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A quarter of a century since the planes hit the Twin Towers. A quarter of a century of wars, terror attacks, migration, integration, counter-terrorism, culture wars, and increasingly fraught arguments over religion and identity.

And yet, 25 years later, one question remains stubbornly unresolved:

Is Islam compatible with the West?

For some, the answer is obviously yes. Millions of Muslims live peacefully across Britain, Europe, and America, participating in and contributing to Western societies, including those who fight in the IDF in Israel.

For others, the answer is far more complicated. Profound tensions between certain interpretations of Islam and Western traditions of free speech, secular government, religious pluralism, women’s rights, and individual liberty.

Perhaps the problem is the question itself. What do we mean by “Islam”? What do we mean by “the West”? And what exactly does “compatible” require?

These are questions too important to be reduced to slogans, accusations, or 30-second clips on social media.

So this Friday, for the first ever live edition of The Winston Marshall Show, we’re going to debate them properly.

At London’s Emmanuel Centre, I’ll be joined by Maajid Nawaz and Raymond Ibrahim, two formidable thinkers who approach this subject from sharply different perspectives. We’ll discuss Islam, integration, history, liberalism, extremism, and what the future holds for Western societies.

The point is to have the debate; to get closer to answering the question.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, there can be few better moments to ask one of the defining questions of our age.

Is Islam compatible with the West?

Come and decide for yourself.

This Friday, 11th September 2026, at Emmanuel Centre, London

For you loyal substackers, get 20% using code WINSTON

Get your tickets here: https://winstonmarshall.eventbrite.co.uk/

See you there,

WM

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“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!” She quipped, with her typical self-deprecating charm. And just one of the hundreds of her zingers now resurfacing on social media. The Queen of the South had a tongue so sharp she could disarm any of her subjects. If she had decided to pursue only comedy, I’m sure we’d have known her name. “Nobody notices I’ve got a great ass too!”

Instead she chose music.

Or maybe music chose her. She was just five years old when she composed “Little Tiny Tasseltop” with her mother Avie, about a corncob doll. Dolly was the fourth of twelve kids raised by sharecropper and construction worker Robert Lee Parton and his wife and homemaker Avie Lee Caroline Owens.

Her parents had married young, aged 17 and 16 in 1939, and raised twelve children in poverty, first in a one-room cabin, later a small farm in Locust Ridge in the Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee.

“We were very proud people, people with a lot of class. It’s country class, but it was a great deal of class. Most of my people were not that educated. But they are very, very intelligent. Good common sense. Horse-sense, we called it.”

In 1959 she recorded and released her first single “Puppy Love”. Written with her uncle Bill Owens when she was only 11. Her grandma Rena Owens accompanied little Dolly on the 30-hour bus trip to Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana, just to record it. Even before she heard it back on the radio, she’d had the music bug.

And so the sweet soprano of the Smoky Mountains began her dazzling music career. 49 studio albums released and over 100 million sold worldwide. She scored 25 No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart – a record for a female artist. Her songs were covered by Whitney Houston, The White Stripes, Olivia Newton-John, Beyoncé and her goddaughter and distant cousin Miley Cyrus, to name but a few.

When she came to Glastonbury in 2014, Britain’s music Mecca, she may as well have been the headline act. Tens of thousands swarmed the Pyramid Stage to catch a glimpse of Her American Majesty. A record crowd and the talk of the weekend, with millions more around the country tuning in on the BBC. She was as beloved in my country as in her own.

Dolly was the American dream in a plastic cup. And don’t for a second mistake that as any sort of slight on her style. She had a splendour and sumptuousness only post-war America could conjure. I don’t imagine it’s easy to make ostentatious cosmetics look elegant. And she did so with ease. Always worn with her signature self-deprecating charm: “If I’d’ve been born a man, I’d’ve been a drag queen.”

But her talents did not, of course, end there. JK Rowling eulogised her passing:
“Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was the best contribution to child literacy ever made by a celebrity.”

