Navigating the culture wars with Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

good evening and good evening uh spectator subscribers viewers friends and others i'm douglas murray uh the associate editor at the spectator in london and it's an enormous pleasure uh to be able to join with so many of you this evening live virtually but still live and uh for this very special spectator event i'd like to thank natalie and all the events team for being able to uh bring this evening together and thank all of you first of all for joining us uh let me say a very quick amount before i introduce our guest tonight a little bit of housekeeping which uh is necessary in this era as in any other uh um our guests and i are going to speak for around 40 minutes and then have time for about 20 minutes of questions and answers uh from uh you at home and i've got a technical note that i've got to inform you all about which is that there are two ways in which you can send in questions this is very important should should anything we say stimulate you to uh think of questions uh the first is that you can type your question in the text on the site now i'm told that this is this is extremely obvious um and i suppose we'll see but apparently there's a question you can you can just type it on the site and there's a clear uh place to do that the other possibility if if like me that sounds slightly terrifying and not as obvious as it seems uh you can also ask a question by emailing and you can email events spectator dot co dot uk that's events at spectator.uko.uk and i'll remind you of that later as well just in case you're all being shy and no one sends in any questions but without any further ado i'd like to talk about briefly about our guests for this evening a couple of years ago when our editor at the spectator fraser nelson asked if i would do the occasional event and have some friends and uh and people i uh admire to talk with these events we had a first event an amazing event some of you will remember many of you have been at with roger scrutin uh in westminster we have another available line of schreiber and uh this event uh tonight i would love to be able to do live uh but it's it's as good as we can get and it's going to be amazing uh to be with uh our guest tonight ayaan herciali needs i think very little introduction uh for most people she has a remarkable life story she's a remarkable woman i'm very proud to have been able to call her a friend for something coming on uh two decades um she's written numerous books including her a life story in the best-selling books infidel and nomad she's most recently the author of a new book called pray uh immigration islam and the erosion of women's rights and we're going to talk about that a bit tonight but without funny uh any further ado i just want to be able to say welcome to ayan on behalf of all of us at the spectator and what an enormous pleasure it is to see you it's a great pleasure to see you uh douglas wonderful to be with you unfortunately it's virtual but we'll correct for that soon we will indeed so let's let's start off there's a lot that we can cover tonight um but let's start off with prey um i remember uh some time ago when you you you mentioned to me that you were thinking of doing a book in this area and i remember um making a whistling like noise i think because i thought i've always admired your ability to go where uh angels fear to tread um but this this really struck me from the moment you mentioned it as as as really treading into the one of the most difficult contentious argued over subjects imaginable so that you could just lay out a little bit about what the book's about and then how you decided to write it and and what what kicked you off well i mean i honestly have to say i wasn't ready for a controversy and i'm not uh and i didn't write this book with the intention of uh inciting a controversy but generating a conversation about something very important that's going on and you're absolutely right when it comes to the issues of immigration islam and women's rights all of these issues are volatile people are feel very passionately about these things and generally there is a sense that it's best to avoid these topics um but the subject of prey is that women in europe in the public space and when i talk about women i'm talking about all women not just immigrant women or local women all of them have seen an increase in their safety in the public space which is very different from the private space and this is an increase of violence against women sexual violence and a lot of this is perpetrated by immigrant men and that is why the topic is it's you know volatile taboo because you're just having any kind of conversation about immigration is just hard enough uh and then on top of that most of these immigrant men come from muslim majority countries where they have different attitudes to women and when you have all of that together and there were events in different parts of europe mainly in germany in austria but also in sweden in denmark in france and obviously also in the united kingdom i was reading a lot of anecdotal evidence on the media social media um a friend of mine went and did a deep dive investigative journalism type of story in austria and she concluded she came away with oh most of the perpetrators are from afghanistan and this is something that's happening in austria and i thought no no no no it's happening everywhere and it's not just men from afghanistan it's men from iraq and syria from somali from eritrea from nigeria from ghana and it's it's very important if we want the immigration process and especially the integration process to succeed to address some of the negative and unintended consequences and that's why i did this book i mean there are several things that i want to ask about this because one is of course you immediately enter among other things a statistical and evidential nightmare uh because uh it seems to me i mean you and you tread it with enormous aplomb in the book um you're actually dealing with an issue in prey that every european government is trying not to find out about uh so you know as you know that the stats that you find are effectively hidden away in the data um the evidence isn't collected it seems you know you have to go and dig for yourself about it how did you go about all of that well first of all obviously i started by calling the formal agencies government agencies whose job it is to collect this data so various uh parts of the ministries of