Douglas Murray - Here’s Your Lawsuit

While author Priyamvada Gopal attempts to deal with the tsunami of abuse and threatening behaviour stemming from deliberate misinterpretation of one genuine Twitter message she sent, and one fake one that she certainly did not, other less charitable actors out there are using the argument over what she said and meant for their own personal gain. And there are few actors less charitable than Doug Murray The K.

Murray is no disinterested spectator when it comes to matters of race, religion, and colour. He is on record as insisting that “Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board … From long before we were first attacked [!] it should have been made plain that people who come into Europe are here under our rules and not theirs … Where a mosque has become a centre of hate it should be closed and pulled down”.

That is unequivocal and leaves no room for alternative interpretation; indeed, after he made those remarks, the Tory front bench severed relations with Murray. Compare and contrast with Dr Gopal, who had Tweeted “White lives don’t matter. As white lives”, meaning that the lives mattered, but not the fact that they were white.

The Guardian has explained “When she had said ‘White lives don’t matter. As white lives,’ she had meant their value should be inherent and not linked to ideologies around race, she said. ‘Whiteness does not qualify someone to have their life matter; the life matters but not the whiteness.’ She added: ‘You cannot oppose Black Lives Matter with “white lives matter” because they are not comparable. Whiteness is already valued but blackness is not.’” Murray has waded into the controversy without troubling himself with meanings.

Firstly, he has been given a platform by the Mail on Sunday to truncate Dr Gopal’s Tweet - not accidentally - so he can then claim “a Cambridge academic called Priyamvada Gopal sent a message on Twitter saying, ‘white lives don’t matter’. Previously, this student of colonial and post-colonial literature has been notorious for tweeting incendiary material”.

And Secondly, he has claimed in a piece for UnHerd that Dr Gopal is a racist. More than once, which may cause some amusement to those familiar with Murray’s oeuvre. Under the title “Cambridge University’s very modern bigotry”, he introduces Dr Gopal by sniffing “A small body of work sits behind her - but a greater body of grievance clearly sits within her”, and sneering dismissively at her work, whether formally published or otherwise.

Then he considers the Tweet, which he calls “this racist little rant”. He talks of “Gopal’s statement that the lives of white people do not matter”, which is not what she said. He talks of “her use of her platform and time to spread racism”. He attempts to equate her behaviour with that of Jordan Peterson. He talks of “abusive messages which her racist tweets had garnered”. He paints a disparaging picture of her and then talks about “these new racist standards”. This was accompanied by an equally incendiary Tweet.

This talked of “the Cambridge race-baiting professor, Priyamvada Gopal”. Dr Gopal has now served notice: Murray will be the subject of a legal action, to the relief of many who wished it had happened rather earlier. “A little envelope coming his way”, as she put it.

Doug Murray The K calling racist on anyone else is most interesting. The defence advanced by his lawyers will be yet moreso. Everyone else can just get the popcorn in.

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