There’s something about Mary Beard I don’t like. Sure I respect her learning and her professional abilities as a broadcaster, but I find her sometimes naive middle class left wingery annoying. I found her so annoying in fact that after I’d seen one too many of her articles in the Telegraph I decided that I would no longer take the Telegraph for a while.

Julie Burchill has done a brilliant take down of Dame Mary Beard over at Spiked and it’s gloriously skewering. Ms Burchill takes issue, rightly in my view, with Dame Mary’s rather naive view of Islam and because of that Ms Burchill has decided to classify Dame Mary as one of those foolish ‘feminists for Islam’ or as they otherwise might be called ‘Chickens for KFC’. Ms Burchill also took aim at Dame Mary’s infamous and grossly outrageous statement shortly after 9/11 that the Americans ‘had it coming’.

Ms Burchill said:

Feminists for Islam are perhaps even odder, like those weird women who write love letters to serial killers. It’s a parody of a ghastly, abusive romantic relationship – suicidal empathy turned ideology, with a soupçon of exceptionalism: ‘Oh, he’d never hurt me!’ But very few of these strange beasts get to write their love letters over several thousand words in the London Review of Books, where in October 2001, the classics professor turned TV pundit, Dame Mary Beard, wrote of the dreadful events of 9/11 that the US ‘had it coming’. 

Ms Burchill is correct there. The deluded ‘feminists for Islam’ lot have been noticeable by their absence during protests against the Islamist regime in Iran but all too ready to protest in favour of that grossly misogynistic regime.

In this piece Ms Burchill, in my view correctly, doesn’t make any attempt to turn off or even turn down her vitriol when it comes to Dame Mary. Ms Burchill criticised strongly Dame Mary for her willingness to support all manner of weird and not so wonderful causes including the delusion that women can have penises and that it is not a problem when Islamic communities displace Christian ones and take over Christian churches and convert them into mosques. Ms Burchill mocked Dame Mary’s so-called ‘national treasure’ status among the great and the good and ‘referred to Dame Mary as one of the ‘cuddly faces of the enemy within’.

Ms Burchill has done a stupendous job of going after Dame Mary and those like her. This is a fantastic piece and it is well worth anyone’s time reading it. Ms Burchill’s original article can be found via the link below.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/07/mary-beard-a-feminist-for-islam/