Islamophobia

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The Islamophobic attacks you don’t hear about

Incidents of ‘Islamophobia’ are really getting out of hand in Britain. In fact there has been such a wave of attacks that it’s amazing that politicians and commentators across the political spectrum, (not to mention all those supposed ‘anti-fascist’ groups) aren’t grand-standing like crazy. Perhaps their problem is that this wave of attacks does not consist of people writing nasty and mean things on Twitter, but of Muslims killing other Muslims and still other Muslims extolling such killings. It’s only a couple of weeks since a Sunni Muslim from Birmingham called Tanveer Ahmed was sentenced to prison for murdering an Ahmadiyya Muslim shopkeeper from Glasgow called Asad Shah. Mr Ahmed

Monday

Nick Cohen

Homophobia is now met with the same silence given to anti-Semitism

Rolling news does not give its participants the option of shutting their mouths and biting their tongues, even when shutting and biting are the best available options. Silence is the producer’s greatest fear. The supposedly contrarian presenter has to keep talking. The supposedly tough-minded pundit has to show she is nobody’s fool. Better that than a hushed studio. Last night, Owen Jones of the Guardian made the rather obvious point to Mark Longhurst, a Sky News presenter, and the Telegraph’s Julia Hartley Brewer, that a terrorist who slaughters LGBT people in a gay club hates homosexuality. The biggest single homophobic killing in the West since the fall of the Nazis

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Western liberals who banned Eagles of Death Metal are doing Isis’s dirty work

If you want to know how lost Europe is, how thoroughly it has abandoned freedom of speech, get this: two French music festivals have banned Eagles of Death Metal, the American rock band whose gig at the Bataclan was turned into a bloodbath by Isis last November, after the lead singer said some dodgy things about Muslims. Yes, six months after they watched and heard 89 of their fans being slaughtered by Isis for the crime of engaging in ‘perversity’, Eagles of Death Metal are now being shut down by festival organisers for saying allegedly perverted things about Islam. Isis must be delighted: Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they’re silencing

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Britain’s Christian culture has risen above the recent religious brawl

Our political culture contains some tension between Jews and Muslims. And some secular anti-Semitism, particularly on the left, and some Islamophobia. But, at the risk of getting Pollyannaish, let us see the positive. This country’s main religious culture, Christianity, is not involved in any of this nastiness. It does not contain any substantial prejudice against Muslims or Jews. It is not significantly invoked by our (rather mild) nativist movement, Ukip. Yes, Farage sometimes says that he stands for Christian values, but this is just a harmless and desperate bit of rhetoric. The louder message is that the Queen asked that lovely Muslim baker to her party. Let us be quietly proud that our

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Zero tolerance for anti-Zionists? The right is now as PC as the left

So now we know: the right and the respectable left are just as good at PC purges as potty, radical students are. In fact they’re better. The effective exiling of Ken Livingstone from polite society; yesterday’s almost hourly toppling of Labour councillors who once tweeted or Facebooked something ugly about Israel; the scouring of social media in search of Zionist-haters we might expose and shame and crush… all this zealous speech-policing, this crusading against people who said the unsayable, has made the intolerant, No Platforming student left look like amateurs in comparison. The right is out-PCing the left. I know what the warriors against anti-Semitic idiocy in sections of the

Monday

Hussein Kesvani

Sectarianism is on the rise in Britain – as any Ahmadiyya Muslim can tell you

I first heard of Asad Shah’s murder through a WhatsApp group. Its members are mainly prominent, respected Sunni Muslims. When it was reported that the Glaswegian shop owner – whose final message on Facebook was to wish Christians a happy Easter – had been killed, the group expressed its outrage. ‘This is what happens when the media keeps pushing their blatant Islamophobia,’ said one member, who later added: ‘This is why it’s important we stick together and we’re united as one Ummah.’ As details of Shah’s murder were revealed, the rhetoric of a united Muslim community slowly faded.  Fewer messages calling for public demonstrations were sent, and the tone became uncharacteristically

Thursday

James Delingpole

An inconvenient truth | 14 April 2016

‘Our findings will shock many people,’ promised Trevor Phillips at the beginning of What British Muslims Really Think (Channel 4, Wednesday). But the depressing thing is that I doubt they will, actually. I think the general British public have known for some time what Phillips’s documentary professed to find surprising: that large numbers of Muslims don’t want to integrate, that their views aren’t remotely enlightened, and that more than a few of them sympathise with terrorism. It’s only the establishment elite that has ever pretended otherwise. As former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Phillips was very much part of that elite. He commissioned the 1997 Runnymede report

Monday

Douglas Murray

Trevor Phillips is finally discovering the pitfalls of the term ‘Islamophobia’

The former head of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has once again said the ‘unsayable’.  In a piece for the Sunday Times (ahead of a Channel 4 documentary to go out on Wednesday) Trevor Phillips unveils an in-depth new poll carried out by ICM (which can be viewed here). The findings include the facts that: 23 percent of British Muslims polled support the idea of there being areas of the UK where sharia law is introduced instead of British law. 39 percent believe wives should always obey their husbands. 31 percent believe it is acceptable for British Muslims to keep more than one wife. 52 percent think homosexuality

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 4 February 2016

In 2000, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, accused Magdalen College, Oxford, of class bias in failing to admit a student called Laura Spence, a pupil at a Tyneside comprehensive. This was grossly unfair — how could the Chancellor know the details of a particular case? It was also outrageous in principle: why should a politician tell a university whom to admit? This Sunday, David Cameron did much the same thing. In the middle of his EU negotiations, the migrant crisis and the other genuinely important things the Prime Minister must deal with, he found time to offer an article to the Sunday Times, headlined ‘Watch out, universities; I’m

