Verbal

Probably. But Corbyn continues his speciality line in grumpy open-goal scoring. He forgets - did he ever know or care? - that the roots of the Labour party are substantially in the Christian socialist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Outside of London - for Corbyn is as much a produce of the hermetic London elite as any of the 'Tory-lites' in his party - the free-chapel preachers (included among the 'ragged trousered philanthropists' of Robert Tressell's famous novel) in working class towns and cities were a critical in laying the foundations of popular support for Labour among working-class voters. Besides, the refusal to issue a Christmas message makes Corbyn the prototypical Sad Old Git - hopelessly confusing a festive holiday enjoyed by atheists and other religionists alike with some kind of ritual of fundamental religiosity. It is not the latter, and never has been. What an utter miserablist Corbyn is. Again.

I see Corbyn's bessie and comrade in Stop the War arms, Tariq Ali, has taken to insulting Kurds because of their support for action against ISIS. He's called them "stage Kurds" - witless stooges of the West, in other words. Here's an excellent response from the Kurds' regional representative in London, basically telling Ali to go **** himself. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2015/12/we-need-talk-about-kurdistan

European countries occupy five of the top ten destinations for the present-day British diaspora. Spain is second, followed by Ireland, France, Germany and Cyprus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_diaspora

Where do you have in mind? Uzbekistan?

I’m not sure what your question is implying, but it doesn’t seem that controversial to claim that Christian communities are being driven out of parts of the Middle East and Africa. I’ve seen one authoritative report that claims that Christianity will be extinct in five years in Iraq unless there’s a dramatic turn of events. 120,000 Christians were forced out of Mosul and the surrounding areas when ISIS took over, and 100,000 were driven out of northern Nigeria as a result of Boko Haram’s murderous campaigns. Then there are other religious groups, like the Yazidis, whose beliefs include a form of Christianity, who have been systematically murdered, tortured and raped by ISIS. And a Greek-orthodox archbishop in Aleppo said earlier this year that his community faced imminent extinction. In Pakistan, Christianity has always existed in the margins, for the simple reason that after Partition, the so-called ‘Untouchables’ adopted Christianity – so the religion has long been associated with the desperate poor. Now they are being targeted by Islamists with bombing campaigns and other forms of extreme harassment including the use of blasphemy laws - a kind of mob rule designed to hang anyone with differing religious views. The Queen making a statement about all this won't change anything, but it does recognise a real crisis.

You must be new to politics. A few things: One is don't buy the Corbynists' simplistic conspiracy theory that the party is divided between them and "Blairites". Labour is a much more complex party than that. For Corbyn's crowd, Blairites = Tory-lites and should therefore be deselected from the party. But Corbynists seem unable to understand that they are fighting with woeful inadequacy to protect the very measures that the Tory-lites introduced. Still, the Corbynists have a good model - Corbyn achieved the square root of **** all in over three decades, while shocking Blairites like Gordon Brown had tax credits and Harman the 2010 Equality Act to disgrace their names. The "bitter" tag is surely ironic given the relentless conspiracy-theorising whining from Corbynists about how the mainstream media are all out to get them. They actually appear to believe that all others aside from Corbyn get a free ride - ignoring the vast acreage of articles critical of Cameron, Grayling, Farage, Gove, Osborne, etc, etc. Who exactly "trounced" the non-Corbynist wings of the party is still to be determined. It looks likely that regardless of the shiny-faced Utopians, the real winners, as in the eighties, will be the anti-parliamentary left. If so, the real losers will in all likelihood be the very people Labour have always sought to protect.

I'll just lob this in here. http://theconversation.com/weighing-up-the-evidence-for-the-historical-jesus-35319 The conventional wisdom is that the mythical Jesus was spun in succeeding decades and centuries from an historical Jesus - a leader of a rebellious but decidedly unCorbynist sect (a Jesus who wouldn't cosy up to Putin, Stalin and Mao but genuinely sided with those Israelites on benefits). Some researchers have proposed the exact opposite - that the claim that there was an historical Jesus has been spun from myth. Either way, the contemporaneous evidence for an historical Jesus is all but non-existent. A slightly different case is made by many historians (including Tom Holland) for Mohammad - that there's some evidence that he was an historical figure, but that he did his good and otherwise works much closer to Jerusalem. There is no credible historical evidence, so this argument goes, that he ever went near Mecca or Medina.

