Charlie Hebdo : Yesterday's crucial verdict

Yesterday in Paris, a court’s decision cleared Philippe Val, the editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” when it published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. The case was brought by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) and the World Islamic League.

The judges were right in finding that the limits of free expression were not exceeded in this case. Their verdict accords with the French Republic’s values and is important for French society as a whole. Hopefully it will set a judicial precedent. Their ruling is in no way a defeat for one single community, rather it is a victory for press freedom, for the general principle of freedom of speech and furthermore for all those who remain determined not to appease Islamo-fascists and all religious fundamentalists in France and around the World.

The Paris Grand Mosque said it would not appeal, although not surprisingly the more radical UOIF announced that it would.

When he left the court yesterday, Philippe Val, who was facing a possible sentence of six months in prison and a fine of 22,500 euros, expressed his satisfaction and confidence in the French judicial system, commenting: “We have been vindicated by the court.”

It is also important to note that this verdict comes at a crucial time for France, just one month before the Presidential election. It was encouraging to see that many politicians, including UDF presidential candidate François Bayrou and French Socialist Party leader François Hollande, voiced their support for the magazine during the two-day trial on 7 and 8 February, and that Nicolas Sarkozy, the UMP presidential candidate, also indicated his support, commenting that he preferred “an excess of cartoons to a lack of cartoons.” At the same, it is unfortunate that, during this Presidential campaign, these same candidates have been so cautious in not mentioning the rise of communities who increasingly aim to separate themselves, and the risks that this represents to France, the French Republic and its core idealistic values.

Franck Guillory


Postscript

The outcome of this key trial for the defence of press freedom follows a similar decision by Danish judges acquitting the editors of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the first newspaper to publish controversial cartoons of Mohammed.

The lawsuit concerned three of the six Mohammed cartoons which the weekly published on 8 February 2006. Two of the three had appeared in Jyllands-Posten in 2005. One of them showed Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb about to explode. The other showed him saying: “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.” The third, which was on the cover, was by French cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut. It showed Mohammed with his head in his hands saying: “It is hard to be loved by idiots.”

18 Doughty Street interviews Mark Steyn

From over the pond, in Washington, 18 Doughty Street talks to Mark Steyn. Fascinating watch. That's here

And remember too the interview Mark gave us last november about his last book America Alone. (Re) read it here

Our next event - Monday, March 19th

You are invited to hear:

JAMES DELINGPOLE

on his new book

HOW TO BE RIGHT

The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History


Monday, 19th March, 6.30pm for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square)

If you think modern Britain has gone mad, then James Delingpole’s How to be Right will confirm your view. Part polemic, part amusing opinion, but mostly hilarious rant, this is a journey into everything that’s wrong with our politically correct society.
As a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, James Delingpole has expressed his thoughts - articulately and amusingly - on everything from politics to popular music, from school sports days to spliffs. If you’ve thought about it, he’s written about it. In this A-Z collection of brief essays he turns his lively mind to modern society gone mad. And what he discovers is that the older you get, the more mad it seems.Can’t understand why Coldplay are the biggest band in the world? Don’t see why there was such a fuss over Pete Burns’s `gorilla` coat? Wondering what ever happened to good, old-fashioned universities? Well, join James’s club. Pouring scorn on the state of Britain after a decade of Blair and Brown, How to be Right couldn’t have come along at a more appropriate time.

Come and join us, prepare to foam and splutter, and to be seriously entertained.

Please RSVP to events@newcultureforum.org.uk

We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening.

Politics and the Theatre: What's Left? Tuesday, February 27th 6.30 for 7.00pm

You are invited to

‘POLITICS AND THE THEATRE: WHAT’S LEFT?’

A discussion with playwright Richard Bean, Associate Director of the Royal Court Ramin Gray, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin and playwright Shelley Silas

Tuesday, 27th February, 6.30 for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square)


Last year, the National Theatre’s director Nicholas Hytner said that one thing he would really like to see there in the future would be a ‘good, mischievous, right-wing play.’

The implication in Hytner’s statement - that such a production would be an unusual occurrence, a naughty aberration, a guilty pleasure - would certainly have confirmed many in their conviction that when it comes to politics, the theatre stands firmly behind left-liberal lines. Recent productions in both the subsidised sector and the West End would seem to bare this out. My Name is Rachel Corrie, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Guantanamo, Stuff Happens, Playing with Fire…the political approach in these plays remains unvarying. And when there is criticism of the prevailing orthodoxy, it comes firmly from the Left.

But if this is all true, why are there no alternative voices? Is there, or should there be, such a thing as a right-of-centre play? Are there untouchable subjects in the theatre? Would different political approaches bring in new audiences? And why are voices on the Left apparently silent about important issues thrown up by radical Islam and the growing debate about multiculturalism?

Shelley Silas’s theatre plays include Calcutta Kosher and Falling. She has also written extensively for Radio Four - her plays include a co-adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet (with John Harvey.) She compiled and edited an anthology of short stories, 12 Days. Her new play, Made in Glasgow, will be produced by Tamasha Theatre in 2008.

Richard Bean has had four plays produced at The Royal Court as well as plays at the National, Bush, Newcastle Live! and at Hull Truck. He was awarded the Critics' Circle Award for Best Play for "Harvest" last year. His political sex farce which looks at the accession of Turkey into the European Union will be produced by Hampstead Theatre in July this year.

Ramin Gray is Associate director of the Royal Court. He is director of Alastair Beaton’s King of Hearts, which opens this week at the Hampstead Theatre

Please RSVP at events@newcultureforum.org.uk
We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening towards drinks.

London Rally for Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer - Thursday, February 15th

Who is Kareem? And why will we demonstrate?

Kareem is a 22 year old Egyptian law student and blogger who was arrested last November in Alexandria for criticizing the Egyptian government on his weblog. This is not the first time he has been arrested. His writings also led to him being expelled from Islamic University of Al-Azhar earlier in 2006. Since his arrest in November, he has been kept in solitary confinement and has been denied access to his lawyer and to his family. Several Middle Eastern human rights organizations have expressed concern for his life. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders have all condemned his arrest. Two US congressmen (Republican Trent Franks and Democrat Barney Frank) have written a letter to the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington, pleading for Kareem's release. His trial has been postponed several times, most recently to February 22.

