My Tell Me More conversations from 🇬🇧 on Spotify. Guests have included Tony Blair, @anneapplebaum, @KonstantinKisin & @francisjfoster, @Miss_Snuffy, @NigelBiggar among others. More to come. open.spotify.com/show/033DTu…

Junge Berliner, die sich nach links radikalisieren, weil die Mitte-Parteien es nicht schaffen, die Wohnungskrise zu lösen? Total verständlich. Andere Deutsche, die sich nach rechts radikalisieren, weil die Mitte-Partei nicht glaubwürdig Abschied nehmen von den Zeitgeistmoden der letzten 20 Jahre? Auch total verständlich. Was überhaupt nicht mehr verständlich ist: Das fehlende Bewusstsein bei CDU und SPD, was eigentlich gerade passiert (ich wiederhole mich: ein großes Realignment der Parteienlandschaft) und die noch immer fehlende Energie, die nötig wäre, um darauf zu reagieren. Wo, bloody hell, bleibt der Fighting Spirit!? Vielleicht mal ein Beispiel nehmen an dem, was Margaret Thatcher 1977 sagte. Zwei Jahre später war sie Premierministerin.

Seeing lots of surprised reactions to the absurd Nature editorial on Jason Arday. Frankly, I'm surprised people are surprised. Nature has been totally captured by wokeness for a while now. I've been trying to call attention to this for nearly a decade. There are no serious scholars left there in influential positions capable of rescuing it. The people in charge of Nature today are brazenly hostile to the foundational principles that made Nature a highly respected and trustworthy institution in the first place. Today, activists have hijacked it and are using the prestige associated with the Nature brand to push an ideological agenda. They don't care that they're quickly burning through the immense trust that was slowly and painstakingly built by generations of competent scholars and stewardship. They're willing to burn through it all in a decade for power. It's an absolute tragedy. Nature has gone all-in on decoloniality, which holds that academic rigor and scientific objectivity are forms of colonial oppression rooted in white supremacy. It seeks to elevate Indigenous "ways of knowing," which amount to tribal myths and forms of religious mysticism, as an equally valid system of producing knowledge. And they don't want this absurd notion to remain theoretical; they want to implement these principles in areas that deal with life and death—medicine and nursing. I know what I'm saying sounds absurd. People can't possibly believe that. Like, I must be exaggerating, right? I promise you that I'm not. If anything, I'm dramatically understating the problem. We are in the midst of a total academic crisis, and we need to stop acting surprised and start taking action to delegitimize these journals and root these fields out of our public and publicly-funded institutions. If we don't, it's only going to get worse.

In my 22 years at United Nations Watch, I have never witnessed a Secretary-General legitimize lies, propaganda, and antisemitism on this scale. António Guterres has appeased tyrants and terrorists. He has disgraced his office. He is the worst Secretary-General in U.N. history.

