20th October 2016
Holy See
I am back in London this week with the Holy See’s Monsignor Antoine Camilleri for the Foreign Office’s conference on how freedom of religion and belief can help counter violent extremism. The discussion has been persuasive. I was particularly struck by the following points. US Ambassador Saperstein argued that you cannot have stability without religious […]
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18th October 2016
Geneva, Switzerland
Violent extremism is of course nothing new, but today we are confronted by the rapid growth of a particular form of it which is linked by its perpetrators to the tenets of one of the world’s great religions, Islam. It is worth just pausing for a moment to consider that violent extremism is not new, […]
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31st March 2016
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
After recent days, we can now add Brussels, Lahore and Istanbul to the growing litany of places directly affected by extemist violence. This was committed apparently in the name of religion, against targets variously identified by the perpetrators as Christians, Israeli tourists, and ordinary “secular” citizens, going about their normal lives. The words “religious” and […]
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21st October 2015
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
The United Kingdom is built on values like democracy, respect and tolerance. These unite the nation, and help our society develop and thrive. They are supported by the overwhelming majority of people in our country. But these values have become challenged and threatened in recent years in an unprecedented way, by extremists seeking to spread […]
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14th August 2015
London, UK
One week ago today, a blogger called Niloy Neel was hacked to death in Bangladesh. He was the fourth blogger to be murdered there this year. I’ve been meaning to start my own blog for some time: last week’s events made me determined that I shouldn’t put it off any longer. Freedom of speech is […]
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29th July 2015
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
“How do you define an extremist?”. I once asked this question of a wise friend of mine, who was always critical of imprecise language used by journalists to describe people who held different views. “An extremist”, he said, “is someone incapable of seeing the good in the other. He must therefore dedicate himself to attacking […]
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