A group of concerned citizens from various nations has organized a global demonstration on Thursday, Feb. 15th, asking the Egyptian authorities to free Kareem immediately and drop all charges against him. Respectful and dignified rallies have been confirmed in New York City, London, Rome, Washington, Ottawa and Bucharest. Efforts are being made to find volunteers in other cities who would be willing to take the lead and plan more rallies. Since this is a worldwide demonstration, it doesn't matter if an individual rally is relatively small. The goal is to send a clear signal that people across the world are aware of this flagrant assault on liberty in Egypt, and that as friends of the Egyptian people, we wish to see their government right this wrong.

When?

The London Rally for Kareem

Thursday, 15 February. 3pm to 6pm.

Where?

The Egyptian Embassy, located at 26 South Street, London W1K 1DW.

The Embassy is just a short walk from either Marble Arch (Central Line) or Green Park (Piccadilly, Victoria, or Jubilee Lines). See a map of the area.

If you're at LSE, you can walk over with a group that will leave from the Peacock Theatre at 2pm.

Contact for more information on the London Rally: Andrew Perraut's Rally for Kareem

More on the worldwide campaign - Freekareem.org

And of course Kareem's blog

Tonight on Culture Clash

Tonight on 18 Doughty Street we’re going to be looking at an art installation at Tate Britain which has certainly caught the eye of the media – artist Mark Wallinger’s recreation of Brian Haw’s so-called ‘peace protest’ which has been a permanent feature of Parliament Square for the past few years. A much-needed retort to a warmongering government, or a ghastly eyesore and the work of a misguided eccentric, depending on your point of view, the protest has been copied lock stock and barrel by Wallinger and stuck in a gallery with the aim of saying – well, what exactly?

But first we’re going to discuss an event which, oddly, received virtually no press coverage at all. A couple of Saturdays ago, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone sponsored a one-day conference at the QE2 Conference Centre which asked the question World Civilization of Clash of Civilizations? 5,000 people came to attend seminars and meetings, and to listen to a debate between Livingstone and Respect party member Salma Yaqoob on the one hand, and Middle eastern expert Daniel Pipes and writer and Culture Clash regular Douglas Murray on the other, on whether the West and Islam were set on a collision course. No prizes for guessing who was arguing what – but the event certainly acted as a valuable barometer of the state of mind of the rainbow coalition which surrounds Red Ken.

Watch Michael Gove's speech to The New Culture Forum

Alex Story produced a four-part film on Michael Gove's speech to The New Culture Forum - 'Are we seeing the emergence of an anti-Islamist intelligentsia?'

Watch Part I here


then go to YouTube for Part II, Part III and Part IV.

Michael Gove's New Culture Forum speech in The Spectator

In The Spectator this week, an edited extract from Michael Gove’s talk ‘Are we seeing the emergence of a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia?’ given to the New Culture Forum last monday.

The new anti-Islamist intelligentsia
Michael Gove

The durability of Conservatism has depended, to a great extent, on it being a disposition rather than a philosophy. What marks Conservatives out, across the generations, and whatever the environment they operate in, is an attitude of mind rather than an adherence to dogma. And that disposition — sceptical, cautious, pragmatic, sensitive to the local and the particular — has been politically successful because it has been in tune with human nature.

But Conservatism, as a disposition, has its limitations. British Conservatism in particular, even though it has been one of the most electorally successful varieties ever, has its own particular flaws. British, particularly English, conservatives tend to
be especially suspicious of intellectuals. Only in the British Conservative party could the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ be construed, however affectionately, as a put-down. And British Conservatives have, with honourable exceptions, tended to a particularly pessimistic view of human nature and the potential for progress. From Lord Salisbury to Iain Gilmour and even Chris Patten, the sense that the barbarians were at the gate has imbued thoughtful Tories with a gloomy view of
the future.

Both those Conservative characteristics, distrust of intellectualism and spiritual pessimism, may have led many Conservatives to miss one of the most significant trends of the past five years — the emergence of a new intellectual movement which gives grounds for optimism in one of the most difficult battles of our times.

Scarcely noticed by most on the Right, a new coalition of thinkers has been emerging from within the Left deliberately to challenge the Left’s greatest contemporary failure. It is perhaps understandable why many on the left might wish to belittle, or
drive to the margins, this new movement. But for those of us who are not tribally tied to the Left, this new turn in intellectual thinking deserves to be welcomed.

A distinguished array of thinkers and writers who have grown up attached to left-wing principles of equality, secularism, respect for universal human rights, opposition to religious obscurantism and support for liberal democracy have been finding their
voices in the last five years. Since the atrocities of 9/11 have focused the world’s attention on the murderous tactics and mediaeval ideology of Islamist terrorists, a number of figures on the left have felt moved to denounce what they see as the, at best, equivocal and, at worst, morally complicit treatment of extremism by many of their former comrades.

This week sees the publication of one of the most powerful denunciations of the manner in which the Left has lost its way. Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? scrupulously anatomises the way in which anti-Americanism, and the doctrine that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, has driven people whose political inspiration was a belief in progress to make excuses for forces that are trying to use murder to propel us back into the Dark Ages. As he argues,

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal Left is against come from the liberal Left? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-Right?

Cohen’s is a brave voice, but not a lone one. In the upper reaches of the British press, Cohen’s outlook is shared, to a significant extent, by writers such as David Aaronovitch and John Lloyd as well as everyone’s favourite drink-soaked Trotskyist popinjay, Christopher Hitchens. Few writers have been as fiercely effective as Hitchens in skewering the moral frailty of those who marched to keep a torturer in power:

In the past decade or so had this ‘anti-war’ rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by ‘Greater’ Serbia and the Taleban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

The positions taken by Hitchens, Cohen and others in the press have, more
recently, been reinforced by the bravery of other writers who have risked
placing themselves outside literary London’s comfort zone by being brave enough
to reject the moral relativism of so many on the left. Ian McEwan, Martin Amis
and, of course, Salman Rushdie have all argued, in different ways, that
Islamism is a totalitarian ideology, like fascism and communism before it,
which seeks to deny human freedom. McEwan has denounced the way in which the
Left is ‘morally selective’ in its outrage, denouncing America with greater
fervour than it can ever muster for criticising the record of Saddam or the
Taleban. Amis has been typically fearless in attacking those ‘people of
liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, who have become the apologists
for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist and
genocidal’.

