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.
I have never met Donald Trump, but I knew his parents. A fact that makes me feel about 100 years old. Which was actually nearer the age Fred and Mary Anne Trump were when, as a teenager, I made my first trip to New York. I remember riding backwards in their limousine on the way
The exit of Emma Rice from her position as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe is a happy day for Shakespeare and a happy day for the Globe. Rice – for those who haven’t followed her work – is one of those directors who thinks that Shakespeare doesn’t quite cut it and needs serious intervention to be
Both Brendan and I have written about the strange martyrdom of Louis Smith. But here is an ugly coda. As readers may recall, the Olympic athlete got drunk at a friend’s wedding and, along with a friend, ended up doing a joke version of the Muslim call to prayer. Something to do with Aladdin apparently.
At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect
After voting for Brexit earlier this year did you come over all homophobic? I mean after you did all the obvious stuff like beat up a few ethnic minorities and burn a Torah. A piece in the Guardian at the weekend explains that ‘Homophobic attacks in UK rose 147 per cent in three months after Brexit vote.’ It
It is a shame that ‘subversion’ of the state is no longer a crime in Britain. One result of it not being so is that people have become blind to the idea that it is even going on. The other day I wrote about the ‘academics’ who had signed a letter to the Guardian insisting
Hurray! It is not often one gets good news, but here is some. Jan Boehmermann, the German comedian who read out a rude poem about Sultan Erdogan on German TV, has had the prosecution against him dropped. In the last couple of hours prosecutors in Mainz said that they did not have ‘sufficient evidence’ against
This is how the madness spreads. While some politicians of the left continue to pretend that the situation in the Labour party and on the British left in general is salvageable, they seem not to realise that all their sluices are up. Take a piece in Thursday’s Guardian written by Alice Ross. The headline is
In March of this year the Turkish government complained about an item on German television which was critical of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A fortnight later – to prove that Germany was a free country – Jan Boehmermann read out a poem that was rude about Erdogan on his evening comedy show. Not only did the
Mark Twain once said that if you give a man a reputation as an early-riser he can sleep in till noon. The same is true of calling someone ‘a moderate’. Call someone ‘a moderate’ and they can rant like a fascist any day of the week without reprimand. President Rouhani of Iran has been called
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
Here is one of those stories that matters even though it preoccupies the Guardian. Last week the celebrated novelist Lionel Shriver gave an address at the Brisbane book festival. It was heralded as being about ‘community and belonging’ but ended up being about ‘fiction and identity politics’. In particular Shriver (the author, most famously, of We Need
The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has announced that the French police and intelligence services have identified 15,000 people across France who are either ‘radicalised’ or in the process of becoming radical. In response to this Nicolas Sarkozy (who is of course in campaigning mode) has given an interview to Journal du Dimanche in which
Here’s a strange thing. In a TV interview on Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton said that Isis want Donald Trump to become President of the United States. In her words, Isis are currently saying, ‘Please, Allah, make Trump president of America’. Personally I have no idea which ticket Isis will be campaigning for, come November. But
Why do people always fall from grace for the wrong reasons? I had always hoped that if Keith Vaz finally fell from whatever form of grace he could lay claim to, it would be for really good reasons. Regular readers will know that my detestation of him dates back to 1989 when as a young MP
Private Eye used to run a column called the ‘Neo-philes’, listing some of the endless cases of hacks saying ‘X is the new Y’ (‘This season green is the new black’ and so on). So let me put in an early entry for the return of any such column by announcing here that ‘The Burkini
So farewell then Anjem Choudary. At least for a few years. Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis. He now faces up to ten years in prison. There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of
Earlier this week the Times had a leader column entitled ‘Protect Prevent’. As a defence of the government’s counter-extremism strategy it was all well and good, but it missed a very crucial point. It said: ‘The success of Prevent has been undermined, however, by a failure of public relations. The government failed to cast it as
It is almost two months since Omar Mateen walked around the Pulse nightclub in Florida, gunning people down while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. During the assault Mateen spoke to American law enforcement and swore allegiance to Isis. Frustratingly Omar Mateen failed to call the group ‘so-called Islamic State’, thus betraying a woeful lack of linguistic sensitivity among his
A few months back, after the Brussels terrorist attacks, I pointed out on Coffee House that there is a certain routine after any such atrocity. One part of it is that, after a couple of days pause, we always get the ‘Muslim good news story’. This is the part when after a couple of days of everyone
