Introduction
If you decided to read the Wikipedia entry for Douglas Murray, you might well notice something odd. More than half of the page is given over to a discussion of his views, in he form of a rather clunky list of things he said and what other people have said about them. It begins with a description of his supposed connections to the far right, with no less than six footnotes drawn from fourteen sources packed into one short paragraph.
More is to follow. Paragraph after paragraph consists of ‘she said, he said’ discussion, largely about Islam and immigration, culminating in three paragraphs of criticism and two of rebuttal. Often the same old sources are used over and over again to hammer points home. For example, one article by Nafeez Ahmed is used to say that Murray has been linked to “far-right political ideologies” (footnote 11), that Murray is engaged in “far-right entryism” (footnote 54), and that his ideas and political views are linked “to the far-right” (footnote 97). A look at the Talk page for his entry reveals a bitter, multi-year edit war by rival editors.
What do they say?
Although the entry makes many claims about Murray, the key ones are included in the introductory paragraphs: that he is linked to the far-right, that he has promoted far-right conspiracy theories, and that he is Islamophobic. In order to do this, the editors draw on a variety of academic and journalistic sources. The key to the debate over his entry is that, if there is an academic or journalistic consensus, then it is true. Due to its crowd-sourced nature, Wikipedia relies on this sort of specialist consensus amongst its sources in order to try and ensure entries are factually based.
The first of these footnotes links to an article in Critical Sociology by Blake Stewart of York University (the joint seventeenth best university in Canada) to prove that Murray is “linked to far-right political ideologies”. Only the article doesn’t say that. Although it is critical of Murray, it only says that “similar themes” around limiting immigration and the dangers of mass immigration can be found in his work. That same article also ends with praise for Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly, Stewart also writes for a website called Socialist Project.
The next cited source is Arun Kundnani, who has previously been covered for his role in a report co-written by two researchers from the notorious group CAGE. Although his article is closed access the Wikipedia citation copies the relevant section. In it, Kundnani quotes Murray saying, “If you were ever going to have a grassroots response from non-Muslims to Islamism, that would be how you’d want it, surely” about the English Defence League. He adds that this shows that by “appropriating official discourse” Murray is able to “evade categorisation as a source of far-right violence”.
However, this quote is out of context. In the full remarks, Murray prefaces this with, “The English Defence League, when they started protesting had banners saying things like Sharia law discriminates against women, Sharia law is anti-gay. Well I'm good with both of those sentiments I'm sure most people in this room are”. Murray also concludes by adding, “But of course, we all know there are awkward things around this. There have been exposed links from the EDL with far-right organisations in individual cases, and maybe, others will know more about this, wider than that”.
In other words, far from providing uncritical support for the EDL, Murray was only praising their early support for women and homosexuals, what the left generally like to describe as intersectionality, before going on to criticise them for their far-right links.
Sociologists Julia Lux and John David Jordan, of Liverpool Hope University provide the next source. In it they accuse Murray of writing “passionately in support of British fascist Tommy Robinson” back in 2018. Unfortunately their article is also closed access but they appear to be referring to an article by Murray in National Review, in which he describes Robinson’s actions; “Some of this has been remarkably brave, some of it remarkably wrong…and some remarkably ill-advised”. He praises his efforts to ensure grooming gangs get the national attention they deserve whilst criticising him for some of the ways he has gone about this. Although supportive, this is critical support. Using the word “passionately” suggests an emotional judgement on the part of the authors.
A look at Dr Jordan’s social media activity confirms that he is far from being a neutral academic. In fact he admits he is a communist, for whom left-wing writer Paul Embry is a “crypto-fascist”, the phrase “liberal elite” is a “fascist trope”, and the “British state has always been, at heart, crypto-fascist”. An incredibly long list of things or people who he deems fascist can be found here. Aside from this he’s accused Murray of being “anti-Semitic” for referencing the Frankfurt School, claimed the Conservatives “incite actual violence” against teachers “non-stop” by talking about “‘Cultural Marxist’ conspiracy theories”, argued that Corbyn was “eminently sensible” not to accept that the Russian state was behind the Salisbury poisonings, and speculated wildly about Boris Johnson ordering the detention of Corbyn “in the name of the people”.