justice and ministries in the interior and many of them are very quick to say yes we do have data on sexual violence but we don't collect any kind of data on ethnicity on religion country of origin nationality all of these features we just can't do it and in some cases on an informal way they would say that has to do with the history of for instance germany and the second world war and the experience of the jews and uh because of that type of systemic and systematic persecution that led to the holocaust we we just simply don't collect that data so i thought okay maybe i'll get it from the newspapers and some of the mainstream uh editorial newspapers tvs and so on they said that they had press norms that were imposed on them on on the journalists doing the reporting to say you know a man of asian origin or of middle eastern and that's what they used to write but now they don't even write that anymore so they would just write the first name of the perpetrator or the person of the suspect and have an initial as the last name but honestly even with the fast names it's quite clear where when a name is local and when a name is foreign um but aside from that i also started having interviews i looked for court cases i looked for victims and had interviews with them and then i started talking to the local people and i found not every country is the same in some countries they do actually collect data and have gone some of these governments have decided that it wasn't worthwhile to hide this information from the public uh denmark is one such country but also austria because of just a sheer number of attacks that they've had to deal with so everything that i have found i document in pray and when you read pray you're not going to walk away with a causal relationships here i'm trying to be very very careful but you do have a very clear correlation um and you know as you go through the pages you're going to see that every institution is trying to find the right way for this but has either been good or bad mostly bad uh for a reason for instance if you take the institution of media they're damned if they report because they're accused of empowering the far-right and populist parties but they're also damned if they don't because if they don't then they end up you know as as citizens you end up going to social media for your news or unreliable news sources as well unreliable news sources that tell lies or exaggerate the issue so in any case that is the challenge for the media i've spoken to members of the various police forces and they would say they would love nothing more than to just do their job but very often they're told by senior officials to drop a case or not to investigate or not to write down the names and and that in that sense they find that they're letting down the victims and then you have the entire court system which really wasn't designed for this type of thing for a heterogeneous society where people would be coming from broken down societies uh where violence is uh the threshold for violence is law so i mean very often i've been asked well we admit that there is a problem yes we have a rise of sexual violence against women and we know that it's perpetrated mostly by immigrant men but what would you like us to do and so there's this shrugging it off of we've got to live with it and an effect of that has been that for many women especially in working-class neighborhoods because that's where the negative effects of immigration is felt the most it is in working-class neighborhoods working-class places some of these women have decided to act like the women in the countries of origin where they decide to think twice about whether to go out in the first place and what to wear whether they should go up in larger numbers some of them have been buying pepper spray and trying to arm themselves in various ways but their freedom of movement is constrained and their safety is limited and that is wrong it's not just an erosion of women's rights it's an erosion of the rule of law i mean it's an extraordinary thing that this this where um such an extraordinary event can be constantly happening and every agency in the country including the media gets stuck in this sort of um impossible situation it seems to be in their eyes i remember when i was when i was researching the strange death of europe uh in germany in 2015 and 2016 uh i remember speaking to germany and said to me you know we we think that whenever well the first thing was they said the whole thing about using asian as the term was just at the beginning was very confusing it sort of suggested there was a sort of chinese rape problem in parts of germany which you know maybe this term means different things in different places and and it seemed to be almost willfully obfuscating and then you had the problem was described to me that if you didn't describe anything about the ethnic origin uh or the name and you simply had as some uh some particularly the german media would do they sort of say well last night a thing happened to a person in a place and and people would actually just assume that that must be a migrant and in other words the less the press tells the worse perhaps the population think the things are because they're having to read the news through this filter of not being told anything and coming to their own conclusions and that actually feeds into conspiracy theories because people start to believe anything and uh if you look into the motives of why some of these institutional leaders are hiding or trying to obfuscate things it's well intended it is to preserve social cohesion and it is to prevent prejudice against immigrants because obviously not all immigrants perpetrators of sexual violence and not all men from muslim majority countries engage in this type of terrible behavior but i think in many ways because of this obfuscation we just end up with exactly the opposite effect which is the breakdown of social cohesion where groups of different communities of ethnic backgrounds and religious backgrounds are constantly suspicious of one another and so i don't i really think it is counterproductive and it's much better to how to be very open and honest about these things but douglas as you know and i think we're going to go into it the backdrop for all of this in the decade we live in now but also in the previous decade and even the decade before that is this emergence of identity politics of looking at individual citizens of various countries not as individuals but as members of different