Leftist/Jihadist Alliance Update from Absurd Britannia. “Friday prayers at the New Statesman,” by Douglas Murray in the Telegraph, February 12:
More people moan about the New Statesman than buy it. They usually start by saying, “this once great magazine”. I won’t because I think the New Statesman was always mostly rubbish.
But events over the last year have made it decline faster than even the magazine’s greatest detractors could have hoped.
This week the magazine presents another “Islam special”. The front-page headline tells us in big letters: “Everything you know about Islam is wrong”.
Now that is almost certainly true for New Statesman readers. And if it weren’t the case before this edition, it certainly will be afterwards for anyone who tries to read through it.
The contents waffle interminably, led by Brother Tariq Ramadan and the head of the “Respect” Party Salma Yaqoob. Lovely.
But why has the Left’s favourite magazine ended up thinking that the way to boost its tiny and dwindling circulation is to become an Islamic magazine? Might it by any chance have anything to do with the appointment last year of a new political editor, Mehdi Hasan? I’ve written about him before here.
Hasan appears to be doing everything he can to chase any non-Muslim readers away from the magazine. Though this might upset the Statesman’s owner, it couldn’t possibly upset Hasan, who has a dim view of the worth of us non-Muslims….