In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South …
The Marxist who recognised evil
Norman Geras, who died 10 years ago today, was an unusual figure on the Western Left: he was a Marxist who steadfastly and unequivocally opposed militant Islamism and jihadi terrorism. As a free-thinking political theorist, he was as strident in …
A new blasphemy battle is coming
Last summer, Sir Salman Rushdie told a German magazine that some normality was finally returning to his life. Two weeks later, he was stabbed multiple times on stage in New York. The incident was a cruel reminder that, despite all …
Should Pakistan surrender?
Pakistan is in a mess. Controlled by an increasingly unpopular military, the nation is teetering on the brink of default. By July, the country’s foreign exchange reserves are set to fall below $3 billion, barely sufficient to cover a month’s …
How Lee Rigby’s murder changed terrorism
Like a still from a cheap horror flick, Michael Adebolajo stands with a meat cleaver and a large knife clasped in one hand. His free hand, saturated in blood, is raised towards the camera. Together with his accomplice and fellow …
The acceptable face of radical Islam
LoonWatch.com was born on April Fool’s Day 2009. At precisely 20:33:38, someone used the pseudonym “Zuhair Thomas” to register the new website with GoDaddy, an internet service provider based in Arizona. What “Zuhair” created was a platform for anonymous character …
Andrew Tate is not a terrorist
In 2020, I attended a meeting with various professionals and volunteers in Nairobi to discuss the recruitment of Kenyans by al-Shabaab, the formidable al-Qaeda affiliate across the border in Somalia. Midway through the presentations by assorted Europeans, the room began …
Is Iran’s Arab Spring doomed?
Ayatollah Khomeini was a fundamentalist cleric who inspired the 1979 Islamic Revolution to overthrow a millennia-old history of Iranian monarchy. He was also, legend has it, an athletic young man who became the leapfrog champion of his village of Khomein …
France is haunted by civil war
Ranks of men in uniform are bombarded with Molotov cocktails, makeshift mortars, and small arms fire. Commando units prepare to infiltrate a smoke-covered urban fortress. A city burns under the watchful eye of the press, reporting on “a civil war”.…
The Shamima Begum delusion
Our national conversation on Shamima Begum, which ebbs and flows according to the imperatives of Begum’s legal team and a simultaneously cynical and naïve mass media, is saturated in bullshit. For her detractors, the 23-year-old East-London runaway is a danger …
The rise of Jihadi prison gangs
By the last count, there were more than 200 convicted terrorists — most Islamist, but some far-Right — currently housed at Her Majesty’s pleasure in British prisons, with a further 200 or so convicted of other offences but deemed similarly …
Writers shouldn’t submit to Islamists
Ever since my childhood, I’ve been afraid of them. I was five years old and they had the face of Iranian ayatollahs. I was 15 and they raged through neighbouring Algeria. I remember, on television, their faces eaten up by …
The infidels will not be silenced
Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the …
What progressive extremism experts get wrong
In 2017, when Maajid Nawaz appeared on Bill Maher’s Real Time, he openly discussed his past membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that calls for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate. Back then, he enjoyed some renown as a “counter-terrorism …
The new war on Islamism
Art and Islam often seem like oil and water. Other times, they behave like matches and gasoline.
It is hard to believe that more than 30 years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The …