communities that are supposed to be all seen by the ideologues as hostile to one another oppresses and oppressed so i think this this is primarily the reason why we are having a lot of problems in trying to just bring into the open developments within our societies that need urgent attention and very often governmental attention but uh being ignored and and then these problems just get bigger and bigger and in these agencies i think they do they're not held accountable you know very well and i think the british public knows the story of the pakistani grooming gangs if you if if early on 20 years or so ago if the police the social workers all the people whose job it was to protect those children had acted uh responsibly and had helped and just done their jobs and had helped these children these young girls then i think we wouldn't have had these runaway networks and these men would not be in prison and so in hindsight you can see why the decisions that were made to do nothing actually were wrong and i don't know as far as i can tell but you maybe you can tell me this is anyone in any of those institutions been held accountable no they they they're all almost none or at least there's no serious accountability uh when operation bullfinch happened in oxfordshire which i mean i mean there's a sort of tendency as you know in the sort of grooming gangs and rape gangs discussion to sort of assume it only happens in the north of england which is itself a sort of excuse for not paying attention you know it's just places like rotherham and rochdale it's sort of dismissed by the particularly southern uh um uh media class so something happened well operation bullfinch was in oxfordshire it was a grooming gang of immigrant men uh um raping girls in the oxfordshire area and after that came to light and the court case and the convictions of a large number of men occurred um uh the the head of the i think was child services at oxfordshire district council uh gave a video apology and you would have thought she was apologizing for sort of leaves on the line in a train journey no she said we we're very sorry for the breakdown of services that occurred in oxygen you're talking about a situation where for instance girls tried to escape men who were gang raping them got back to the the hostily way they were in and were sent back to the gangs because the people in charge of the hostel wouldn't pay the taxi fare you know that was just one of the stories from it that you know about it absolutely horrific and to hear the uh um one of the people responsible for this just outrage uh um giving this sort of pathetic bureaucratees apology really was one of the things that made me most angry about this before before we move on by the way to the identity politics let me just raise a couple other things quickly which is i think the identity of the victims is a very important thing in this as well because as it were the identity politics of talking about the perpetrators is one thing but there seems to be a sort of issue about the identity of the victims in these cases the women in cologne uh from new year's eve um and particularly the the well it turns out thousands of victims in towns across england um you just tell us something about that because it's very striking to me i just thought you do they just throw out one other story which is uh um some years ago i remember mark stein told me he was thinking about writing a book in in in this area and and um actually it was such a depressing subject to look into he just sort of couldn't bear it my other finger you know um but he said one thing that always haunted me on this he said as he went round england speaking to some of the girls who were the victims he had the impression that they would be sort of talked out you know the rotherham victims the rochester victims the telford victims and he said it it was quite the opposite uh they they kept telling him things like you're the first person who's come and asked me what happened you're the first journalist i've spoken to and i always thought that was that was so haunting and shaming that that would be the case but the identity of the victim seems to be a major component um i i have found that also in different countries that's uh the identity of the victims in this case so i'm in in the book it's a documenting of sexual violence against what they call strangers so the perpetrator and the victim do not know one another it's random and some of the perpetrators act as individuals but very often as groups of two three four or more and there are two things that strike me and struck me about the identity of the victims one is the prejudice that the perpetrators hold against white girls they deem them to be in indecent uh not virtuous not modest and up for grabs so that is the prejudice that the immigrant men who engage in this in these sexual violence acts they have that prejudice against these girls the other type of prejudice is class and i know that in the uk it's much more common to talk about class differences but in many european countries there is a sense that oh we are so equal and egalitarian we have absolutely no class issue i think that is a lie because indeed if the victim happens to be a girl of middle class where the parents educate have a college education university education and or a higher income the outrage generally seems to be more widespread it's carried by the newspapers and television stations and so on and then local officials law enforcement and government officials are forced to do something about the problem or pretend to do something about the problem but when it is in working-class neighborhoods and again i repeat they do carry the biggest burden when it comes to the negative and unintended consequences of immigration it is that class factor is one that has to be looked into and uh what i also thought was fascinating was anywhere where there is any kind of feminism you know organized groups of women who say that they are there to fight for the rights of women this is mostly middle class it's mostly about getting women into positions of power uh on boards uh shattering ceiling um finding some kind of balance between home life and working life those are the priorities it's not the priorities of safety in the public space in working-class neighborhoods and transport hubs and that sort of thing so yes this is very much a class issue here that's not been looked into and yes yes that's such a fascinating point i am because uh i i think the historians would look back on this