What marks all these writers out, apart from their courage and their literary stature, is their heritage as authors of the broad Left. They are figures of intellectual weight
whom the Left cannot plausibly paint as blinkered reactionaries, and whose
critique, therefore, demands to be taken seriously.

But will it be? There are signs that the intellectual challenge to left-liberal appeasement of Islamism is gathering growing support. The range of voices who have signed up to the muscularly liberal Euston Manifesto is one indication that the
Pilger/Chomsky/Guardian comment pages consensus is much less representative of
progressive opinion than it pretends. And, more recently, both Gordon Brown and
Ed Balls have called for an intellectual response to the challenge of Islamism
which stands comparison with the cultural resistance to communism developed by
Western intellectuals during the Cold War.

But victory in the Cold War depended not just on the voices of Western intellectuals, crucially it depended on Western governments giving support to those dissident voices which were struggling to be heard in the Eastern bloc. Where are the political leaders now who will defend liberal and progressive voices in the Islamic world in
the way in which Reagan and Thatcher championed the Sharanskys and
Sakharovs? The real heroes of the anti-Islamist intelligentsia are Arab
thinkers like Shaker al-Nabulsi who are challenging totalitarianism within
the Islamic world. If the West is really serious about winning hearts and
minds in this generational struggle, then it needs to show its support for
those who, in the least propitious circumstances, still have the bravery to
cry freedom.

from The Spectator, January 25th 2007

Daniel Johnson reports on Michael Gove's speech

Extracts from Daniel Johnson's comments in Contention, the COMMENTARY's blog.

The New Anti-Islamist Intelligentsia by Daniel Johnson

Yesterday Michael Gove, a Tory member of Parliament and the author of Celsius 7/7, a hard-hitting study of the London subway
bombers, asked an audience of the New Culture Forum a highly pertinent question: “Are we seeing
the emergence of a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia?”
Gove answered his own
question emphatically in the affirmative, and provided chapter and verse, too.
What adds lustre to his thesis is the remarkable fact that the most prominent
voices now being heard in protest against the scandalous alliance of the Left
with Islamo-fascism are themselves for the most part intellectuals with
impeccable Left-liberal credentials. Gove singled out the journalists Nick Cohen
(whose book What’s Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way chronicles the
Left’s great self-betrayal), David Aaronovich (who defected from the Guardian to
the Times of London), and Christopher Hitchens, who needs no introduction for
American readers. Nick Cohen is also a leading light among the group of liberal
academics and writers who last year signed the Euston Manifesto,
distancing themselves from the Leftist consensus.
Most remarkable of all,
three of the most celebrated British novelists—Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and
Martin Amis—have all come out strongly against Islamism. Amis even describes himself as an “Islamismophobe,” but the real objects
of his hatred are the “middle-class white demonstrators last August waddling
around under placards saying ‘We Are All Hizbollah Now.’” As he observes,
“People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the
apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic,
imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those
that want them dead.”
All of these prodigal sons are more than welcome in
their return to what those who have always defended it fondly persist in calling
Western civilization. Like many others, I have not forgotten Martin Amis’s essay
“Fear and Loathing,” published in the Guardian a week after
9/11, in which he wrote: “The message of September 11 ran as follows: America,
it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. . . . We would hope that
the response will be, above all, non-escalatory.” He and his intellectual
compatriots have come a long way since then—at least on seeing the threat of
radical Islam for what it is.

COMMENTARY is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal
voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and
increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s,
the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated
questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened
by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the
future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States,
and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of
political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.

Michael Gove at The New Culture Forum

Michael Gove was the speaker last night at the New Culture Forum on the question of whether we are witnessing the emergence of an anti-Islamist intelligentsia. Held at Portcullis House, the event attracted over a hundred people; guests included Lord Trimble, Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin, Ramin Gray, Assoc. director of the Royal Court Theatre, Spectator TV critic and author James Delingpole, Conservative A-Lister Sayeeda Varsi, the National Theatre’s Chris Campbell, writer and commentator Douglas Murray, the distinguished Egyptian academic Bat Ye’or, and the editor of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie.

Gove’s speech was filmed by 18doughtystreet Talk TV, and ConservativeHome and The Croydonian today carry a detailed account of the evening. We’ll be returning to the event later in the week here at the NCF website.







Michael Gove, Sayeeda Varsi and Sir Andrew Green, Tim Montgomerie - 18doughtystreet Talk TV and ConservativeHome, Claire Fox - Institute of Ideas - and James Delingpole, Peter Whittle - director of The New Culture Forum.

What we want to read...

This week in The Spectator, two of our favourite most recent reads get very interesting reviews. Graham Stewart on George Walden's Time to Emigrate and Michael Gove on Mark Steyn's America Alone - THE dream ticket for NCF's Team members.

Our Best of:

I know that for many of my fellow panty-waisted, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys being harangued about our propensity for cultural suicide by cheerleaders for Bush can grate a little. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the author of America Alone as simply a jester at the court of King George W.(...)

That many of Steyn's conclusions will be unpalatable to the European consensus only underlines how much a failure to face harsh truths has characterised the European response to the scale of the terrorist threat we face.(...)

One of the biggest questions in contemporary European politics is how our societies manage relations between Muslim citizens and others, and that’s been reflected in the debate over the veil, the agonised questioning which followed the death of Theo van Gogh, and the controversy over the Danish cartoons.(...)

Steyn’s specific contention is that the problem is not so much multiculturalism as biculturalism. The danger as he sees it is the inherent tension between an increasingly liberal and hedonistic, yet diffident and uncertain, de-Christianised civilisation and an increasingly religiously zealous and culturally assertive Islamist movement. (...)

And a mention to Melanie Phillips in Michael's conclusion, what a treat!

But Steyn, like Melanie Phillips in her very different way, has done us all a service by ensuring that questions some would prefer to pass over are posed in a way it is impossible to ignore.

The full text is available here

And of course, you can still register to hear Michael Gove at The New Culture Forum on January 22nd - Are we seeing the emergence of an Anti-islamist Intelligentsia?

FG

Our January Event

You are invited to hear:

MICHAEL GOVE MP

Are We Seeing the Emergence of a New Anti-Islamist Intelligentsia?

