Brendan O'Neill (journalist)

For other people of the same name, see Brendan O'Neill (disambiguation).

Brendan O'Neill is currently the editor of Spiked Online.

He began his career at Spiked's predecessor, Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which ceased publication after ITN won a libel action they brought against the magazine. O'Neill has contributed articles to publications in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia including The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian, BBC News Online, The Australian, the Christian Science Monitor, The American Conservative, Salon.com, and Rising East. He also blogs at Comment is free, part of the Guardian Unlimited site.

O'Neill has criticised the notion of tackling global warming by solely reducing carbon emissions, and instead advocates technological progress as a method of overcoming any side-effects of climate change. In January 2006, he co-founded the Manifesto Club, an organisation "with the aim of challenging cultural trends that restrain and stifle people’s aspirations and initiative." Broadly libertarian, he considers efforts to combat racism in football to be "a class war" driven by "elites’ utter incomprehension of the mass passions that get aired at football matches". Referring to high profile cases of racial abuse and alleged racial abuse, he argued that "these incidents and alleged incidents are not racism at all, in the true meaning of the word" due to the levels of passion involved, describing anti-racism efforts as "a pretty poisonous desire to police the...working classes".

His book From Bosnia to Beslan: How the West Spread al-Qaeda, published in 2010, blamed humanitarian interventions in countries such as Afghanistan and Bosnia for promoting terrorist groups and destabilising developing states.

Bibliography

• "After that by-election, what now for liberty?" Spiked Online (10 July 2008), retrieved 31 December 2008

External links

• Personal website