era and think you know what were the feminists uh um campaigning about most vociferously in that era and if you notice there's a vast number of cases you talk about in your book across europe the way in which there seem to be an ignoring of the problem or just an unfamiliarity a best and unfamiliarity with the problem it strikes me as something that people are going to look back with bafflement and what's more as you well know if you bring out him pray in an era where where in every other situation claiming that a woman was as it were asking for it yeah is completely unacceptable for a brief period yes it was the case that as a woman you are not held responsible for the misconduct of the male perpetrator in europe in the united states of america at least that was a milestone that feminists had reached which was doesn't matter what she's wearing it doesn't matter whether she's drunk or not it doesn't matter if she's in the wrong place you are not supposed to commit the crime and here uh in the stories that i tell in uh pray these women have all said the exact same thing no one actually listens to them at all and very often these victims would say to me i want to tell you my story but before i tell you my story i want to make it very clear that i'm not political i have no right-wing connections in fact i've always voted for social democrats or center-left parties and i want immigrants to come here and i want them to flourish i want them to thrive i just wanted them to stop this crime this is what the victims are saying now when it comes to social democratic parties center-left parties i think they have abandoned their constituencies and these women are in fact their constituencies and these women have nowhere to go at this point and the only i think the only way out would be for them the women themselves to start forming their own organizations and interestingly the only other group of women who were very very vocal about this issue were immigrant women survivors of honor violence and survivors of uh you know women who felt that their families were imposing islamist views on them to cover themselves and stay at home and marry someone that they didn't want according to women who survived these things in the various countries while the women's were out in front saying look what's happening the more you bring men from muslim majority countries the more our neighborhoods are affected the social control is more severe and are seeing these problems almost like it's back home from the countries you know from north africa or the middle east of asia or uh various parts of africa so i think that there there is an opportunity perhaps for working-class women and immigrant women to form some kind of movement and fight this because i don't think these uh center-left parties are interested in in their in their interests anymore these parties are now driven by identity politics so it's things that like skin color as you know and religion and islamophobia and other you know very trendy sounding causes well let's get on to that because um i i regard you as being one of the most acute observers as well as one of the bravest observers of the scene in the west in particular perhaps at the moment and um and i wondered you know having followed your career very closely for many years i wondered what you think now looking out at the situation in in america in britain across europe um you've got a great eagle eye for spotting the things that people aren't daring to talk about but should uh um what are the one what are the ones that are on your mind at the moment well to be honest with you it is what everyone has now been talking about for quite some time which i i was not in the least evil eye towards i in fact dismissed uh council culture critical race theory critical justice theory all this identity politics stuff you know a while i dismissed it as as a fad and i thought it was something that was just in universities and as soon as these students graduated and got in touch with the real world that they would shed them because the real world would teach them i didn't expect this thing to expand out of these colleges and into the wider society into corporations the government everywhere else but i do see um that there are these connections where you know if you ignore the constraining of free speech and academic freedom in the universities and then you ignore it again or you succumb to it you submit to it in elementary and high school education and then right now what we are seeing in the united states is that the government itself various governmental departments are imposing this critical race theory features on employees and government employees and the same is happening with corporations i think in in the long run it's very easy to see how you know the the minds of americans can be closed and i wanted to ask you in fact i know that there is a similar struggle going on in the uk perhaps not as dramatic as here in in the us but i i wanted to ask you how is it in the uk because we are in a very very bad position here in america from what i can see yeah i think you're certainly right about that i mean i spend a certain amount of my time there in america and notice these these trends there i mean it's odd isn't it the way that these sorts of um um these things hesitate to use the term virus about this but these sort of thought viruses sort of transfer between the continents it seems to me now and there are certain things that we know well about in europe about for instance islamist extremism which america is sort of a bit behind on some of it i would say um but then you get the things like the uh the sort of um council culture uh the term identically like but also you know obviously the identity politics of the critical race theory and more and that that's just flooded out of america straight to the uk and elsewhere readers of the spectator well now i mentioned some of this in my column this week where um you know institution after institution keeps deciding that since the death of george floyd at the hands of a minnesotan policeman who's now in prison uh they have to change everything about their institution you know whether it's the the national trust or the uh or norwich town hall last week or uh everyone's got kew gardens recently announced that uh that uh botanical uh gardens were uh um racist um uh and and then we had the royal academy of music the other day it's denied it since but it said it was going to decolonize its instrument collection it's collection of ancient