Monday, 22nd January, 7 for 7.30pm

The Attlee Suite, Portcullis House, Westminster, London SW1A 2LW

(next to Westminster Tube)

The British intelligentsia has traditionally been characterised by its adherence to the doctrines of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and internationalism.

But as Western values face an onslaught from a hostile and increasingly emboldened Islam, and established political allegiances either fracture or make disturbing new alliances, are we witnessing a major new intellectual shift?

Some of the foremost literary figures of our time - Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie - have spoken about the threat which Islamism poses to Western culture. Prominent left-of-centre journalists and academics, disturbed by much of the left’s unthinking anti-Americanism and seeming fondness for dictators, have formed the Euston Manifesto Group. And amongst the left/liberal-leaning cultural and media establishment, attitudes are hardening as issues of cultural ‘sensitivity’ and self-censorship in relation to Islam come increasingly to the fore. Is a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia emerging?

Michael Gove, Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath and Shadow Minister for Housing, is one of Britain’s leading writers and thinkers on terrorism and foreign affairs. Michael was founding chairman of Policy Exchange, and is a founder member of the Henry Jackson Society. As well as being a columnist for The Times, he has been a frequent panellist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and BBC2’s Newsnight Review. His most recent book, Celsius 7/7, was published last year.

Do join us for what promises to be an important and fascinating talk. It will be followed by a Q & A session.

Please RSVP at events@newcultureforum.org.uk
We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening towards drinks.

Wishful Thoughts for 2007

The New Culture Forum brings you the cultural news and events you can (not) expect to hear about in 2007, as brought to you by our contributors on the ground.

Let’s kick off with Christmas…

DEBENHAM ADMITS: WE DID NOT DESIGN CHRISTMAS”.

The retail giant Debenhams has retracted its “Christmas: Designed by Debenhams” television advert, after it decided it might be offensive to Christians. In the advert, a slim, sexy, modern-styled ‘DJ Santa’ glides and break-dances his way through rooms in his hi-tech grotto lined with robotic toys, perfumes, handbags, and other fashion accessories, before attractive women in stockings help send him out to deliver presents in a flying, high-powered snow ski. A company spokesman told reporters: “As soon as our executives viewed the ad, they realized that we had become so caught up in all the commercial opportunities of the festive season that we had lost sight of the true Christian message of charity and compassion. … We also recognized that some Christians might find our transformation of their beloved Saint Nicholas into a sex-crazed fashion victim, and our claim to have been the true originators of their historic religious festival, offensive.” The spokesman confirmed, however, that an equivalent advert,
“Eid: Designed by Debenhams”, with a similarly sexy, break-dancing ‘MC Muhammad’, would still go ahead in their stores in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia: “The Islamic world is famed for its sense of gentle good-humour, and we foresee no problems there.”

[View ad here: http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=39607]

(from David Brescia)

JANUARY

BBC News press release

Head of BBC News Peter Horrocks today banned the use of three key terms on BBC global news output - ‘suicide bombers’ ‘martyrs’ and ‘freedom fighters’. Horrocks made this unusual statement at the inaugural BBC Friends of Israel fundraising dinner. As well as raising thousands of shekels for Israel to spend on reinforcing the controversial security fence, Horrocks said in his after dinner speech ‘it is time the BBC recognises that homicide bombers in the middle east have the same motives as homicide bombers in the west’ and ‘are nothing but barbaric murderous scumbags acting under a veil of pseudo religious nonsense’. Horrocks then sang the Israeli national anthem as a solo before inviting Baroness Jenny Tongue onto the dance floor for the first Chassidic dancing number ‘We want moshiach now!’.

(from Jonathan Levi)


To celebrate the West's abolition of slavery 200 years earlier, Islam decides to join in, apologising for enslaving more people than the West ever managed and for perpetuating slavery into the present day in countries such as Mauritania. 'This one's been on the books a bit too long,' laugh Ayatollah Khamenei and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi at a joint press conference.

(from Mark Sidwell)

FEBRUARY

BBC, CHANNEL 4 ANNOUNCE FACTUAL PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS

BBC Panorama, tonight, 'teaching sex to kids': how a half-century of UK sex-education has pushed us to the top of Europe's teen pregnancy tables. We ask the Department of Education why it thinks more of the same will now produce different results?

- C4 'Unreported world', 'Castro's Gulag': We get unique access to Cuban dissident groups inside Cuba who show us the true extent of the dictator's repression of writers, thinkers and journalists.

Also 'A Bolivarian blunder', Is Chavez driving Venezuela to ruin and isolation?

- Dispatches: 'A Comprehensive failure': with childhood illiteracy increasing - and entry of poorer students to top universities at a post-War low - we ask whether it's now time to 'permanently exclude' Britain's greatest educational mistake - the comprehensive school.

- C4 News special, 'The Bush tax miracle': how American economic growth has been powered by tax cuts.

- BBC File on four, 'The end of the road for the Human Rights Act?': In order to cope with the terrorist threat, is it time to admit the damage caused by the Human Rights Act, scrap it and re-introduce effective national treason laws?

(from Alan Smithee)

MARCH

THOUSANDS CONVERGE ON WEMBLEY AS ROCK STARS RAIL AGAINST CHINA

Madonna last night led a glittering array of stars from the world of rock and pop in a massive protest concert at the continuing of human rights violations in China. She told the crowd: ‘Chairman Mao caused the deaths of 70 million of his own people. Well Communism is dead but the torture goes on! Make torture history! Rock against China!

(from PW)

APRIL

In an astonishing new play at the National about multiculturalism which looks set to draw angry protests from Muslim groups, a white couple in a largely Asian town see their gay son sacked from his job as a teacher because Islamic fundamentalist parents do not want him teaching their children. Terrified of causing offence, the local council fails to intervene, leaving the angry and frustrated family to deal with a media firestorm. The play, which opened this week, has already sold out, and the theatre has also been encouraged by the proportion of so-called ‘first-time’ ticket buyers. ‘This play is bringing in a whole new audience to the National’, said a spokesman. ‘We’ve been trying to widen our audience over the years with the £10 ticket scheme, and that’s been a real success especially with students, but for some reason the subject of this production has really struck a chord with people who would not otherwise go to the theatre.’

