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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Terrorism

Mark Steyn: A Joke Is a Small Thing, but It’s Our Societal Glue

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Mark Steyn: A Joke Is a Small Thing, but It’s Our Societal Glue

Tags

Blasphemy, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Copenhagen, Ezra Levant, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Islam, Mark Steyn, speech, terror, Terrorism

12 Dead In French Magazine Shooting

“You know, a cartoon is a small thing. It’s not The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

It’s not a big work. People get a pencil, they do a little sketch, and it’s in the paper the next day, and they forget about it. It’s a funny thing. It makes you laugh.

And the joke is an important signifier of society. A joke is a small thing, but it’s part of the societal glue. It’s what holds us together. Jokes are about recognition. When you tell a joke, people understand the social norms that are being mocked in it…

Now we live in a world though, where they don’t just end your career. These people are so serious about jokes — cartoons, gags — that they want to kill you for it.

And the correct attitude of all those people who intervened, all the politicians who spoke up and said ‘I deplore the offense that was given by this cartoon’ is completely wrong.

You should just say, ‘Look, we’re in a free society and we don’t regulate jokes here.’ […]

My friend Ezra Levant once observed that one day the Danish cartoon crisis would be seen as a more critical event than the attacks of September 11th.

He was wrong, obviously, in terms of the comparative death tolls, but he was absolutely right in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization in the 21st century.

In the long run, the ostensibly trivial matter of some not-terribly-good drawings in an obscure newspaper… will prove to be a more important signifier of the collapse of Western civilization than a direct, violent assault on the citadels of American power in Washington and New York.

Because if you provoke on the scale of 9/11, even Western civilization in its present decayed state will feel obliged to respond.

So yes, if they blow up St. Peters, if they blow up the Eiffel Tower, then yes, they’ll get a response.

But the cartoon crisis confirmed to our enemies that at heart we don’t really believe in ourselves anymore. That we won’t defend our core liberties, and that you can steal them from us one little bit at a time.”

__________

Pulled from the inimitable Mark Steyn’s recent speech in Copenhagen to mark the decade anniversary of the Danish cartoon crisis. As a wise man recently noted, “It used to be that they came for the Jews first. Now it’s the cartoonists. Then the Jews.” Quite surreal, that.

I highly encourage you to check out Steyn’s speech below (and buy Charb’s newly minted, posthumously published book). Steyn is a truly first rate orator. If the pulled text gives you the sense that this is another dour, Doomsday-Is-Here rant about Western Civilization’s imminent collapse, then it’s giving off the wrong impression. Steyn is utterly hilarious, astonishingly articulate, and always fun to listen to. I think he’s the best raconteur and pure talker out there since Hitchens passed. For a sample, you can start here. Also, you can keep up with his daily output of writing — mostly on this topic, though also about his jazz cat album — at his website, steynonline.com.

Continue on:

  • John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg riff on why defending freedom of speech often means defending controversial speakers
  • Salman talks about why it’s normal to be offended sometimes
  • Douglas Murray discusses why we have to defend liberty at home first

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Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

Tags

Adam Gopnik, and the True Enemies of Free Expression, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen, extremism, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Hypercacher, Islam, Islamism, Islamophobia, liberty, Maajid Nawaz, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Podcast, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, Waking Up Podcast

[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

__________

Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

Go on:

  • Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, talks about “the tyranny of silence”
  • A brief reflection on 25 years of the Salman Rushdie fatwa
  • Douglas Murray shows us some strangely uncontroversial cartoons

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

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Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Essay, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Daesh, France, interview, ISIL, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadis, Jihadism, Lawrence O'Donnell, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Paris, Paris Attacks, Podcast, religion, Sam Harris, Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, terror, Terrorism, The Last Word, violence

Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

__________

Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

  • The ultimate poem about the city of lights: “In Paris with You” by James Fenton
  • Meet Napoleon Bonaparte
  • A few of the best words from some indomitable Frenchmen: Jules Renard, Blaise Pascal, Edmond de Goncourt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus

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The Problem with Qatar

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Religion

≈ Comments Off on The Problem with Qatar

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, Daily Beast, David Cameron, Douglas Murray, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Hate Speech, Islam, Islamism, Jamie Dettmer, Mosque, Nick Clegg, Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq, Terrorism, World Cup

Qatar World Cup

“In Doha last Friday, the sermon given by the Imam at the biggest mosque in Qatar. Just reflect on this: biggest mosque in Qatar. You might have noticed Qatar is doing quite a lot of business in this city these days.

