat. Of course the low production values are part of the fun. But for the Palestinian audiences, most entertaining of all seems to be the sight of watching Palestinian children being taught to murder every Jew. Often by an adult dressed up as a giant bumble bee. Because one of the most popular characters in the death-fest that is ‘Al-Aqsa TV’ is indeed ‘Nahul’, the giant cuddly bee. Anybody who still thinks that Hamas is a legitimate ‘resistance’ organisation, or that the recent Hamas-Fatah unity deal could in any way help bring about a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian border dispute,

Friday

Lara Prendergast

The ‘selfie’ protest

The kidnapping of the 276 predominantly Christian schoolgirls by Islamic terror group Boko Haram is an atrocity, but it is not the first atrocity they have committed. It is just the first one to trip the West’s interest switch. A girl’s right to an education has become an important pillar in western ideology, and an important pawn in the battle against radical Islam. It is why Malala has seen herself elevated to an almost saint-like position. The recent kidnappings have enraged western sensibilities, because they desecrate hallowed ideas about female equality. The West has responded in the only way it knows how: a self-righteous selfie protest using the hashtag ‘Bring Back