(from PW)

MAY

Leading figures from the arts and media address huge London rally
A massive crowd of moderate Muslims, estimated at nearly half a million, yesterday heard stars of stage, screen and the literary world call for an end to the subjugation of woman and gay men under fundamentalist Islam. Carrying banners declaring ‘Not in Our Name!’, thousands of protesters listened peacefully in the capital’s Hyde Park as figures including feminist Germaine Greer, National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and Oscar-winning actor Sir Ian McKellen made impassioned speeches condemning the wearing of the burkha, the execution of thousands of gay men in Iran and the increasing tolerance in Britain of what Sir Ian dubbed in his speech ‘vicious attacks on our liberty’.
Interviewed after the event, Germaine Greer underlined how important it was that women in the West stood up to such reactionary forces. ‘It’s the duty of feminists everywhere to speak out in support of women who live lives of total subservience – women whose voices will never otherwise be heard.’

(from PW)

JUNE

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown admits that juvenile relocation to Mayfair, and its attendant reduced knowledge of traditional Malawian songs, dances and agricultural techniques, may be preferable to dying alone, disease-riddled and abandoned in an African orphanage.

(from Emma French)

JULY

Carbon neutral is a load of hippie bollocks," announced Chris Martin, last night, to a stunned audience of Coldplay fans.
"Sorry guys, but the fact is I got it all wrong. This save the planet stuff I've been preaching at you for the last five years - it was just hot air. Al Gore is a mendacious loser twat. Michael Moore is a fat, lying, treacherous c***. An Inconvenient Truth is the worst film ever, worse even than Love Actually or that other terrible Richard Curtis one about the Scottish girl at the G8 summit who converts everyone to eco-fascism. The Rainbow Warrior had it coming. Greenpeace are tossers. Global warming is due primarily to solar activity, perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. Wind turbines are crap. Nuclear is our only hope."
After a climactic performance of Yellow, Martin further shocked fans by urinating on a copy of Kyoto agreement, before driving off in a 4 x 4 with wife Gwyneth Paltrow chic in pure sable fur) and chums Thom Yorke and Michael Stipe (both engrossed in Douglas Murray's Neo-Conservatism: Why We Need It?)

(from James Delingpole)

AUGUST

Gwyneth Paltrow abandons her ‘macrobiotic diet’ in favour of a new diet dependant exclusively on conventionally grown Genetically Modified Organisms.

(from Dawn Steeves)

SEPTEMBER

Ekow Eshun says something cogent and to the point on Newsnight Review

Male character on advert/in sitcom shown not to be a bumbling fool; female character revealed to be something other than a long-suffering omnicompetent.

(from James Delingpole)

OCTOBER

Spooks finally broadcasts an episode in which it really is the Islamists who are baddies and not Christians/Big Business/Jews masquerading as Islamists so as to give these peace-loving people a warlike reputation they SO do not deserve.

Bono admits: "What do I know? I'm just a rock star."

(from James Delingpole)

NOVEMBER

‘We are a waste of taxpayer’s money’, declares Disability Rights Commission

‘There’s a lot to be said for the occasional slap’, NSPCC counsels parents

Muslim Council of Britain condemns suicide bombers

Arts Council launches new fund for middle class whites

(from Nick Seddon).

DECEMBER

Channel 4 announces that it’s Alternative Christmas Message this year will be given by Dr John Sentamu, the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York known for his outspoken support of Christianity and the celebration of British Culture. When questioned about this unusual choice, a Channel 4 spokesman said candidly: ‘We always aim to be provocative, and so we thought it would be really daring to use the Archbishop. Frankly, all the old counter-culture ‘alternatives’ are pretty much mainstream culture now, and rather than just be known as one of Oriana Fallaci’s ‘phoney revolutionaries’, we thought we’d really try to stir things up.’

'The cultural establishment in general stands firmly behind left-liberal lines. For how long?' asks Peter Whittle and his guests in Culture Clash

The thing to watch on 18 Doughty Street Talk TV, at 8.30pm GMT on Tuesday, December 5th

During an interview earlier this year, the National Theatre’s director Nicholas Hytner said that one thing he would really like to see there in the future would be a ‘good, mischievous, right-wing play.’

The underlying implication in Hytner’s statement - that such a production would be an unusual occurrence, a naughty aberration, a guilty pleasure - would certainly have confirmed many in their conviction that the cultural establishment in general stands firmly behind left-liberal lines. The right may have won the economic battles, but in the culture wars, the left were victorious.

But is this really true? And if it is, why are there no alternative voices? Do not conservatives - or indeed those others opposed to the increasingly stifling and predictable liberal/left line - do these kinds of things? There is the rather complacent view, still cleaved to in the cultural establishment, that broadly speaking the right conserves, and the left creates, and that the most enduring art tends to be subversive. However where does that leave such giant figures as Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, Graham Green or Edward Elgar, to name a few from this country alone?

What does seem undeniable is that if there are right-of-centre artists or writers out there now, they’re certainly keeping a low profile. Or is it possible that we’re looking at this the wrong way?

With me to discuss this are Michael Attwell, TV producer and a former chairman of BAFTA, Susan Shaw, senior producer of the South Bank Show, writer and commentator Douglas Murray, and Clive Davis, , journalist and regular contributor to The Times and The Washington Times.

To read as an introduction to the discussion: Arts and The Right, a piece by Peter Whittle for The Sunday Times

Mark Steyn talks to The New Culture Forum

Version française

Mark Steyn’s exhilarating new book, America Alone – The End of the World as We Know It, is currently riding high in the New York Times’s bestseller list, and is top of the charts too in his native Canada. We were very pleased when Mark took some time out to talk to us.


NCF: Mark, when can we expect to see the book published in Britain?

MS: We hope to have the British edition out sometimes next year. I don’t want it to be the same experience poor old Melanie Phillips had. She was rejected by twenty publishers who basically didn’t want a controversy. So I’m being a little bit more careful than I would usually about some of these overseas rights. I want the publishers to be committed to it.

NCF: What do you think will be the reaction to it in Europe?

MS: I’m gratified in a way by the reaction so far. I’ve had really an incredible number of inquiries about overseas English rights, I’ve got many about foreign language rights from European countries where I wouldn’t have thought it was the kind of message they wanted to hear. So it seems that in the fullness of time, any language you want to read it, it will be available in. And I’m also glad of the number of sales you’ve had here to people in Denmark, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands and Spain, because I agree with Melanie, that if European populations get serious, there’s no need for them to lose their countries. If they don’t get serious, if they don’t correct force in the very near future, then I think it will be too late.