But what did the Imam say at Friday prayers? He said, among other things, this:

Allah strengthen Islam and the Muslims and destroy your enemies — the enemies of the religion. Allah destroy the Jews and whoever made the Jews, [and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.]

This has been and is being pumped around by the ministries of the Qatari government. They’ve been sending around the video. They’re proud of it!

Is any leader in this country going to raise their voice about this sort of thing? I doubt it, because people don’t even raise them when it gets preached in this city, which it does. It really does.

[…]

It’s as bad as Je suis Charlie, which I’m deeply, deeply aggrevated and upset by… People weren’t Charlie, ladies and gentlemen. They really weren’t. They aren’t. If they were, Charlie Hebdo cartoons would’ve been published in every newspaper and on every TV station.

You know when Nick Clegg and David Cameron and all the other political leaders say Je suis Charlie, no they’re not. No they’re not. If Charlie Hebdo had been published here, it would have been decried as a far right wing, racist, Islamophobic magazine, and would have been shut down years and years ago. And don’t think when people say Je suis Juif that they mean that any more. They really don’t. It doesn’t mean anything more than Je suis Charlie. It’s a bit of sentimentality.

But hold them to it. Hold them to it, for God’s sake.”

__________

Pulled from Douglas Murray’s spot on, fervent opening on a recent panel with Maajid Nawaz and others discussing radical Islamism in Modern Europe:

The bracketed part of the pulled quote above is sourced from Jamie Dettmer’s article in the Daily Beast “An American Ally’s Grand Mosque of Hate,” which I’m assuming is where Murray found the quote.

Here is Dettmer’s more detailed account:

On the Friday before ISIS posted the horrific footage of the burning [Jordanian] pilot, a preacher sermonizing from the [Doha] Grand Mosque’s minbar prayed for the destruction of the faithful of other religions. “Allah, strengthen Islam and the Muslims, and destroy your enemies, the enemies of the religion,” intoned Saudi cleric Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq. “Allah, destroy the Jews and whoever made them Jews, and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.”

His comments wouldn’t have been out of place in ISIS-controlled Mosul or Raqqa. He also beseeched Allah to save the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, from the “claws of the Jews.”

Al Ateeq, who was on his sixth visit to the state-supervised Grand Mosque since 2013, reserved his most bellicose remarks for the part of the sermon called the du’aa, when the preacher encourages the faithful to join in guided prayer.

Within minutes, Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs promoted al Ateeq’s remarks on Twitter. And the sermon was broadcast on several local television channels, including Qatar TV, the official state channel, signaling another stamp of approval…

If the thousands of dead slave laborers, gross violations of basic human rights and criminal extortion involved in Qatar’s hosting the 2022 World Cup are not enough to force us into even threatening to boycott the games, then surely the above facts and their attendant, sordid details should. Our only consolation so far is that hosting the World Cup is an enormous economic boondoggle.

Read on:

  • “I don’t have an Israel”: Murray explains why we have to preserve our own societies — because most of us have nowhere else to run
  • Maajid Nawaz, the great hope for a modern, moderate Islam, explains why our leaders should call ISIS “Islamic”
  • The cartoons the media will show us

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Inside the Mind of Muhammad Atta

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Religion, War

≈ Comments Off on Inside the Mind of Muhammad Atta

Tags

9/11, al-Quds Mosque, Anti-Semitism, Hijackers, Islam, Islamism, Israel, Jihad, Lawrence Wright, Misogyny, Monica Lewinsky, Muhammad Atta, Muslim, Osama bin Laden, Palestine, religion, Sayyid Qutb, terror, Terrorism, The Looming Tower, Wahhabism

9:11 Security Camera

“What the [9/11 hijacking] recruits tended to have in common — besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills — was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared… The imams naturally responded to the alienation and anger that prompted these men to find a spiritual home. A disproportionate number of new mosques in immigrant communities had been financed by Saudi Arabia and staffed by Wahhabi fundamentalists, many of whom were preaching the glories of jihad. […]

Although they would often be accused of being a fascistic cult, the resentment that burned inside the al-Quds mosque, where Atta and his friends gathered, had not been honed into a keen political agenda. But like the Nazis, who were born in the shame of defeat, the radical Islamists shared a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations.