The Imagination Library, launched by Dolly in 1995, mails a free age-appropriate book monthly to children from birth to age five. Inspired by her father, who was illiterate, she began by mailing free books each month to kids in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee. Over 300 million books have since been distributed globally. The Dollywood Foundation have confirmed that the programme will keep going, even after Dolly’s passing.

Even King Charles and Queen Camilla have paid tribute to the American Queen. They had a Household Division band perform Dolly’s classic ‘9 to 5’ outside Buckingham Palace this morning and posted their condolences, “Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you.”

And here we see that Dolly was a hero for all people. From the impoverished children of the American South to the Royal households of the Old World. For southern conservatives she personified grace and wit, kindness and community. For northern liberals she had glamour, openness and style. So talented a singer one forgets that if she was judged just as a songwriter, comic or indeed philanthropist she would be deemed world-class.

Americans don’t like monarchs, but for her they made an exception. A woman of the people. The essence of the South. She was a sort of divine contradiction. A prima donna with humility. A self-effacing diva. Winsome and regal. Never has so much plastic looked so wholesome.

“First thing you do when you get out of bed in the morning?” She was once asked in a television interview.

“I usually get up, put on my clothes and go home”

Rest in Peace, Dolly Parton. You were a treasure to us all.

WM

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The black and yellow barricades, officially “hostile vehicle barriers”, have become the trademark of Khan’s rule. Some are not so aesthetically glaring. Driving through the West End yesterday (in a vehicle I was assured was not hostile) I noticed the more subtle variety: adorned with shrubbery, weaving between the theatres and Shaftesbury Avenue, interstices dotted with metal bollards. Boris had his bikes. Peel had his Bobbies. Sadiq has his barriers.

It is of course neither “diversity” nor “hostile vehicles” that Sadiq’s walls are protecting us from. It’s radical Muslims. After the July 2016 Nice attack, when Tunisian immigrant Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne cargo truck through the Promenade des Anglais and killed 86 innocents, in Britain a public-facing push for protective barriers was launched by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI). And in 2017, after Islamist attacks in Westminster, London Bridge and Borough Market, temporary and permanent Hostile Vehicle Measures (HVMs) were rapidly installed at high-footfall locations by the Home Office, Metropolitan Police and the Mayor of London’s office.

But it’s not just London. From Cambridge city centre down to the Brighton boardwalk, from Southampton up to the seaside town of Ayr on the west coast of Scotland, barriers are blooming like daffodils in spring.

It is the same story across Western Europe after vehicle-ramming Islamist attacks in Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona, Munich, Berlin and Modena. From Christmas markets to Gay Pride, such attacks have become a mainstay of European life.

How much exactly we are coughing up on our national wall-building frenzy is not clear. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park paid out £4.57 million in 2022 for their barriers. Birmingham City Council had a tender for HVM works valued at £2.9 million. York city centre footstreets scheme has cost up to £3.4 million. Cardiff spent £1 million on multiculturalism bollards. The National Barrier Asset (NBA), a collection of temporary vehicle security barriers and fencing managed by the counter-terrorism police National Vehicle Threat Mitigation Unit (NVTMU), costs £35 million for four years of storage, maintenance and deployment.

Suffice to say it is not cheap.

I for one am not against walls. My home has walls on four sides, which I think more practical than barriers within my home as a security measure against those who might have entered a wall-less home uninvited.

Nor am I against walls around our country, even though it might be a tad trickier for us as an island nation. But that technical issue certainly didn’t stop the Spanish authorities using floating barriers around Ceuta last month, after 70,000 Moroccans casually trooped around their land barriers in a short 48-hour window. Floating walls are very much possible – as I have long suggested.

There are other parts of the world where walls have become a mainstay: Israel, Gaza and the West Bank come to mind. Or indeed Northern Ireland. In all these places, of course, they don’t use euphemism. The walls are explicitly to keep out terrorists. Sadiq’s walls are an implicit admission that the terrorists are already in our home. And that he’d rather put up walls between us British than have those anti-British, uh-hum… vehicles… permanently banished from our little island.