NCF: Speaking from the frontline here, what do you think the people who agree with you have to do here? I know you’re not a politician as such but it looks as if the way you describe it, it looks to be an absolutely hopeless situation here.

MS: I think that if you look at it historically, Islam is able to live in a kind of manageable situation with other cultures but that, generally, depends on how confident those other cultures are. At the extreme left for example, the Soviets had very little trouble with radical Islam when they ran central Asia. The minute Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan became independent, all the Iranian and Saudi money moved in and radicalised the population within a very short period of time. And I don’t think that becoming as aggressive as the Soviet Union is really an option that most British subjects would want to consider. But likewise, British India also very effectively managed Islam for a long time. So I think in a sense that if it is made clear to people that there is absolutely no possibility of living under Sharia, that it is just an absurd thing, the demand for Sharia and what is effectively a sort of creeping sharia where bit by bit the host nation effectively assimilates the Islamic law, by which I mean all these little things, eliminating pork from school and hospital menus - I think if you resist all those then there’s a possibility. But I think the danger is, unless it is clear that this is going to be resisted by society as a whole, then you get the kind of three way split where some people will do as the Dutch are already doing, and just sell up and look for a one-way ticket to Australia or Canada, or wherever will take them, and in a sense that’s easy for the British to do because there are more English-speaking countries. In a sense if you’re asking somebody whether they want to fight a battle with not terribly favourable odds or whether they’d rather spend the last half of their life in Australia, I think a lot of people would actually take the Australian option.

So I think there is a danger there, and there is also a danger that at the other extreme people will, as long as the political class maintains its sort of ostrich-like posture, be drawn to the kind of neo-nationalist, neo-fascist end of things, which I think honestly is very unlikely to offer any kind of long-term solution. So the trouble you might have, in so far as people want to do anything about it, is you might have this sort of three way split, which only accelerates the decline of the native European population.

NCF: There seems to be very little talk and discussion about these issues here. There is a new Conservative leader but there seems to be a kind of convergence of political parties in Britain, and these issues have been cast beyond the pale in terms of political discussion.

MS: My view of David Cameron is that he is a total disaster. The big difference between Britain and the principal English-speaking countries is that Canada, Australia and the United States all have conservative leaders and Britain doesn’t. And those conservative leaders didn’t get elected to the highest office by taking the David Cameron route which is mainly about the fact that he is the first Tory leader to look cool in jeans and an open-neck shirt, and the fact that he has embraced Al Gore’s movie…

NCF: That’s right, he went to the Arctic.

MS: This is rubbish. By the time the effect of the melting ice flows and the rising sea levels kick in, there will be no Britain and so no one is going to remember David Cameron having saved the Maldives islands when the rising sea level consumed them – which is on present trends going to be around the year 2500. All they will remember him as, so far as they do, will be this conservative leader who did not identify the real pressing threats to Britain’s national interest, as opposed to this modish piffle.

So I think he’s making no useful contribution to this cause, and I think that’s actually very disturbing. The fact of the matter is that the snob right in Britain, the Max Hastings crowd, who denounce American adventurism in Iraq and all this, the Michael Moore conservatives as they are sometimes known over here, basically their argument - that George W. Bush is engaged in a hopeless task in Iraq, that Islam and democracy is completely incompatible - that’s not a problem for Iraq, that’s a problem for Britain, and Belgium and the Netherlands and Scandinavia. And to airily make that statement about Iraq and not to see its implications for your own country is almost unbelievably crass.

NCF: Do you think that the penny has dropped in America about the truth about the actual situation in Europe?

MS: Yes, I do think so. You know there’s a theory in the media that the so-called realists, the stability fetishists as I call them in the book, are back in favour at Washington. In essence their complacency helped get us into the mess really. But I think if you do believe in stability and containment, then Europe is a very sobering lesson, because it is changing with bewildering speed.

NCF: One thing that has changed. If there’s still a kind of avoidance of the Islamic threat, at least multiculturalism is being discussed in a way you couldn’t have imagined even five years ago.

MS: I think that’s right. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and while I was there the Prime Minister – and I was very impressed by this man, I was very glad at the opportunity to congratulate him on this – because I think it’s an absolutely marvellous initiative where, they had this big education conference, in which they advocated teaching Australian history as a heroic national narrative. And I think that if your country has basically been on the right side on most of big clashes, you should be able to teach your history as an heroic national narrative. Britain has certainly got a better claim to that than almost any other country on the planet. Obviously it has his warts but there’s a difference between doing the painting warts and all, and doing it with just the warts, which I think is what a lot of British history has dwindled down to. I’m not surprised when they capture these fellows from the west Midlands on the battlefield in Afghanistan because if you’ve gone into the average English school in Pixton or West Bromwich, or whatever, in the last twenty five years it’s hardly surprising they were not exactly imbued with the love of country. That is actually where it starts, it starts in kindergarten where you’re raised not explicitly to hate your country but you’re raised just with that sort of vapid nullity, where effectively the tie that binds you to your national story should be.

NCF: What do you say to the argument that follows on that that if the population of a country shows very few sign of wanting to preserve its way of life then it’s not worth preserving?

MS: I certainly think in an electronic age it’s easier to live in the present tense as opposed to being aware of the seven eighths of the iceberg which is your accumulated inheritance. I think that if obviously you’re living in a kind of pre-mass culture society - you’re living, say, in a remote part of northern New England in 1850 - you’ve got much more sense of your part in a long epic story. If you’re in the year 2006, the new James Bond movie and the new Britney Spears CD and all the rest of it loom a lot larger because it’s much easier to live in the present tense. That’s all the more reason why government - I don’t much believe in big government, I believe in small government - but one of the critical things that a government ought to be there for is, instead of doing all this modish David Cameron piffle, is to connect people with the bigger story.

I think Britain is a real tragedy. Britain has been the single greatest force for good in the modern era, exporting its language, its legal system and its broader culture to every corner of the planet. I cannot understand it why the people who most disdain the Britannic inheritance is the mother country itself, the metropolis. It’s absurd.