Although Atta had only vaguely socialist ideas of government, he and his circle filled up the disavowed political space that the Nazis left behind. One of Atta’s friends, Munir al-Motassadeq, referred to Hitler as ‘a good man.’ Atta himself often said that the Jews controlled the media, banks, newspapers, and politics from their world headquarters in New York City; moreover, he was convinced that the Jews had planned the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya as a way of holding back Islam. He believed that Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to undermine Clinton, who had become too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The extreme rigidity of character that everyone detected in Atta was a Nazi trait, and no doubt it was reinforced in him by the need to resist the lure of this generous city. The young urban planner must have admired the cleanliness and efficiency of Hamburg, which was so much the opposite of the Cairo where he had grown up. But the odious qualities that Sayyid Qutb [the founder of modern Islamism] had detected in America — its materialism, its licentiousness, its spiritual falsity — were also spectacularly on display in Hamburg, with its clanging casinos, prostitutes in shop windows, and magnificent, empty cathedrals…

Atta was a perfectionist; in his work he was a skilled but not creative draftsman. Physically, there was a feminine quality to his bearing: He was ‘elegant’ and ‘delicate,’ so that his sexual orientation — however unexpressed — was difficult to read…

On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.

Although the sentiments in the will represent the tenets of his community of faith, Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. The will states: ‘No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.’ The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.”

__________

An excerpt from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

If you’re yet to see it, spend two hours watching the new HBO documentary Going Clear, based on Wright’s book of the same title. It’s an eerie, engrossing, and absolutely scandalizing look at the Church of Scientology and its hucksterish origins and practices.

Wright is interviewed throughout the film. His speech is always clear, never hyperbolic, and tuned to challenge viewers’ easy assumptions and reflexive piety. His command of the material shows through. I was impressed and liked the guy, so I decided to read his book on 9/11 — and I encourage you to do the same. It reveals the origins of not only that day — the most important day of any of our lifetimes — but also of the kind of fiendish, extremist worldview (what Martin Amis once called “the dependent mind”) that we’re now confronting in nearly every country on earth. It’s a stranger and even less coherent creation story than you’d expect.

Read on:

  • Christopher Hitchens: Resisting radical Islam 101
  • Douglas Murray discusses what are the likely destinies for foreign recruits to ISIS
  • Clive James’s charming solution for integrating Muslim communities

Lawrence Wright

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Christopher Hitchens: Their Hatred Towards Us Is a Compliment

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, War

≈ Comments Off on Christopher Hitchens: Their Hatred Towards Us Is a Compliment

Tags

Anti-Semitism, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Pearl, Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, foreign policy, Islamic Jihad, Judaism, racism, Terrorism

Hitchens


“
Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity, and of civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college and was the chair of the Islamic Students Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected.

Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that their hatred towards us is a compliment and resolving some of the time at any rate to do a bit more to deserve it.”

__________

The closing of Christopher Hitchens’s fantastic Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, given in March 2010.

Daniel Pearl, one of the first Americans killed at the hand of Islamic extremism in the post-9/11 era, was murdered 13 years ago this month. His death looks more and more like our most stark, literal harbinger of the kind of barbarism we now see everyday in the Middle East and around the world.

As a supplement to Hitch’s talk, I recommend reading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?. In it, BHL argues convincingly that Pearl was murdered not only for his Jewish/American roots, but also because he had uncovered hidden connections between the Pakistani nuclear program and al-Qaeda.

Daniel Pearl

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Should We Call Terrorists ‘Islamic’?

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, War

≈ Comments Off on Should We Call Terrorists ‘Islamic’?

Tags

BBC, Douglas Murray, Islam, Jihadism, Muslim World, terror, Terrorism

Kurds3

Interviewer: Do you think this appalling act [ISIS’s beheading of 21 Copts] will focus minds?