I thought this DIE ZEIT article about Islamist ideas at the University of Cambridge might also interest readers in the UK, so I’m posting an English translation below. From a human perspective, the case of Jason Arday was a tragedy, a modern Icarus saga: At the age of 37, he was appointed the youngest black Cambridge professor ever and celebrated by his faculty as one of “the best” sociologists of education of all time — all this despite extraordinary claims about his career, plagiarism, and research methods that failed to meet the usual standards of scholarship. After all this came to light in the summer of this year and the story of the supposed prodigy made headlines around the world, Jason Arday — according to the current state of knowledge, it must be assumed — took his own life in London in mid-August at the age of 41. Since then, many people have had to answer many questions about their share of the responsibility. The case points to deeper problems. Both in Cambridge and in Oxford, the other famous British elite university, an orthodoxy of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has spread, especially in the social sciences. Although it aims at greater justice, it simultaneously undermines the principle of selecting the best. In Cambridge in particular, however, at its Faculty of Education, another development has been added: a special missionary zeal on the part of its head and some of its members. Within this mission, decidedly anti-Western ideas, including Islamist tenets and are flourishing at the faculty. To begin with the head: According to Professor Hilary Cremin, under whose leadership Jason Arday received his chair, education has a crucial civilizational task. It is supposed to help correct the supposed wrong turns of modernity. The head of the faculty assumes that the “modernist project” has failed. Among the “worst excesses of modernity and Enlightenment thinking,” she counts “neoliberalism,” the financial markets, the “climate emergency,” a growing “collective trauma,” and inequality in society. Cremin writes all this in her programmatic book “Rewilding Education”. In it, Cremin presents a profound critique of culture. The volume was published this year by the respected academic publisher Routledge. Cremin proposes establishing other methods of creating knowledge alongside the existing principles of the Enlightenment, empiricism, and rationality. Schools and universities should rely more heavily on models of knowledge that integrate feeling and emotions: “Education for the soul must be based on self-transformation, equanimity, inner peace and harmony, universal oneness, and unconditional love.” Cremin is concerned not only with social justice but, at a deeper level, with “cognitive justice.” This could be advanced by “epistemologies of the Global South” breaking the dominance of Eurocentric thinking. Cremin repeatedly quotes poems she has written herself in the book. She says she wants to use them to “demonstrate the power of poetry.” This approach “resonates” with the methods of the Global South, she claims. As another method for opening up new possibilities of knowledge, Cremin describes expressive dance. Writing about a corresponding workshop in Cambridge, she says: “Circling around each another, moving in and away, connecting and disconnecting, understanding and misunderstanding each other’s motions (…) inhabiting together a place of ambiguity and vulnerability, we explored what resistance looks like within the space of the university might look like, and what it means to do rebellious research.” At the faculty, however, there are other projects intended to put the supposedly Western tradition of rationality in its place. They can justifiably be described as ranging from fundamentalist Islamic to Islamist. For example, doctoral student Usama Javed Mirza is conducting a project he calls “Islamic scientific critical counsciuous.” The Enlightenment, Mirza explains, ensured that science came to be regarded as secular and objective. But this norm, he says, is not part of the Islamic tradition. Rather, he claims, it was imposed on the Islamic world by European colonialism and is therefore “oppressive and problematic.” Above all, Mirza counts the separation of religion and science among these imposed ways of thinking: “There is not one thing called religion and and another thing called science in Islamic epistemology.” Thus, Mirza develops ideas about how Islamic traditions of thought could be incorporated into school lessons. If, for example, Freud’s psychology were the subject in class — an interpretation of the psyche that has nothing to do with a higher spirituality — students should challenge it collectively with the ummah. This would make students better Muslims. Mirza also envisages another possibility: If the subject in the seventh year of school were electrical circuits, students should reflect on “Where and how does Allah invites us in the Quran to reflect about electricity?” In science lessons, it could also be discussed that the Israeli army in Gaza is “systematically killing cardiologists.” “Bringing people who are being erased into the consciousness of our students is an act of reflexive action.” The work of Farah Ahmed, an Assistant Research Professor at the Faculty of Education in Cambridge, goes even further. According to her own account, Ahmed regards the British state school system as a source of “injustice” and a “pestilential calm of despair.” In an edited volume entitled "Education & Identity – The Dilemma of Muslims in the West" (2017), Ahmed describes Western education as a “threat to our beliefs and values.” Parents, she says, have a duty to protect their children from the “rubbish” and “Kufr concepts” (Kufr means rejection of faith) with which the Western education system indoctrinates them. Among these influences, Ahmed, includes feminism, gay rights, and premarital relationships. “Is it surprising then, when young Muslim women leave embark on pre-marital relationships? May Allah (swt) protect this Ummah from such degenerate practices.” The introductory chapter of the book states: “Islam is the deen al haq (religion of truth, JB), and by its nature, it renders all other beliefs false. As a result, the Kuffar have worked tirelessly in their quest to destroy the haq.“ According to her own account, Farah Ahmed founded two independent schools in London with other Muslim parents as early as 2002. Ahmed herself reports that some of these parentes were members of Hizb ut-Tahrir. This international Islamist group (“Party of Liberation”) was banned as a terrorist organization by the British government in 2024. For Ahmed, this proximity does not seem to have been a major problem. She mentions in passing that the Hizb-ut-Tahrir connections merely attracted a bit attention in the press for a short time. Ahmed reported all this in a lecture she gave in spring 2025 for the “Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies,” which is available on YouTube. This “Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies,” in turn, describes itself as an academic fellowship organisation “with a view to identifying the roots of modern society's systemic disorders and planning for the application of the knowledges and practices vital to the attainment of civic recovery and renewal.” It is a sentence that could just as easily have come from the book by the head of the faculty, Hilary Cremin. DIE ZEIT would have liked to discuss all this with Hilary Cremin, Farah Ahmed, or other members of the Faculty of Education, above all the question of whether centuries of Enlightenment are currently being rolled back in Cambridge and what role fundamentalist Muslim faculty members play in this. Unfortunately, the inquiries went unanswered.