In contrast Joel Busher, of Coventry University only says that Murray is popular with EDL members, alongside, he claims, Andrew Gilligan. It’s hard to see how Wikipedia justifies this as proof of far-right links, as you can’t be responsible for your readership. Busher is a pro-migrant Europhile who attended the People’s Vote marches.
More controversial is Jon Bloomsfield, an Honoury Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham who works for an EU project on climate change, who claims Murray as part of the “white nationalist right” alongside Sir Roger Scruton. This is an outrageous claim, considering, for example, Sir Roger’s friendship with Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni. Bloomsfield has form here, having claimed that John Gray is a “nationalist philosopher” who uses “far right….language” in the “populist gutter”. His antipathy can perhaps be explained by his ardent support for Remain or history of supporting Labour. Despite his sensitivities, his recent book features an introduction by Salma Yaqoob, who stood for George Galloway’s Respect Party and was accused of running such a dirty campaign against the Labour MP Naz Shah that she considered suicide.
On the other side of the ocean is Alex Kotch of Sludge, a left-wing website investigating money in politics. In this case it centres on Murray giving a brief summary of one of his books for the American conservative video website PragerU, which Kotch calls “far-right”. Although Kotch subsequently claimed the videos are “white nationalist…propaganda”, in his article he quotes a researcher from the Anti-Defamation League who rejects that claim. Kotch himself is a left-winger who has claimed that Israel has an “apartheid system” and supports the BDS movement. As one of the most recent PragerU videos is an overview of the black conservative economist Thomas Sowell, to call it “far-right” is clearly an over-statement.
Two other journalists cited are Murtaza Hussain, of The Intercept, and Nafeez Ahmed, a prolific writer for sites such as Middle East Eye. The pair regularly talk to each other online, although Hussain auto-deletes his tweets. Hussain is linked to other critics of Murray, citing Kundnani in an article criticising Britain’s counter-radicalisation effort. Elsewhere he’s compared jihadists to George Orwell, arguing that despite their “deep flaws”, there is “something to learn” from them because of how they drew together people “across racial, linguistic, and geographic boundaries”. He’s also a strong critic of the USA, who has previously suggested that China would make a better superpower.
Although Hussain links Murray to “far-right political ideologies”, his article exposes the weakness of that claim. His title claims the far-right is obsessed with Murray’s book, although an author can’t be held responsible for their readers, and later on he is compared to “far-right American publications” for their mutual interest in immigrant crime statistics; but that’s a comparison rather than a link and a weak one at that; as any reasonable discussion of immigration must discuss the statistics, including crime.
Ahmed is a far more conspiratorial thinker, who challenges the official record on 9/11, claimed the US invaded Iraq for oil, alleges that MI5 is foiling Islamist plots “of its own hatching”, and described the wars in the Middle East since 9/11 as a “genocide” which killed 6 million Muslims. He also moonlights as an expert on energy and the environment, although his skill can perhaps be summed up by his 2014 prediction that the US shale boom was “over” (it has since nearly doubled). His article on Murray accuses him of “far-right entryism”, by which he means that Murray is far-right and entering Whitehall. Shortly before that accusation, he argues that “harassment” by the security services was partly to blame for the radicalisation of Jihadi John and that the security services deliberately leave known extremists the freedom to operate. His long and rambling op-ed illustrates the impossible standards he expects of the security services: that they should somehow respect civil liberties but also arrest people like Jihadi John before they’ve committed any crime (or else bear part of the blame for their attacks). This cannot be considered a credible source.