NCF: We’re talking here about the culture wars. It’s a cliché that the right might have won the economic debate but that the left were victorious in the culture wars. Do you think that that is showing signs of changing? Or do we have to literally wait, to use your demographic analysis, for a generation – the so called sixty-eighters, the people who are now running the place – to, if you like, die out?

MS: Yes, I do think there is a huge problem with that generation. I think it’s almost impossible to get any sense out of them and, as you said, there are the generation which runs the Western world, which in part explains why Western civilization seems to have lost its confidence. I think that in Britain’s case there’s a danger of really appalling tragedy of a country that’s been hollowed out from within. I said the other day rather grimly that I thought it was in danger of turning into Somalia with chip shops, that’s to say a sort of husk of a state into which dangerous, malevolent, opportunist forces basically move in.

I think the scale of the problem should have been clearer to MI5 and the other authorities a lot sooner. Even today, there are far too many people at the highest level of the British State who think that it is an IRA kind of problem, that it will mean that every so often a bus will be blown up, a train will be blown up and a couple of dozen people will die but, as with the IRA, it will be manageable. And it is not, it is something far darker, more ambitious, and potentially far more transformative and I don’t see the point of spending huge sums of money on MI5 and other agencies if they can’t even get something that basic. And I think at heart reconstructing a British identity is critical to that – but you have to know what it is. But I think it’s very difficult to have any sense of tradition if basically you indicate all the time that you’re willing to put everything up for grabs. If you go to an Island Parliament in the Caribbean, if you go the parliament in Grenada, they’ve got their miniature Hansard, they’ve got their mace, they’ve got their wigs, and that is the kind of thing that Tony Blair wanted to abolish from the House of Commons at Westminster. The difference is that in Grenada, and St Kitts and St Lucia, they understand that all that stuff is what connects them to peaceful constitutional evolution across the centuries, and in that sense it is the difference between them and Cuba or Haiti, or these basket case states. They understand it but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown don’t, and David Cameron doesn’t.

NCF: Looking across now to France, with the Presidential election coming up. The Muslim population is actually far greater than in Britain. The country seems to believe that because it opposed the Iraq war, they will not be attacked. How do you see the situation there developing?

MS: I think the continental countries have particular problems. The idea that Mr Sarkozy can be France’s Reagan, or that Angela Merkel can be Germany’s Thatcher, I’ve never given much credence to, because the reality is that the German or French population are not yet in the situation that the British and the American electorates were at the end of the 70s. In other words, they have not yet accepted that the old way is kaput, and I think that, as far as the Germans and the French are concerned, yes it’s true that a lot of them think that there are far too many Muslims in their cities and they are getting pretty sick of the crime and all that, but they haven’t yet realised that one of the reason why they are in these situation is because of the unaffordable social programmes, welfare entitlements, the cradle-to-grave welfare, the paid vacations, the controlled job market and all the rest of it that’s created this situation.

If you are going to have immigration, at least you should have immigration from multiple sources. Once your immigration becomes overly dependent on a particular source then there’s a cultural component to it, effectively it becomes a demographic transformation. If your immigrants are drawn in equally from the two hundred countries on the planet, there is no cultural component to that issue. Once they become overwhelmingly drawn from one particular self-segregating demographic, there very much is.

It would seem odd that, let’s say, Latin Americans don’t emigrate to catholic Europe. They would seem on the face of it to fit in relatively easily. But one reason they don’t do it is because Europe is much less attractive to a skilled immigrant because it has higher taxes – and the taxes are likely to spread higher – and you will be going there and basically paying to keep Jacques and Gerhardt in their dotage. If you’re a skilled emigrant from Latin America or India or China that’s not very appealing. So while these immigrants go to North America and to Australia, Europe is left to take what it can get and what it can get is mainly Muslims. You cannot tackle the Islamic issue in isolation from the broader problems in the continental countries.

NCF: What’s your view on the idea that the Muslims coming into these countries are in a sense the foot soldiers of a much wider desire for caliphate? This is one view, isn’t it?

MS: I agree with that, it is no great secret. Imams in Europe say it and so do Muslim leaders in the Middle East, Colonel Gaddhafi said it, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran more or less signed on to the thesis. Basically, it is very hard to have a kind of Gates of Vienna scenario when the guys are already inside the gates. And I think that is the reality that when you poll western Muslims, a large number of them, effectively share the same goals as the September 11th ‘heroes’ – they don’t want to fly planes into skyscrapers but they support the basic idea of a western world under Islamic law, and in America that is still a very long shot, but in Europe it edges closer every day. We know from the people who are being arrested that the so-called War on Terror is not being waged against some fellow in some kind of smelly cave in Afghanistan, it is being waged against the educated groups of the most westernized Muslims. They are the one who carried on the Sept. 11th – it was a Hamburg cell -, the tube bombers were British subjects, so was the shoe bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui is a French citizen… It is a problem in the main that arises from the increasing alienation of western Muslim the longer they spend in western societies. So, when people say, well, another generation or two and these guys will be fully assimilated – a Dutch candidate Minister said to me what made him change his mind was when he realised that these young Muslims in the Netherlands today are far more radicalised, far more alienated than their parents when they came in 1970s. It’s reverse assimilation.

NCF: There is this Arab saying you quote in your book, that ‘a falling camel attracts many knives’.

MS: That’s a proverb that I came across – A falling camel attracts many knives. I kind of reformulated Donald Rumsfeld’s marvellous aphorism, Weakness is a provocation. I greatly regret the defenestration of Rumsfeld after the mid-term elections, because he was one of the few people who understood that in effect it is the perception that the West is weak that attracts these assaults. In other words, the more you try to accommodate and appease, the more they simple move on to the next alleged grievance. I saw the President a couple of weeks ago in the Oval Office, and the subject of these grievances and whether it is Iraq or Israel came up, and he was sort of riffing on the theme, and he said ‘oh, no, before Iraq, it was Israel’ and he listed various other things and eventually he wound up at the end of his great long laundry list by saying: ‘If it is not the Crusades, it is the cartoons’. That’s such a marvellous slogan, someone should print it up as bumper sticker, because it encapsulates perfectly not only the kind of total lack of proportion, in that on the kind of scale of grievances a bunch of cartoons in a Danish newspaper nobody reads can loom as large as the Crusades a millennium ago, but also it captures their readiness to take offence at every little itsy-bitsy thing, and if you can see that, as soon as you’ve started one week observing things – the Burger King removing the chocolate ice cream top looked a bit like the Arabic for Allah – as soon as you’ve done one of those, something else comes up. Or the Muslims objecting to the sex shops selling ‘Mustapha shag.’ If I lived in England that would really be a sobering thing – I mean, I’m not a great patron of the Ann Summer’s sex shops, or whatever, but it does tell you in a rather severe way where you headed, it shows that the whole comedy of English life is simply not possible once a confident Islam reaches a certain proportion. You’ll loose all the Phew-what-a-scorcher, red-top culture that English people love so much. I mean, I like it in very small doses, but that whole thing is not going to be possible once you’re in a semi-islamicised society.

