Category: Britain

The Policy Exchange think-tank recently published a report on attitudes among British Muslims called Unsettled Belonging. Among its many interesting observations, one in particular leapt out at me. No, it wasn’t that 43% of British Muslims support the introduction of some forms of sharia law in Britain. Nor that, despite this aspiration, more than half wanted to “fully integrate” with British society. Nor that 7 per cent believed the Jews were responsible for 9/11, more than the 4 per cent who pinned it on al Qaeda (described by the authors…

In British Prime Minister Theresa May’s otherwise very welcome and supportive remarks about Israel and the Jews that she made at the Conservative Friends of Israel lunch in London earlier this week, one paragraph struck a jarring false note. She said: “I made sure we kept extremism – including the sort that peddles antisemitic vitriol – out of our country… That is why I said no to so-called comedians like Dieudonne coming to Britain. It’s why I stopped Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Pastor Terry Jones coming too – since…

You were once considered a good or decent person if you acted according to moral codes of behaviour organised around something called conscience, or doing well by others. Now that those codes have been dumped in favour of individual expression, people need another way to show they are decent and good. Suffering thus becomes a badge of honour as it makes the sufferer morally untouchable. Others prove their own goodness through displays of compassion towards people suffering in this way. Anyone who questions such attitudes invites a tsunami of opprobrium…