Progressivism has many paradoxes. Its insistence on tearing down walls around countries offset by the building of walls within countries is perhaps the most absurd. Britain has morphed from a high-trust, culturally coherent society without walls to a low-trust diversity-dystopia littered with barricades. Much of the same can be said of our neighbours in Western Europe.

This is a new normal I do not accept. Nor should you.

WM

Is Islam Compatible With The West?

On 11 September at the Emmanuel Centre in London journalist and author Maajid Nawaz and historian Raymond Ibrahim will be coming together to debate the most important question of the age - and you can be a part of the action!

THE WINSTON MARSHALL SHOW LIVE!

Get your tickets now before they sell out: https://winstonmarshall.eventbrite.co.uk

What I am reading…

12,000 arrests are made every year in Britain for social media posts. Bernie Spofforth was one such case. At the height of the Southport murders in 2024 one post on X cost her a night in a police cell. Bernie is now bravely telling her story, and I was pleased to host her on The Winston Marshall Show this week. Her interview will be published soon but in the meantime do get a copy of her book ‘A WAR TO WIN BACK YOUR WORLD: BECAUSE SILENCE FEELS LIKE DYING’ which I’ve been reading this week.

WM

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“I was quite mean about you,” his head arched down bashfully, “I’m sorry.”

I laughed it off and put my arm around his shoulder. I knew exactly what he was referring to. An album review from years ago…

I remembered his Spectator piece well, not just because it was by far the funniest review we’d ever received, but because I’d taken it as an honour to have been the subject of a Rod Liddle piece.

Now reconciled, Rod then took the rostrum at the Social Democrat Party convention that had brought us together. It was October 2023, and outside our building in Westminster, swarms of anti-Israel protesters bayed. It was the 14th and Israel had not yet responded to the October 7th pogrom of one week ago. But that didn’t stop hordes of keffiyeh-clad savages from coming together in central London to exhibit their hate for the massacred Jews.

“There is simply no precedent for this depravity” Rod rumbled. When you’re engulfed by ghouls, as we were, courage is as welcome as water in the desert. “We stand with Israel” was Rod’s resolute message.

That afternoon I saw the full range and versatility of the man. Humility, wit and, most importantly, moral courage. And crucially, knowing when to bow each string to stir the listener.

He was one of the great wordsmiths in British public life. He showed fortitude well ahead of the crowd. And he was a joy to read. Even if it was a damning attack on your own work.

Rod’s silhouette will loom large amongst us for many years to come.

My deepest condolences to his family.

RIP Rod

WM

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Six years on, they have resurfaced. “25 celebrities sing “Imagine” in isolation, creating a moving montage” is doing the rounds this week, as former-NIAID director Anthony Fauci faces a Senate grilling. Of course it was not just the self-made videos that were so enraging. Late night shows, mainstream news and infinite social media posts parroted the same lines from the CDC and the World Health Organisation.

But this was not a spontaneous movement.

Back then, I was behind the curtain. I saw how it unfolded. I can tell you – it was not organic. Some of it was centrally coordinated by the WHO themselves. From the very start a deliberate, high-profile campaign of positive publicity intended to win favour was under way.

The sentence hangs bold and centred in the middle of the WHO letter I received along with my band Mumford & Sons in March, 2020. The world was scrambling to make sense of the enveloping plague. And our overlords were on the front foot.

“In these unprecedented times the music industry is pulling together to instigate a global initiative with the primary aim of raising awareness and funds for The World Health Organisation (WHO) COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.”

Hang on a second, I thought. Wasn’t the WHO responsible for preventing the pandemic? And even if it is not their fault, I reasoned at that early stage, shouldn’t there at least be an investigation before we start whitewashing their name? Or indeed giving them more money? Their request for us to perform as part of their “QUARANTUNES” home concert series had the pong of reputation laundering.

“There’s a big one off gig being announced tomorrow for WHO by global citizen (lady gaga has done most of the booking) [sic]” the accompanying email read.

Wait, we have to make a decision right now, on the spot? Was I really alone in thinking something else was going on here?

