“The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” -Marcus Aurelius
Here are three great clips put together from the TV debate. THe original clips from YT I found much too quiet. So I boosted the volume and put them together. If the embed does not work for you, please click here to watch the video directly where it lives. Firefox users may have a problem seeing it here.
All I can say is, thank you Mr. Murray
I really really like this guy.
I really like this guy. I hope Europe hasn’t moved far far past the point where voices like his are enough. Although it almost certainly has.
Here is a clip from the brilliant Douglass Murray from 2007. This speech was never made public officially. This is the only video of the event.
And then there is always this important and now ancient document, but of critical importance. A speech he gave at a memorial service for Pim Fortyne.
Below, is an article that I read before I started this website, and was in fact one of the inspirations for me to do it. I have had it as a .doc download on the page, ‘The agenda and views of this site’ for some time now, but I felt it was worth actually posting this speech, originally given at a Pim Fortyn memorial service, here in full. It is by Douglass Murray, someone at the time I had never heard of but I now recognize him as one of the most important voices of our times, and speaks about the relationship between leftism and Islam in a way that is simply brilliant and very important. I thought of reposting it because of a compliment I got on a youtube comment I made, where I loosely quoted Murray from this speech with reference to another matter. I said,
“Back before Islam, Canada’s hard slide to the left was my concern. This is nostalgic to me, getting to post on something? other than the religion of peace and the horror it creates everywhere it can. However leftism is like AIDS to the social body and Islam is merely the common flu that kills the weakened victim. If it wasn’t for leftism, we would laugh off Islam and its preposterous demands on our superior culture.”
The second part of this comment is a direct reference to Murrays speech below. When you have the time and patience, please consider reading it.
Eeyore for Vlad:
Posted by Douglas Murray
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=809(0)
Why will European intellectual and political leaders not stand up to radical Islam? Douglas Murray – the author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It – suggests that it is because these leaders are in the grip of a virulent infection. The infection is relativism. A culture which is imbued with relativism, argues Murray, can in the end find no reason to fight for its own salvation. Europe can only save itself, argues Murray, if it unambiguously stands up for its values and rediscovers absolutism in the defence of these values.
What follows was delivered by Douglas Murray as a speech in The Hague to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam in February 2006. The views expressed are those of Douglas Murray, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.
In 1938, when German troops had again crossed into territory that was not theirs, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to see Herr Hitler. In his understandable desire for peace, Chamberlain agreed terms, gave up not just some ground, but the entire nation of Czechoslovakia, and returned to London. There he was greeted by Winston Churchill with uncompromising words. Churchill told him:
You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.
Much of the threat we face today bears no similarity to the Nazi threat of the thirties. We do not face vast militarized units, we are not seeing the absorption of nations into a military superstate, and we can be all but certain that we will not in our lifetimes again see the mass mobilization of Europe’s citizenry. By all these things we are comforted.
Yet we have, in Europe and the West, a deep and growing problem, and because this problem only occasionally resembles the problem last time, it is all too easy to assume that what we face now is not a problem. Were troops in blackshirts or jackboots to come marching back through our cities today, not a European country would stand for it. The recent reactions from the governments of Europe to the lunatic of Tehran’s pronouncements demonstrate this. It was only when he spoke abhorrently of the holocaust that European leaders finally seemed to sit up and take notice. We should take some pride in this fact: there are still things that cannot fail to wake Europe, and lines beyond which we will not be taken.
But we must also be careful. Not everyone who hates us is as stupid or suicidal as President Ahmadinejad. In fact very few of the enemies of freedom today give us such unambiguous expressions of their ideological position, and when they do, few do so in a manner so likely to tempt us into action.
The conflict which we are now in – which we have been most visibly engaged in for five years, but which had in truth opened far earlier – is not a conflict which looks familiar to the people of Europe. It barely resembles conflicts of their past. And just as this war does not much look like earlier wars, so victory in this war will not look like earlier victories. This poses a problem: what will victory in the war on terror – the war against Islamic extremism – look like? How will we know when it is over? How will we know when we’ve won? The only, and deeply imperfect, guide may be time – the length of time in which we are not hit, seriously threatened or cowed. If we are to have victory then it will emerge as an almost imperceptible victory: it will be a diminuendo towards victory. Only historians will then be capable of determining which battles were vital, which significant, and which illusory triumphs of their time.
The flip-side of this is that defeat in the war on terror – the war on Islamic extremism – will not happen in a familiar manner either. Defeat will not look as defeat would have looked last time. It will rather, I suggest, consist of a gradual accretion of hurts on our society, a wearying accumulation of often minor humiliations: death by a thousand cuts. Rather than waking up one day and finding troops rolling into our cities, we will simply become aware, with a growing sense of numbness, that what we had has slipped away, that what we relied on for support and succour has eroded and washed beyond our reach. If we end in darkness this time, it will be because we shuffled, rather than fell, into it. Continue Reading →
This is a truly excellent piece of work by a man who I grow more and more to admire as one of the great intellectuals of the day. Douglas Murray appeared with Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the IQ2 debate, ‘Is Islam a religion of peace’ and was excellent. But this piece is superb. If you read nothing else today, read this. Thank you Fred for sending it to me. This is nectar for a thirsty mind.
By Douglas Murray
What was your first reaction back in May when you heard of plans to build a mega-mosque near the site of the Twin Towers in New York? Did you assume it was a tasteless joke? Did your jaw drop? Or did you think: “What a good idea. No better place.”
My bet would be that most readers (including self-described liberal readers) had a touch more of the former reaction than the latter. Some people even said so at the time. A number of families of 9/11 victims spoke out against the building and for a few weeks the idea of a 13-storey mosque complex beside the World Trade Centre craters, due to cost £68 million yet with no known financial backer, seemed a dead duck.
So how was it that within a few months many of those same people, most notably the most loudly self-declared liberals, were not merely advocating the building of that same mosque but in many cases seemed eager to build it themselves, finally depicting its construction as the sine qua non of America’s survival? The distance between first and second instincts is always illuminating. But this one turns out to be more than usually so. Public debates in America tend to happen rougher, faster and more ferociously than they do in most of Europe. And so it was that a heated debate over one hot summer transformed a planning dispute into something far larger and more significant.
Daisy Khan: Wife of the Imam of the proposed Ground Zero mosque has claimed to be a victim
It was at the beginning of August that the Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg stood with the Statue of Liberty in the background to make a major announcement. The planning regulations surrounding the former Burlington Coat Factory on 45-51 Park Place, had already met opposition at the community board advisory level. National polls suggested that a majority of Americans were opposed to the building of what was then called Cordoba House, a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. But Bloomberg thought differently. Surrounded by the requisite collective of religiously-attired figures, Bloomberg declared that restrictive planning laws of New York would not be allowed to stand in the way of the planned mosque. The debate was not about a planning application any longer. It was about something more, he declared. It was about America.
In his often teary-eyed speech, Bloomberg exercised the now decade-long tendency to believe that al-Qaeda meant whatever you want them to have meant when they destroyed the Twin Towers. Bloomberg declared: “Three thousand people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.” The issue, he said, was “as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime”. And it wasn’t a test he intended to fail. Expressing his support for the construction of the mosque, he said: “The community centre and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighbourhood and the entire city.”
President Barack Obama appeared to enter the debate on Bloomberg’s side when he raised the matter at a Muslim iftar (post-fast) dinner at the White House. “This is America,” he confirmed indignantly. The next day, he changed tack in the face of a popular uproar, and claimed that he had not in fact made the statement he appeared to have made, but had instead carefully avoided making any statements about the wisdom of building anything anywhere.
Despite Obama’s phantom U-turn, by the end of the summer the liberal consensus appeared to be with Bloomberg. After further negative opinion polls, Bloomberg declared that those opposed to the mosque “ought to be ashamed of themselves”, adding: “To cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists.” Al-Qaeda had attacked the World Trade Centre and as a result it was now vital that America reply by building a mosque.
Other politicians were not as distrustful as Bloomberg was of popular sentiment. In mid-August, Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said on air: “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington…We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbour.” Gingrich’s intervention allowed mainstream politicians respectfully to oppose the construction. But by then another element of the debate had emerged. It was one which points to perhaps the largest difference between the European and American debate on this issue. Continue Reading →