instruments as i said in spectator i think george floyd would be surprised to have heard that his killing was going to lead to a purge of harpsichords in london but but it seems to have just washed across the entire culture it's a fascinating thing that and um but america is the absolute um source of this it's um it's patient zero on this and it is stunning to me the speed with which it's spilled out but you see you've seen uh you've seen this up close well yes first if you go you know to the roots of it these post-modernist philosophers came from france and then i think they were cultivated here in various american universities in places where they they have gender studies and race studies and all sorts of uh you know other seemingly innocent uh things that people want to focus on or in some cases i mean i looked at gender studies and i always think when you have a degree in gender studies what are you going to do afterwards but so it seemed kind of contained and eccentric in these places but now it's become it's a big deal and i think the the um the effects that we're seeing is it's caused by groups like the strident inflexible transgender activists where of course it's very understandable that they say they want equal rights for transgender people and they want these people to be recognized which is one thing but when there are unintended consequences like young children being lured through the internet into undergoing physiological changes that are dramatic and you know cannot be reversed and we can't have a conversation about that when the healthcare professionals are too terrified and just go along with that women's presence now uh you know we have just passed the law in california and this just tells you how crazy things are that if you you don't have to undergo any kind of process to become female or male you just have to say i identify as such and so male prisoners male convicts are claiming to be female and no one is allowed to ask any question they're being housed with women and uh here now these men are being abusive towards these women and no one is listening to these women you know we are seeing things like that we're seeing the entire education system where children as young as six or seven or eight years old are being told if they're white that they're oppressors which in my book is just pure child abuse because why not would you be telling a six year old seven eight nine year eight nine year old that they're oppressors and they're responsible for all these heavy history and then uh the children of color are being told that they're victims and again in its own way that's also a form of abuse because these children are being told they have no agency everything that happens to them that is negative is as a consequence of something that white people do and this is now becoming the standard curriculum and so i'm seeing around a lot of parents who are saying that they're either going to leave the country or home school or start their own schools um and then in government people are being subjected to these so-called mandatory uh unconscious bias trainings uh and this is just really an ideological indoctrination and the policing of what people think and so here it's it's crazy it's it's going out of control let me let me ask you a couple of things before before we bring in uh audience questions and just remind the audience so these two two techniques for sending in questions uh one of them is to send it in on apparently the extremely obvious box on your screen and the other is to email events at spectator.com uk uh before we get to audience questions there is just a couple of things the first is um i'd love your thoughts on this what do you what do you make of this and it touches on on on a number of things we have to spoke about what do you make of the way in which um identity seems to be sort of transferable depending not just on the identity of the speaker but on the specific words they use so that for instance um some people who are not white are allowed to voice their opinions and indeed to tell everyone to listen and other people who happen not to be white are told to shut up because they're not saying helpful things in some ways and this seems to have been rife in america i wonder if you've got any views on that um it's and it's not just in america it has now also come to europe yes but if you are black or of you know indian origin or if you're non-white yes it seems that at first what you say if it diverges from the ideology people might listen but after that really douglas even then you're dismissed as you know i i'm a proponent of the free market obviously with protections of the unintended consequences of the free market um i believe in individual freedom and individual responsibility and accountability these things are now called whiteness and racist i believe that people should actually try and pick themselves up by their bootstraps first if possible and only afterwards ask for help all of these things are now regarded as whiteness we are told that punctuality is whiteness that mathematics objective truth is whiteness and there are obviously a lot of people who are not white who object to that and say it's just absurd and what does that mean what does that make me as as black person or person of color does that make me is it just i'm lazy i can't read the time i can't plan for the future my merit is to be questioned only because of my skin color so you see how it's sort of a subtle racism that goes on yeah but if you're sorry guys i was gonna ask one other follow-on from that before i come to some excellent audience questions coming in perhaps you can help me with one question i've already had in recent years about this is why can you now predict with 100 certainty uh uh the views that a certain type of public figure is going to have uh on a range of issues i think let me give you throw two examples out there um ilan omar a famous uh congresswoman i think from somalia i think originally isn't she yes when she was in office of a very brief amount of time wrote to the local sports authorities in her district complaining that they wouldn't allow somebody was born a man to win the women's weightlifting competition uh and in no ordinary way would i you expect ilan omar who holds pretty strict views uh her islamic background to be standing up for the big bearded man winning the women's weightlifting competition but there it is and the second example springs to mind is um aoc another famous um young congresswoman who um in her first