The West’s scapegoats: the long history of Islamophobia
Times Literary Supplement | 9th August 2022
The journalist Peter Oborne once cherished a faith in British rectitude. His columns for publications including the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator marked him out as one of conservatism’s more erudite spokesmen. Then came Britain’s complicity in the invasion of Iraq – broadly supported by both Labour and the Conservatives – and the Labour government’s mendacity over the death in suspicious circumstances of its scientific adviser David Kelly. The double deception prompted him to renounce his beliefs: “I went mentally into opposition to the British state”. In The Fate of Abraham he turns his attention to some victims of the system he has rejected: Muslims in Britain and abroad. Western civilization’s apologists divided Muslims into the “good”, who collaborated with the imperial project, and the “bad”, who resisted. As a religion with adherents spanning the globe, Islam could be targeted as a disruptive force in the Philippines in the same…
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Times Literary Supplement
In 1920, Clarence Darrow, America’s great “defender of the damned”, told a Chicago jury, in defence of freedom of speech: “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free…
Anything Can Happen
The New York Review of Books
Notions of authorship, creator, and creatures, as well as of love, folly, and imagination, dominate Salman Rushdie’s and Ariel Dorfman’s retellings of Don Quixote. I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows…
Hush-Hush Boom-Boom
London Review of Books
Alexander Cockburn blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no…