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.
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One step forward, one step back. Theresa May says in Parliament that the Paris attacks have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. And on the same day, later in the evening, her boss quite rightly says: ‘It is not good enough to say simply that Islam is a religion of peace and then to deny any connection
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A huge number of nonsense goes around after atrocities like those in Paris. The media and social media are full of them. I thought it might be helpful to list the worst. ‘This attack has nothing to do with Islam’: obviously not true. See here. ‘Islam means peace’: Very obviously not true. Incidentally the word actually
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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
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A wave of terror attacks has rocked Paris tonight with a restaurant, a stadium and a concert hall amongst the targets. Gunmen fired into Bataclan concert hall shouting “Allahu akbar,” according to France24, and then proceeded to hold hostages; French police then went in hard and some reports have suggested that up to 100 may have
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Excellent news, if it is confirmed, that Mohammed Emwazi – aka ‘Jihadi John’ – has discovered the hard way that seventy-two virgins have not been waiting around for him on a cloud. It is more than a year since David Cameron announced that this country would chase the murderer of British, American and Japanese aid-workers
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When Hugh and Mirabel Cecil’s book In Search of Rex Whistler was published in 2012, the late Brian Sewell reviewed it with typical insight and lack of generosity. Despite recognising the artist as an extraordinary talent and perhaps the inventor of neo-romanticism, he regretted that Whistler would never be taken sufficiently seriously and pronounced it
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The farcically named ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ has featured here many times before. The last time was earlier this year when this Khomeinist group decided to award their ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ award to the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo. At their ‘awards ceremony’ for this the IHRC even joked about what a shame it
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The ‘Stop the War coalition’ is no such thing. It is a meeting point for hardline Stalinists and Islamists to pursue their own imperial policies. Anyone in any doubt of this need merely consider the organisation’s leadership and history. Currently their membership’s views on Syria seem to range from those supporting Russian intervention in Syria
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Fascinating events in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orban continues to come under fire from other EU member states for trying to maintain what we used to call ‘borders’. This has now led Orban into direct confrontation with Hungary’s richest export – billionaire financier George Soros. Orban identifies Soros as being one among a number
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A nation rejoices! After a campaign waged from the political right and left, the UK can now finally welcome back Shaker Aamer. This is the man generally described as ‘the last British resident’ in Guantanamo. As he returns to these shores we can confidently predict that he will now be accorded the same human-rights hero
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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
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Regular readers may recall the charming group ‘Cage’. This is the organisation which made headlines earlier this year when Mohammed Emwazi (aka ‘Jihadi John’) was outed as one of their associates. The response of ‘Cage’ was to extol what a ‘beautiful’ young man Jihadi John was, and claim that if it weren’t for Britain’s security
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The British government has published its counter-extremism strategy, unencumbered by the Liberal Democrats who held a similar strategy up for five years of coalition. There is much to be said about this strategy, a strategy which is to my mind the most advanced, careful and rigorous counter-extremism strategy anywhere in the Western world. While the
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The things people say in anger are generally the most revealing things of all. So it was on last night’s Question Time when a clearly very angry Simon Schama confronted Rod Liddle of this parish on the question of migrants. I’m sure Rod himself will have something to say about this, but I thought it
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Some politicians and pundits are brewing a perfect storm across Europe. Migrants are heading into our continent illegally in record numbers, and at the same time many politicians and pundits are spending their time trying to deride and shut down anybody who might be concerned about this. Last week I mentioned Angela Merkel’s skewed priorities
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So the German Chancellor has just been caught on microphone talking with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was overheard confronting Zuckerberg over incendiary posts on the social network, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, amid complaints from her government about anti-immigrant posts in the midst of Europe’s refugee crisis. On the sidelines of a
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Europhiles have warned us for years of the dangers of Britain leaving the EU. But all the while a different spectre has crept up on their other flank: which is that even if the UK votes to stay in the EU in 2017, we might be one of the only countries left. It’s a radical
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On Saturday I wrote a blog recommending readers catch the ‘Passion For Freedom’ festival’s final hours in London. Thank you to all the readers who did and helped make it a packed-out show. One further detail about the show came up afterwards in the Guardian and I mentioned it at the start of my talk
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This has been a terrible year for free speech. In January, after the atrocities in Paris, the whole world was ‘Charlie’, for about an hour. Then the violence and intimidation did the job they usually do (though we like to pretend otherwise) and by July even Charlie wasn’t Charlie anymore. So I was delighted earlier
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I am in Copenhagen at the moment – of which more anon. But before fleeing these shores I had time to pop in to see something I want to recommend to any readers in the London area. For the rest of this weekend you can still see the 2015 Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall
