Douglas Murray - Still A Bigot

It’s now more than eleven years since his speech in den Haag to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam. But Douglas Murray is still an unapologetic bigot, still an Islamophobe, and still personally paranoid about Scary Muslims (tm) somehow overrunning the entire European continent. His words back then have caused his alienation from the centre-right mainstream.

Doug Murray the K: the honorary Fifth Horseman

Why that should be is not difficult to discern: Murray decided at the outset that Muslims were inherently anti-Western, and also spongers: “Until the Middle East and other Islamic lands have a greater measure of freedom, the West can barely be surprised that even fairly hardline Islamists will continue to be desperate to join the welfare-wagon in the West”. And Muslims, he wanted everyone to know, were The Enemy.

“We are currently in the first stage of a war which the Pentagon and others are now looking at as a 30-year conflict … we cannot be blind to the problem of how to deal with the swamps in the Middle East which produce those who hit us and those who urge them on”. He was all charm. And ignorance: “if you were Osama bin Laden at this moment, why would you leave the comfort of your own cave?”

As we now know, bin Laden was living in the comfort of a secure detached villa in a quiet neighbourhood in northern Pakistan. But Murray was off with the fairies, sneering at the West for not “standing up” to the Muslims, sneering at Michael Moore, and telling anyone who would listen about something called “dhimmitude”.

And then came the remarks which caused him all that trouble. “All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop … Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from … Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West … must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin … Where a person was born in the West, they should be deported to the country of origin of their parent or grandparent”.

“The whole deal under which Muslims live in our societies must change … Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”. Yet here he was again today, being given a platform for his highly eccentric and paranoid views by LBC host Nick Ferrari, whose most significant recent contribution to investigative journalism was to ask Theresa May about cook books. His questioning of Murray was little better.

Here’s one prime example: “One particular thing shocked him in his research - London is actually twice as homophobic as any other part of Britain. And he said that is because the large immigrant population are not assimilating into the British culture”. Murray took a YouGov survey which asked if respondents considered homosexuality to be “morally wrong”. It did not measure homophobia or homophobic acts.

So he was also allowed to claim of immigration “that instead of as it were Europeanising the world, that Europe becomes more like the third world”, and also “that there are people who are intolerant who we should not tolerate”. We should counter intolerance by being similarly intolerant. We should lower ourselves to the lowest common denominator.

Douglas Murray is still a bigot. Only now he has a book to sell, so that’s all right, then.