Douglas Murray: I think it’ll focus minds for 24 hours until the next atrocity somewhere, maybe in Europe, maybe in North Africa, maybe in the Middle East. We live in an incredibly forgetful news cycle these days, in a time when people don’t want to add things together.

You know Sisi himself, general Abdel el-Sisi the leader of Egypt, at the end of last year made a very important interjection to the scholars of Al-Alzhar, the main center of Sunni learning in the Muslim world. He told them we have a worldwide problem of radical Islam and it needs to be sorted out by the scholars and leaders of the Muslim world.

Now Sisi has made himself very unpopular in parts of the region and the wider world for saying this, but it did need saying.

What I think is striking is that across the Western world — even in the wake of atrocities we see now day in and day out — there is no desire to add these things together.

The man who ran into a free speech seminar in Copenhagen a couple of days ago and sent machine gun bullets ripping through the cafe and then shot up a synagogue, the people who shot up newspaper offices and a kosher market in Paris last month, are individuals who share the exact same ideology of the people who want to cut off the heads of Christians and persecute moderate Muslims.

It is an unbelievably fascistic ideology. It is a united ideology. And it has to be comprehensively identified in order to be defeated. And it is a great symbol of the problem of our time that we have so little leadership here that General Sisi has to lead the world in admitting there is a problem.

__________

Douglas Murray again, this time speaking in an interview with the BBC on Monday. The pictures are of our friends the Kurds as they reclaimed Kobani on January 28th.

Kurds4

Kurds 6

Kurds 5

Kurds

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What Happens When They Return?

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, War

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cider with Rosie, Douglas Murray, foreign policy, George Monbiot, George Orwell, interview, Islam, Jihadism, Laurie Lee, politics, terror, Terrorism, War

Kurds2

Interviewer: I’m wondering about your take on the British-born Muslims leaving to wage Jihad abroad. Of course we should be concerned about what they’re going to do while they’re there, but how big of a concern is it for when they return?

Douglas Murray: Obviously it’s a real concern. I don’t think it’s being overhyped; to the contrary, I don’t think people realize how dangerous a thing this could be.

We’ve been quite lucky in recent years. I don’t say that lightly. A lot of people who’ve been involved in plots in this country have had the desire but not the capability. I’m thinking of the second set of attempted suicide bombings in July 2005, where the chemicals were mixed incorrectly so four additional bombs didn’t go off in the heart of London.

Or take, say, the Detroit airline bomber, Abdul Mutallab, who tried to ignite the device in his underwear which just ended up burning his genitals off. But you know, we were lucky that that didn’t go off, because if so we wouldn’t be laughing about the underwear bomber — we’d be mourning the thousands of people on the plane and on the ground in Detroit who were killed on Christmas Day.

So a lot of these people haven’t had the technical knowledge that the IRA did, say, at the end of their campaign in the 1980s.

But there is a real risk in Syria of jihadis going out and, aside from anything else, connecting with people who actually do have the technical know-how, who do have the expertise, and then coming back.

There are various reasons why it might not play out like that, though. For one, there is a large likelihood that nearly all of the people who go out will be killed. There are believable rumors that there are squads of executioners specifically roaming Syria and now Iraq in order to find foreign fighters and machine gun them immediately. Because they don’t want these foreign fighters and actually realize foreigners are part of the problem — that they come to do bloodthirsty things and boast about it then go home.

So a lot of these people won’t return, and I don’t shed a tear for any of them.

But I do think there’s a question which is worth pondering about why anyone would end up in that situation.

There’s some historical revisionism about it. There was an awful, lamentable George Monbiot column in The Guardian earlier this year, saying the jihadis that have gone out to Syria are no different from those who went out to fight Franco with international brigades in the 1930s. He even went on to say that British jihadis are the Laurie Lees and George Orwells of this generation.

But I’m fairly sure that after a few months of chopping off peoples’ heads and killing innocent Muslims in Syria and Iraq, these guys aren’t going to come back and write ‘Cider with Rosie.’ They won’t even write ‘Sparking Water with Rosie’s Dad.’

And I think that part of the problem is precisely saying that these jihadis are like that — getting history wrong and getting the present wrong — and giving them an additional boost.