NCF: Many thanks for that, Mark.

SteyOnLine, Mark Steyn's website

More from The New Culture Forum:
Douglas Murray on Intimidation, Censorship and Islam: Holland's experience, Britain's warning?
Melanie Phillips on Londonistan

Religious Fundamentalism

On Wednesday, Mark Steyn talks to The New Culture Forum

Mark Steyn’s exhilarating new book, America Alone – The End of the World as We Know it, is currently riding high in the New York Times’s bestseller list, and is top of the charts too in his native Canada. Culture Clash on 18 Doughty Street will be discussing this tonight at 8.30pm, but here at the New Culture Forum we’re very pleased to announce that we will be posting our interview with Mark Steyn about the issues raised in his book tomorrow.

Paul Goodman's Wake-up call

Paul Goodman, MP for High Wycombe, has given a superb speech in reply to the Queen's Speech this week. As Melanie Phillips says on her website, he gets it. We've reproduced a section here, but to read it in its entirety go to Melanie's website

Mr. Paul Goodman (Wycombe) (Con):

More than 9,000 of my constituents are Muslims, almost 11 per cent. of my electorate. I thus represent more Muslim voters than any other Member of Parliament of my party. I therefore necessarily see one of my most important duties as a constituency MP and, indeed, more widely, as being to help to do what I can to create a moderate, prosperous and integrated British Muslim majority.(...)

A central question about the Queen’s Speech, therefore, is whether both it and Government policy more broadly will curtail terror, build security and help to deliver that moderate, prosperous and integrated British Muslim majority that we all want to see. Ministers must thus convince the House that the analysis that accompanies their actions is thoroughly thought through. I shall risk a medical analogy: relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain are clearly to some degree poisoned. Seeking to drain the poison and heal those relations is a bit like a doctor treating an illness. We have to diagnose the cause of the illness before seeking to cure it.

There is no shortage of diagnoses. Some claim that the main cause of Muslim alienation is racism and Islamophobia; others that it is poverty and lower life chances; and others still that the cause is intergenerational conflict between older people who, in some cases, still inhabit psychologically, if not physically, the hill villages of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir, and more rootless younger people who identify neither with traditional life in those villages nor with modern Britain. Other voices cite the failure of the multi-culturalist experiment in delivering social cohesion, and others point to foreign policy.

For myself, I believe that all those observations are part of any sensible diagnosis. As the first parliamentary Member of my party, as far as I know, to call publicly for an independent inquiry into the Iraq war on 2 June 2003, I am scarcely likely to argue otherwise. However, in my view these observations do not constitute the whole diagnosis. Clearly, there is something missing. (...)

I suggest to the House that that missing something is the ideology of Islamism. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean) said, Islamism is not Islam. Islam is a religion-a great religion at that and one, it seems to me, as various, as complex, as multi-faceted and as capable of supporting a great civilisation as Christianity. Islamism, however, is an ideology forged largely in the past 100 years, and that word ‘ideology’ should help to convey to the House a flavour that is as much modern as mediaeval.

Like communism and like fascism, those other modern ideologies, Islamism divides not on the basis of class or of race, but on the basis of religion. To this politician, it has three significant features. First, it separates the inhabitants of the dar-al-Islam-the house of Islam-and the dar-al-Harb-the house of war-and, according to Islamist ideology, those two houses are necessarily in conflict. Secondly, it proclaims to Muslims that their political loyalty lies not with the country that they live in, but with the umma-that is, the worldwide community of Muslims. Thirdly, it aims to bring the dar-al-Islam under sharia law.

I am not an expert on Islam, but I have learned enough about it since I was first elected to this place in 2001 to recognise that its view, and our inherited view of the difference between the sacred and secular, diverge. In our inherited view, the sacred and the secular are separate. The Christian tradition from which our inherited view springs has always acknowledged a distinction between what is God’s and what is Caesar’s. In Islam, that distinction is harder to perceive.

It is, of course, true that in the Muslim societies in which I have travelled sharia law and secular law exist side by side. In Pakistan, for example, there are both secular and sharia courts. None the less, the distinction is anathema, so to speak, to the Islamists. They look back for inspiration to Mohammed’s original political settlement, in which the religious and political were, in effect, one and the same. They are, as the phrase has it, ‘dreaming of Medina.’ They seek to restore the caliphate to a glory that is tinged with nostalgia and longing.(...)

We must consider what the likely future effect would be on domestic Muslim support for sharia, and even for terror, of a further downward spiral events, of further international tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, of further domestic terrorist incidents-which, alas, there may be-and of racist and xenophobic backlashes against British Muslims. That is the challenge that we all face together. In my view, it is a challenge to Britain that is no less pressing than the challenge of climate change, which has occupied much of the debate today. That is the challenge for the political and media classes as a whole, and it is especially the challenge for this Government and the security and terror-related aspects of the Queen’s Speech.(...)

George Orwell once wrote of the ‘deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. ‘On 7/7, we heard the roar of bombs in London. I sometimes worry that the deep, deep sleep that Orwell described in the 1930s is still here in relation to Islamism in sections of the Government, parts of the political and media establishment, the House and the country. This is one of the most urgent problems facing us, and if we are in that deep, deep sleep, it is time for all of us to wake up.

Douglas Murray's Speech at The New Culture Forum

Michael Gove at The New Culture Forum

Michael Gove, Shadow Minister for Housing, Times columnist and author of the much-praised Celsius 7/7, will be talking to The New Culture Forum on January 22nd . We’ll be posting details of the meeting, which will be taking place at Portcullis House in Westminster, nearer to the date, but in the meantime perhaps you’d like to put it in your diary.

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More posts on Michael Gove

Celsius 7/7