Monday

Douglas Murray

‘Religion of peace’ is not a harmless platitude | 28 December 2015

We’re closing 2015 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No10: Douglas Murray’s piece about Islam and violence, first written in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks but read most (and shared most widely) after the Bataclan atrocity.  The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Hug, hold hands . . . then stampede to the right

What a pleasure it was to see two socialist parties triumph in the most recent elections. First, Labour increased its share of the vote in Oldham — and then, last weekend, the Front National became France’s most popular party, securing almost 30 per cent in the first round of the country’s regional elections. Labour’s win was, I suspect, a bit of a false dawn. For a start, the party did an un-usual thing and fielded a sentient and likeable candidate, something which most of the time it successfully avoids doing. But even then, it was at least partly dependent upon Asian men hauling large sacks of votes from illiterate and

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

France’s new reactionaries

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’. The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence. They look back on a golden age that started with the French revolution and continued for nearly 200 years as France —

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How can multiculturalism both cause and cure racism?

In recent weeks there have been two prominent examples of what some people in Britain term ‘Islamophobia’. The first involved a woman on a London bus shouting to two identifiably Muslim women that they should ‘go back to their own country.’  She goes on to call them ‘Fucking Isis bitches’. The whole ugly scene was recorded by another passenger and widely trailed around the internet, subsequently leading to a woman’s arrest. The second incident was also filmed on a passenger’s phone and took place on a London bus a few days later.  On this occasion a passenger levelled an equally expletive-laden rant at a man sitting opposite him, also inviting the man to

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

Why does the left care more about Islamophobia than anti-Semitism?

Why do leftists care more about Muslims than they do about Jews? If that sounds confrontational, consider this: this week, the Met Police released the latest hate-crime figures for London. They show that offences against Jews have risen by 93% over the past year, while offences against Muslims have risen by 70%. And guess which story the BBC, Guardian and Independent, those voices of the British liberal conscience, have chosen to flag up? Yep, the 70% hike in Islamophobic attacks, not the nearly 100% hike in anti-Semitic offences. The BBC’s headline is ‘Islamophobic crime in London “up by 70%”‘. The Guardian‘s is ‘Hate crimes against Muslims soar in London’. The

Friday

Douglas Murray

Muslims in the UK are attacking mosques. Does that make them Islamophobic?

The Times today reports that leading Muslim clerics in the UK are warning that ‘religious sectarianism is on the rise in Britain’s Muslim community and threatens to spill over into violent crime and terrorism’.  An investigation by the paper ‘found a sharp but largely hidden rise in sectarian tensions between the minority Shia community and the dominant Sunni groups’. I must say that I am shocked – really shocked – by this.  Like everyone else, I had always assumed that if you allowed very large numbers of people with totally different beliefs into this country then in no time they would be down the local pub and fully integrated loyal

Thursday

Rod Liddle

I’m emigrating to Islamic State – see ya, kafirs!

I am getting heartily sick of being subjected to low-level racist and Islamophobic abuse whenever I go out wearing my black Islamic State flag. It is a very beautiful flag, symbolic of freedom and love and bears the legend: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is His Messenger’, which I hand-painted in Arabic script. (On the other side it says: ‘Nothing to do with Islam’, just so as I can hedge my bets a bit.) Anyway, walking around London with it I can report that several people looked at me funny. That’s Islamophobia for you. Also, one fairly obese man shouted, ‘Fuck off to Syria, you wanker.’ That’s

Thursday

Ed West

Polygamy could be the next sexual liberation campaign

Back in the early 1990s when the kind old 17th Duke of Norfolk was special guest at prize-giving night at our school he remarked that in Islam one was allowed up to four wives. ‘What a nightmare,’ he quipped, ‘imagine having four mothers-in-law’ (or something to that effect). I think back at the joke as indicative of a more innocent age; if he had said that now, some little Pavlik Morozov in the assembly would have tweeted his outrage and by the time the Duke left the building he would have been trending on Twitter, forced to step down as governor and the ‘offensive comments’ would be the subject of

Monday

Theo Hobson

We assume British Muslims support British values. Do they?

Let’s put the question very bluntly: do British Muslims affirm British values, or are they outsiders to our way of life? Or, even more bluntly: can we trust them? It is important that we learn to answer this question with nuance, and not in a self-righteous and simplistic way. A week before the Tunisian carnage, David Cameron implicitly raised the question, when he said that too many mainstream Muslims were equivocating, seeming to condone Islamic State and to disparage the West –this ‘paves the way for young people to turn simmering prejudice into murderous intent’, he said. His comments, and his planned counter-extremism bill, were strongly condemned by commentators, and

Monday

Ed West

Qatar doesn’t deserve to host the 2022 World Cup but Turkey does

The campaign against Qatar’s plans to host the World Cup is racist and Islamophobic, according to the former prime minister of the oil-rich absolute monarchy where Indian workers are treated like serfs and leaving Islam is punishable by death. Maybe worker health and safety is just a Eurocentric construct and there are no objective truths about how many people die on building sites? Momentum is building against Qatar, with pressure on the corporate sponsors to pull out, and for UEFA to lead a European boycott. The case against Russia is also pretty strong, too, but at least Russia can physically hold the tournament in summer. One of the main political problems

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Is Ed Miliband really proud to have fought alongside me? I’m not so sure

Sheesh, sometimes you read something and it makes you go all gooey inside. Take this email I got from Ed Miliband. Dear Rod, As I write this, Justine and I are on our last trip on the Labour campaign bus. We’re heading back from an incredible supporter rally in Leeds to Doncaster so we can vote there first thing tomorrow morning. So while I have this rare, quiet moment, I want to say this: thank you. I am so proud to have fought this campaign alongside you. If our country votes for a Labour government tomorrow, it will be because of the dedication, passion and generosity of hundreds of thousands