weeks in office did a fundraiser for the very very controversial charity mermaids which seeks to help children in the uk transition you think why would aoc be interested in in raising thousands of pounds for a children transitioning group in the uk well that's because it's part of the ideology and i don't know when at one point at what point uh these internal contradictions are going to come about but in the case of ilhan omar there's the the islamists and the uh the woke ideologues are united in the hate of america in the hate of individualism in the hate of accountability in the hate of israel and in their anti-semitism and so in many ways they they have common ground in all of these things now aoc and high interest in the transgender community i don't know i don't know much about that but i do know that part of this um you know the erasing of sex and gender it's part of the work ideology there are no women there are no men it's all fluid they're 100 genders or more i mean i sometimes ask why stop at 100 you could just say a hundred somewhat limiting if you think about it yeah these are some of the you know ten commandments or whatever they're religious orthodoxy ideological you know ideological orthodoxy so i do see where they see common ground but i think it is for us on the outside to poke at their contradictions and to demand really uh you know if you're a proponent of sharia and then what are your views on the rights of women and all on the lgbt community on a jewish community and so it's for the outsiders uh to keep asking these questions but unfortunately they do not want to debate coleman hughes who is a friend and a black man he invited ibram ex who's one of the living prophets of this this critical race theory i call it now criminal race theory and he he invited ibrahim x kennedy to debate he will not respond i did robin d'angelo to come and debate with me she will not they will not debate because they are not ready to defend their beliefs and their ideas they just want to impose it on others and that really really makes them into much more of a religious movement than a political movement yeah well i i have to say um i think i know why they won't i know coleman and and i know why ibra makes candy won't debate him which is that coleman would make mince meat of candy and i know why robin d'angelo won't debate you which is you may miss me to her so so on a personal uh career level they're very sensible to keep away and uh typically disingenuous of them to do so let's go to some questions i've got a lot of them have come in uh um here's a very interesting one from amir um is there any other option amir asks than either government and law enforcement doing what we pay them to do or a tommy robinson persona leading the charge against predators well in my book i think that law enforcement should do their job because you know we have governments that have the monopoly of violence and we pay taxes first and foremost so that the government can protect its citizens from external forces and also from domestic harm and so i think it is key very important that we do hold government accountable for that now the tony robinsons of this world ideally you would not want the tony robinsons of this world to be the voice of women's emancipation but what you want is for those voices where you know where there is where there is harm and and the individuals the victims when they voice that harm you you want them to be listened to and they've always been in europe groups and organizations and individuals that articulate particular interests and we touched on feminism and the feminist movements and organizations don't seem to be interested in this or in they may have made a trade-off where they think it's far more important to them to protect the sentiments of the immigrant community rather than women's rights these are these are you know personal choices and organizational choices that they've made that are wrong but as you said the question was posed by a person called anir i think it's also important that individuals within the communities where the perpetrators come from should come forward and say we don't want the community name smeared and the way to stop that from happening is not to pretend that there's nothing going on and be offended because we're talking about the problems but to go after the individuals who are the perpetrators who are engaged in this terrible behavior and stop them let me throw another question in uh paul asks uh wokest mobs across the western world have had great success rewriting the basic tenets of our established history what are the key factors at work that have made such inroads into our established historical legacy and what does it say about historians that they have had such an easy ride so far now i hate to say but you're married to a historian of course and uh don't speak for him but this is a very interesting question it is a very interesting question and yes i am married to a historian who is very much upset by what's going on and by this erosion of history and i think part of it is because i we took it for granted that uh people who you know that these things have been fought and there's not only anybody who's fighting historians was going to lose i think because there was a sense that the history departments within universities teaching of history in high school and elementary school that that was a given that these curricula were not controversial at all and that's one and i think when we saw the first signs of opposition many people ignored that development including historians and i think historians should take responsibility for that um a lot of these um institutions were underfunded and then there was this ideological bent where people on the left and perhaps even on the far left were left to do the administration and you know to recruit academics so that i i don't know very much about the uk because i didn't look into it but in the united states almost all things that colleges and universities do uh is done by the left i think it was michael bloomberg who remarked on it sometime in 2014 15 where he said something you know it was over 95 or 98 percent of professors at harvard and most of the ivy league had given to the democratic party and so in that sense you see this ideological bent and lack of balance and so all of these things it it i mean i think we're just seeing the sudden change but these things were going on for quite some time then i think we we confused uh critical thinking with self-condemnation it's