In this email exchange with a publicist (who I won’t name) representing the WHO, I was told Lady Gaga’s gig would be streamed as “a one off on April 18th and in a windowed broadcast in various places starting in the USA on TV and then Bbc day after…[sic]”. And it gets creepier… “WHO wanted a sustained approach to messaging which is where the idea for a series came in.”

Reading it back now, the behaviour of the WHO is less surprising than that of so many artists who went along with it without hesitation. “A sustained approach to messaging…”. Knowing what we do today about the lab-leak cover-up, the lies about social distancing, masks, quarantining, vaccines and much else, these words are deeply sinister. But even then it should have faced more resistance.

We were told the videos were to be stripped back but include “key WHO messaging on what people should be doing right now”. They might as well have said explicitly that this was WHO propaganda, and I bet artists would have signed up just as willingly.

It brought me no pleasure to push back, alone. Such requests are deliberately framed so that to oppose them puts you on the back foot. You don’t want to support people suffering in the pandemic? I faced similar issues when BLM came up – clever wordplay means that to oppose an explicitly Marxist anti-Western organisation is framed as you being against black lives. And again with the anti-Israel BDS activists as I described in the Jewish Chronicle.

The WHO and Global Citizen initiative “One World: Together At Home” virtual benefit concert raised $55.1 million for the WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. According to the WHO website, that money was used, amongst other things, for “combating COVID-19 misinformation.”

Take that in - the WHO created a propaganda machine of pop stars to raise money from ordinary people to fund a censorship program to be used on ordinary people. Well, presumably not the “misinformation” they themselves were spreading.

Now let’s take for the sake of argument that a lot of the money was used for good. And I suspect some good was done with the money. Such activity did not have to be done through the WHO. There were countless charities and organisations pulling together at that time.

I’m proud to say I stood my ground. I did not participate in the concert, and I feel vindicated by time. It also seems clearer that the behaviour of the WHO was not as benign as so many took it to be. But it is worth considering why so many artists went along with the folly.

I imagine many of them did in fact have good intentions. They may not have considered where they might have been misled or indeed were misleading others. But it is also the case that many have thought carefully about their support for “the experts”, the institutions, the blue-stack progressive media. And they wholeheartedly supported it.

What is less forgivable is the shame they heap on dissenters like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Nicki Minaj. Nor the censorial attitude to their fellow artists who bucked the trend – you will recall Neil Young’s crusade against Joe Rogan. Nor the blue-tick peer pressure to follow the crowd.

Today my feelings about the pandemic are an uneasy combination of wishing to forget and a tremendous sense of injustice. Who has been held to account? The WHO? The CCP? Those at the Wuhan Lab? … No one? Worse still, former President Biden actually pre-emptively pardoned Anthony Fauci in January, 2025. A pardon backdated to 2014 when Fauci first funded the Wuhan Lab through EcoHealth Alliance.

Fauci’s long-overdue Senate hearing by Sen. Rand Paul on COVID origins, gain-of-function funding and pandemic guidance saw him plead the Fifth Amendment one hundred and eleven times. In one sitting.

Even better, Paul has now released Fauci’s 1,100-page pandemic diaries (late 2019–2022), recovered by RFK Jr.’s HHS team from government servers after an eight-month search.

It appeared “America’s Doctor” Fauci was quite enjoying the attention back in 2020 – “It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.” And countless puff pieces like this in The New Yorker. I wonder if he is enjoying the limelight this week.

As for the artists who supported the regime, if any of them have, on reflection, come round, I suspect it would be easier for them just to ignore that it ever happened. And the WHO’s coordinated charm offensive – don’t let them memory-hole it.

WM

What I’m Reading Today

Some subscribers have requested I share what I'm reading, so I'm going to start doing just that! This week I'm coming to the end of Winston Churchill’s ‘A History Of The English Speaking Peoples: Volume 1 - The Birth of Britain’. Quite apart from just how staggering the great man in leading our country from Nazi peril, that he was such a prolific writer is often forgotten. And I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read pro-English history without all the put-downs and self-flagellation of modern historians. I wonder how many MPs today even have a cursory knowledge of our proud British history.

WM.

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