__________

Douglas Murray riffing in an interview last summer (these comments can be found 22 minutes in).

Go on:

  • Murray reflects on why terrorism works
  • Murray laments the excuses we give terrorists
  • Clive James asks what good is culture in the face of terror?

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The Cartoons the Media Will Show Us

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Asghar Bukhari, Blasphemy, Charlie Hebdo, Douglas Murray, Hate Speech, interview, Islam, Islamism, Muhammad, Muhammad Cartoons, Private Eye, Terrorism

Douglas Murray - Private Eye

“This is about freedom of speech.

What is going on at the moment, worldwide and particularly in Europe, is an attempt to shut down any and all criticism of Islam — one religion alone.

I’ll hold up for a moment — don’t worry it’s not a cartoon of Muhammad, you don’t have to get scared.

This is the Christmas edition of Private Eye. An image which, on the front cover, lampoons — quite amusing, not very — the Virgin Mary and Jesus and has various jokes about where the frankincense should have been bought from and so on.

That’s perfectly commonplace. But you know what: if anyone had gone into Private Eye’s offices yesterday and massacred the staff because of it in the name of Christianity or Jesus, I think that not only would all the papers today have been a lot more robust, they would have shown — at the very least, shown — this image to give us a sense of what the person who did the killing was so irate about.

The fact is that there is something going on, which we have to identify. It is an attempt, in our society, to make Islam and in particular the founder of Islam immune from any criticism.

It cannot be allowed to continue.”

__________

Douglas Murray, debating Asghar Bukhari on Britain’s Sky News last week.

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The Excuses Terrorists Haven’t Asked For

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, Daniel Pearl, Douglas Murray, interview, Islam, Islamism, terror, Terrorism

Charlie Hebdo cover

Interviewer: You hear the excuse that the Muslim community is not integrated into the larger French community, they’re stuck out in the banlieues. But is that really the cause of this terror?

Douglas Murray: It has nothing to do with whether you like the suburb you live in or not, whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor. Most of the terrorists who have been coming from Britain in recent years: very well off.

The man who tried to bring down a plane over Detroit: a student at University College London, millionaire Nigerian family.

The man who decapitated your colleague at the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, ten years ago: very well off, private school educated, London School of Economics.

I’m fed up with people trying to give excuses to the terrorists that the terrorists themselves have not asked for.

__________

A quick section from Douglas Murray’s interview with the Wall Street Journal, given the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

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Terrorism Works

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, BBC, Charlie Hebdo, Douglas Murray, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Islam, Islamism, Jyllandsposten, Maajid Nawaz, Muhammad, Muhammad Cartoons, terror, Terrorism

150114_EM_CharlieHebdoEbay

Interviewer: In a sense the terrorists are winning, aren’t they? They’ve cowed the Western media into not reprinting the cartoons.

Douglas Murray: Not only are they winning, they’ve won. They’ve won. Terrorism works — that’s the brutal fact of it.

And a lot of people will take lessons from that today.

You know, after the 2005 Jyllandsposten cartoon, by the conservative paper in Denmark, the only paper in Europe, really, that was still willing to draw pictures of Muhammad in the same way they’re willing to draw pictures of every other religious, political — you name it — figure, was Charlie Hebdo.

So Charlie Hebdo stood alone. Charlie Hebdo was attacked.

That’s why I’ve suggested that there’s really only two options that the press can choose from here.

The first is that we all agree that we live under an element of Islamic blasphemy law. I think that would be highly regrettable. I don’t think that is what our society should live under. I think we should do everything possible to avoid it.

But if we are going to avoid it, I think that it’s going to have to be done unanimously. All of the newspapers, all of the magazines — the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 — should unanimously publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons at a particular hour, because as Ayaan Hirsi Ali said after the Danish cartoons row, we have to spread the risk around.

It cannot be that a single cartoonist is holding the line for all freedom of speech. Or that a single, small satirical magazine is doing it.

It has to be everybody.

__________

Douglas Murray, the clearest voice on the issue of Islamism in Europe, speaking during a BBC discussion with Maajid Nawaz.

  • I wrote an open letter to Brandeis University defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Douglas Murray gives one of my favorite speeches: If we don’t stand for Western values, who will?

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