very good to look critically at the history of western civilization and of the various countries within western civilization but it is wrong to condemn it wholeheartedly and to say you know the whole thing has just been really awful and it's only a story of oppression slavery and exploitation when in fact that's not the case uh the history of western civilization is also the story of civilization and emancipation the emancipation of women the emancipation of and the abolition of slavery and this quests relentless quest for equal rights for everyone so i think that story has to be told before these very naughty people tell us and that walkism is the way out by the way i'll just add one coder to that if i may which is there's also a technical reason it seems to me in the teaching of history which is that uh uh issues like for instance empire uh were unpopular for some time in um in academic study in the uk for instance uh it was almost as if there was a realm of knowledge that was that was forgotten uh so much so that when for instance you had the rosemary's fall campaign at oxford the campaigners were saying things that cecil rhodes had said which he just hadn't said you know there are all sorts of legitimate claims you can make for and against cecil rhodes but they were just making stuff up and no one seemed to notice until nigel biger of of church college looked into it did what anyone should do and you know read the dictionary of national biography entry to start with on cecil rhodes and founder so it's a very interesting thing that that effectively the the campaigners and others the defamers are speaking into a kind of knowledge vacuum where we have a sort of forgotten knowledge or forgotten history uh which perhaps perhaps needs to be dug up again this goes to a number of the questions um that are coming in uh let me this is jumping around slightly there's a fair amount about history which is very interesting but maybe we could also go to helena who asks why are immigrant women living in europe not fighting this erosion of rights first of all is helena wright and why is it yes so to helena there are actually a lot of immigrant women who are fighting it and i think i said before during our first conversation that in fact surprisingly it is immigrant women who have lived in europe for a number of years some of them who were born and raised in europe who are seeing some of these changes and are fighting it but they are not large enough and they're not powerful enough they don't have the resources but aside from that you immigrant women especially those from muslim households have to deal with the culture at home where as girls they're pulled out of school they're subjected to all of these scriptures around honor uh you're not allowed to wear makeup you're not allowed to have a boyfriend you're not allowed to finish school you're not allowed to work you're forced into marriage all of these things and the bigger and more conservative or reactionary that community is the more of a constraint that there is for girls and women so it is really really tough on immigrant women in particular to come out because they don't they they have to fight the woke ideology that's trying to label them victim when some of them are really proud survivors and and want what everyone else wants to have and then you also have as an immigrant you have to deal with your family your extended family your community that are telling you that you're becoming too westernized too british or too american or too swedish or what have you and so it's a very good question but it's i think these women are not seen enough and not heard enough um let's go probably got time for a couple more questions so do keep sending them in um this is a this is one uh i think you're very well placed to uh to answer ayanna oliver says in this i think this is said slightly cheekily i must say he says in the spirit of balance do we need to talk more about the slavery that took place in other parts of the world absolutely please let's do it and it's not you said took there is slavery that still takes place uh today in the middle east in south asia in africa where i come from there are people when i was growing up in somalia who was somali at least seen within the nation states whatever is left of it somalia but these people were forced into labor and they were not paid and they were called slaves when i lived in saudi arabia just because of my black skin saudis referred to me and my family members are slaves they still do there are all sorts of people who go immigrants who go from various parts of africa and asia to work in the middle east and those people are treated very very poorly close almost closely they're not sold and bought but they're not paid what's due to them and very often they find that they can't leave those circumstances look at human trafficking uh look at uh the whole sex industry i mean they all depend on people who actually can't get out and are forced to do jobs that are awful and that they can't they didn't ask for so instead of you know being mesmerized and hyper focused on the slavery of 200 years ago why don't we talk about the slavery that's going on now and then again i want to point out actually it is western civilization it is the british and the americans who fought was to end slavery and who told the story over and over again of why human dignity must stand above uh you know religious and ideological notions of inferiority that you know you might hold towards other people and so that story hasn't been told and it should be told and it can't you can't really understand it if we're not honest about the history itself i'm not surprised that people are asking quite a number of people are asking about history i really hope that you know a large number large enough number of british people and others stand up and demand that history be you know be taught and be taught right and and be told honestly we've got time for perhaps one final question before we do can i just throw in one of my own as well i and i'd love to know your answer to this uh before we go to a final question from the audience in the remaining few minutes we have um we've been living through he hasn't come up this evening um but uh we've been living through all of us the most extraordinary and unusual period in the last 18 months or so it's obviously too early to tell in lots of ways but do you have any views on on how us all being forced into our solitude for well over a year in this unprecedented situation will