The next charge levelled against Murray is that he is “promoting far-right conspiracy theories”. The first source for this is Ed Pertwee, an LSE post-doc in Sociology, who also links to the work of Nafeez Ahmed. Pertwee isn’t shy about his political leanings, with his first tweet saying he’d tweet about “new forms of radical and emancipatory politics”. Elsewhere he linked to a communist site which predicted that coronavirus would make a revolution more likely, described a “revolutionary anti-fascist” blog as having “one of the best analyses” of the Capitol riot, and quoted a libcom article about Michael Gove owning some far-right books as saying it “show(s) the diminishing gap between the right wing of the Conservative Party and international fascist networks”. Indeed, his article mentioning Murray concludes that the threat of “Islamization” is being used to generate a “colossal international counterrevolutionary assault on the…New Left”.
The article itself mentions Murray only once and doesn’t accuse him of promoting conspiracies. Rather, he’s cited with other “conservative writers” as spreading the Eurabia narrative, whose originator Bat Ye’Or is accused in the article of being a “conspiracy theorist”. To conflate writers because they discuss similar themes is lazy and for Wikipedia to say it proves Murray is promoting conspiracies is even lazier.
Yet another sociologist is Ilgın Yörükoğlu, whose article accuses Murray of providing “emotional force to the Eurabia conspiracy”, although unfortunately due to the rest of his article being inaccessible it is impossible to know why. His arguments seems to be based on the work of Foucault, claiming that “Western modernity needs a “constant reminder of the threatening impure” whether it be illness or Islamic terrorism or immigration so that the “cautious citizen” will submit to “relations of domination”.
Similarly, Media and Communications Associate Professor Mattias Ekman doesn’t have his article publicly available. From the snippet available on Wikipedia though it is possible to see that he lists Murray as an “Islamophobe” alongside Niall Ferguson and the left-wing British columnist Nick Cohen. One of the sources for this assertion is Kundnani, who was mentioned earlier. Equally brief is William Allchorn, who calls Murray one of the “mainstream Islamophobes” but without providing any citation or proof. Then there is Stuart Chambers, who lists Murray as an “Islamophobe” because Murray said that to reduce terrorism in Britain it needed a “a bit less Islam”. Chambers considers this Islamophobic because the majority of Muslims reject violence; but the very piece by Murray he links to includes Murray also citing statists to show that the majority of Muslims reject violence. Murray is actually warning about the dangers of those who reject violence officially but still support Islamist goals. Amusingly, by 2020 Chambers was agreeing with Murray, at least when it comes to diversity in Hollywood.
The only one of the sources cited by Wikipedia who has a serious academic security background is Kumar Ramakrishna, a National Securities Study expert from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His article is cited to prove that Murray has been promoting far-right conspiracies. Instead, Ramakrishna calls him a “prominent conservative intellectual” who has “voiced deep concerns”. He does describe this as part of a “Great Replacement motif”, which has been “weaponised” by others. At no point does he argue that Murray is promoting conspiracies.
Comment
What these sources show is how it is possible to use Wikipedia to mislabel someone, in this case Douglas Murray. Although utilising academic sources is good practice, there is no guarantee that an academic source is actually correct (as the replication crisis has shown). Over and over again the sources quoted to accuse Murray turn out to be the work of people with strong political biases, or depend on assertions which are rarely backed up (and then often by reference to other academics, whose own work is flawed), or which deliberately conflate Murray’s arguments about immigration and Islam with Eurabia or the Great Replacement (neither of which are referenced in the index to Murray’s book), or which turn out not to be accusing Murray of the things he is being accused of.
These issues show the problem with Wikipedia, where a handful of hyper dedicated accounts can impose their views so long as they are able to game the rules and keep fighting in the Talk section. They’re aided in this by the left-wing leaning nature of academia, which means that there is a surplus of articles - many not very good - which attack Murray but none to defend his reputation. These can be laundered as impartial sources, despite their failings, to create a false consensus. For many people, if they are curious about something, they Google it and then read the Wikipedia. As such, it has tremendous political power. If misused, that makes it very dangerous.
Note: all references to Wikipedia were correct at the time of publication but, owing to it being editable, they may change over time.