Extremism must not be allowed to prevail following attacks in Cologne

 

By Matthew Hynds

It has been reported that male asylum seekers have been banned from using a public swimming pool in Bornheim, Germany. Women at the swimming pool had complained of harassment. This follows the outbreak of assaults against women that took place in Cologne on New Years’ Eve, and revelations that similar crimes were covered up by police, at a music festival in Stockholm. What unites these, and other disturbing cases, is the fact that the alleged attackers are asylum seekers.

Honest debate is being wrongly labelled as regressive politics

 

Germaine Greer

 

By Matthew Hynds

Following on from an article I wrote last month, there was a little more I wanted to add. So here it is:-  I wrote about the tendency that exists in the minds of some people on the left and right of politics, to conflate criticism of “our” own governments’ foreign policy decisions (“our” meaning those of us in the west), with a latent sympathy for terrorism – of the Islamic, fundamentalist kind. I cited Douglas Murray, Sam Harris and Maajit Nawaz as prominent commentators who have used the term “Regressive Left” to describe a kind of “masochism” that they have identified on the political Left. Harris, in particular, has been forthright in identifying Noam Chomsky as a kind of figurehead of the “Regressive Left”, based on his tendency to look at western involvement in the Middle East and elsewhere as being responsible for worsening chaos in those areas, as well as being highly questionable in legal terms.