affect some of the issues we're talking about tonight and if there's other things you see coming down the road as a consequence of this extraordinary time well i think the the main question in free societies is you know how much power do we hand government and then what do governments do with that and governments have to balance between you know respecting personal liberty and all the other liberties that have but also containing this disease and understanding it and i think in every country western country you see those conversations being had um what kind of effect is this going to have on the conversations that we've been having for instance immigration and the negative consequences of immigration but especially the integration of immigrants into the wider society and what's the role of government in that and if government does take upon itself that role then how much of the individual freedoms of immigrants who are to be integrated is going to be sacrificed in the name of that higher good of you know the outcome so i think it's we're living in very very interesting times but i it's legitimate both to say you know we we don't want government compromising our liberty we also you know don't want the economic the economies to be collateral damage but at the same time these governments do have to understand um and and encounter such things as the pandemic if you you said that i liked uh controversial issues but i think for instance just looking back at your country do you think in hindsight that an organization like the nhs should have been saddled with this particular emergency but then you're not allowed to ask such questions because the nhs is now sacred and so you know everything goes back to uh what can we talk about [Music] honest conversations of ours yeah let me wrap up there's a couple of questions uh linked um we both have a shot at them um mata asks is the only way forward to speak the truth in our everyday lives rather than using their ideology against the woke and uh then um sophie says douglas and diane you have oh there's a very nice question another flash right she says you have helped keep us sane through this culture war madness what do you suggest we do okay you go first diane let me go with number one and say because uh the critical race theory movement critical justice still social warriors their movement one of the key objectives is to pollute our language to contaminate the everyday language that we speak to one another so obviously the most glaring pushback or answer to that would be not to allow them to do that so that we just speak plain english and if english is a second language in my case it's a fourth language you've worked very hard to know to understand and you're taught grammar and syntax and all that and suddenly they come around and they introduce this incredibly ugly vocabulary and so you have to learn their language and i think language is especially the english language is one of the realms that we have to protect from these people it's the only way to have honest debates discussions and conversations and let's not allow them let's not speak their language very clearly yes there are men and women not people who menstruate or all of these adding the letter x to nouns it's just terrible don't allow them to do that just speak plain english the plainer the simpler the better there's nothing quite like making you feel smaller than i am reminding you that she's speaking in her fourth language i didn't mean to do it but you know how no no no i know i know but it is one of the things it's been remarkable i mean you arrived in holland and you you learn dutch immediately sort of anyhow uh something one of the many things i've always admired about you let me just a very quick stab at sophie's question i think i i agree with everything ayan just said and i think i think everyone has a role in their everyday lives in order just not to as it says not to fall into the the traps that are laid for us uh i've come to the view that that you shouldn't demand kamikaze like acts of bravery from everyone but we can all speak up a bit more we can all take a bit of a step forward there are cases i am there as well from america in particular where just individual parents for instance have said no no not having this at this school when i'm not having you teach my children this junk uh this racist divisive nonsense and and it has a huge effect and and they must be onto something because they get so when you know individual parents uh stand up like that they get huge attention and if they were on to nothing no one would care uh it's because they're on to a thing that so many people feel a majority feel i believe but too few people speak up about that's the reason why there is so much attention but but if there was more of that and i i think there will be then i think these are these are winnable battles uh i may have said before doyle i mean i i i fought many unwinnable battles in my life i'm an expert in them uh connoisseur you might say but uh i it means i know i know a winnable battle when i see one and i i think i think uh on on much of this it's a winnable battle um now i am we we started four or five minutes later we're we're um we just passed the hour uh here um that there's so much more we could talk about and so much more i know that everybody with us this evening would love to hear about and so much more i would like to hear about uh will you promise me one thing before we finish which is that whenever we're all allowed out of our seclusion and we're allowed to take the risk of sitting next to other spectator subscribers in a theater and more than 30 people do you promise you can come back and do this in a in real life in real time in real person i promise to do that and i promise to do it in the uk fantastic i'm gonna hold you to that promise i hope that everybody who's joined us tonight uh will hold us to that promise um thank you everybody uh for joining us this evening thank you again uh to the events team at the spectator uh most of all thank you ayan it's been a thrill as ever uh to see you i can't wait till that next opportunity and until then thank you and to everyone thank you and good night you

Channel: The Spectator

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Keywords: The Spectator, Spectator, Politics, News, Opinion, Current affairs, Analysis, debate, The Spectator Magazine

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Length: 60min 18sec (3618 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021