Die Uni Cambridge hat noch ganz andere Probleme als einen Hochstapler. An der Erziehungswissenschaftlichen Fakultät gedeiht dezidiert antiwestliches Gedankengut, bis hin zu islamistischen Thesen. Der (erste) Text zum Film: zeit.de/politik/ausland/2026…

Rote Linien gegen Extremisten in der Linken, Brandmauer wegen Extremisten in der AfD — sehe ich das richtig? Für beides gibt es ja gute Argumente, aber ich begreife nicht, wie einen dieser Doppelstandard nicht anspringen kann. Gilt natürlich auch für die umgekehrte Anwendung.

Wie es sich als Jude in Kreuzberg anfühlt, den Wahlerfolg der in Teilen antisemitischen Linkspartei zu erleben zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2026-09…

I don‘t agree with the „extremist“ terminology and also don‘t believe that Angela Merkel had the foresight to really grasp what she was doing. However, the basic analysis is correct. Merkel was a major disruptor and her immigration, energy, and military policies harmed Germany. Unless the CDU truly recognizes this painful reality, it will never recover.

So‘n kleines bisschen manipulativ, nur den halben Post zu zitieren, um mir unterstellen zu können, ich sei „siegestrunken“, oder lieber MDR? mdr.de/altpapier/das-altpapi…

Ich fürchte, die Church of England ist nach den Universitäten und der Polizei die nächste Institution, von der sich viele Briten zu Recht fragen werden, wie sehr sie ergriffen ist vom ebenso unterkomplexen wie modischen Underdog-versus-Oppressor-Groupthink.

Die Erzbischöfin von Canterbury hat den Preis jetzt zurückgezogen, nachdem sie erfahren hat, dass der Imam den al-Qaida-Chef Osama bin Laden mit einem Ehrentitel ausgezeichnet hatte. Das sei erst jetzt „ans Licht“ gekommen. archbishopofcanterbury.org/n…

Appeasement ist schon nicht mehr das richtige Wort dafür.

Ein paar Zahlen, die man hier so aufschnappt: Vor zehn Jahren lag Großbritanniens Staatsverschuldung bei 1,5 Billionen Pfund. Heute sind es 3 Billionen Pfund. Die Zinszahlungen dafür betragen pro Jahr 100 Milliarden Pfund. Diese Kreditkosten sind der größte Haushaltsposten nach dem NHS und noch vor dem Verteidigungshaushalt (gut 60 Milliarden Pfund). Eine Million junger Briten (16-24 Jahre) sind weder in Jobs noch in Ausbildung. In Schottland sind rund 900.000 (16-64 Jahre) von 5,5 Millionen Einwohnern „ökonomisch inaktiv“ oder arbeitslos. Ich bin ja kein Volkswirt. Aber das klingt alles nicht gut.