Excellent article by Dan Hodges, comparing Corbyn with Enoch Powell: Powell was always at pains to paint himself as someone who did not personally entertain prejudice. He was merely an interlocutor between the body politic and those that did. He did not endorse racism. But he thought it important to engage with those who held such views, to understand them, and provide an outlet for their opinions. Jeremy Corbyn is the same. Terrorists. Anti-semites. Isil apologists. He doesn’t share their views. But he offers himself as a conduit for them. So we can better understand them. Or so he says. And then off he goes, partying with those who chide us not to compare Isil with the Nazis, just as Isil are slipping lethal injections into the arms of disabled children. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12051510/Jeremy-Corbyn-has-become-the-Lefts-Enoch-Powell.html

LA, huh? Probably just a misheard phone call. Not Jihadists - Jediists.

There is a clear distinction between apologising and condemning. I see nothing wrong and a lot right in condemning. Some of my family are Muslim. They are beyond disgusted by IS, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, etc., and are more than happy to say so. They is not diminished by that, nor do they feel that they are. Can you give me a single example of anyone being asked to apologise for - as distinct from condemn - the attacks? And I'm not sure why Katie Hopkins needs to come into this. She's an irrelevance, at the very best.

But this is almost always not the case SOG. Muslims do object frequently that they are being asked to apologise for atrocities. But they're generally not being asked to do that - they are making a mistake in believing they are being asked to apologise. They are being asked to condemn the attacks. Apologising and condemning are two completely different things. Apologising means accepting some personal responsibility for attacks - and that would obviously be objectionable. Condemning means rejecting the perpetrators' claim that the attacks are carried out in the name of the beliefs that other co-religionists hold dear. I don't see any problem in condemning. I would do the same if someone carried out an atrocity in the name of beliefs I shared. And I wouldn't need urging to do it. I'd want to separate myself clearly from such outrages. Also, do not underestimate the number of Muslims who do very vocally, and without prompting, condemn atrocities by ISIS and their imitators. There are plenty of sour mashes out there who clasp their ears when such condemnations are issued, and imagine, with viciously conspiratorial mindsets, that all Muslims are the enemies within.

Not that this will be a surprise, but some interesting details on the company Corbyn keeps with his “fraternal” welcome at the Stop the War coalition dinner: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12047827/The-veteran-Trotskyite-and-the-public-schoolboy-united-behind-Jeremy-Corbyn.html John Rees, “veteran Trotskyist” and participant in the CAGE press conference in which Jihadi John was praised as “beautiful”. He also supported the Russian annexation of Crimea. Andrew Murray, Communist Party member and the current chair of STW, who oversaw the article gloating about Paris “reaping the whirlwind” of the ISIS attack. Kamal Majid, a patron of STW and founder member of the Stalin Society, devoted to “defending Stalin and his work.” Issa Chaer, who runs the “Syrian Social Club” and who appears on Assad-friendly TV stations to praise the murderous dictator. Kate Hudson, who was recently quoted as saying “The collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for humanity.” Before any Corbynists on here sneer at the Telegraph link, it’s worth remembering that Andrew Gilligan exposed the “dodgy dossier”.

I don't get this silly whataboutery. No one is suggesting that Corbyn should sit down with arms dealers. But by this argument Corbyn apologists (you've not the only one by any means) try to deflect rather than address the criticism. To be clear: "going to war with Israel" is wildly inappropriate language for a supposedly anti-war movement. Interesting, isn't it, that Corbyn's close mate in Stop the War, Tariq Ali, declares by contrast that the coalition "does NOT [his emphasis] take positions on the demerits or otherwise of the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad." So those responsible for a vast body count that far outweighs anything Israel has managed to achieve since the 1940s are not worthy of any critical comment whatsoever. Nothing. But we in the west should "go to war with Israel". I repeat: any responsible anti-war organisation would listen to the voices of Syrian citizens. What they have said time and again is that Assad is the cause and ISIS the symptom of the terrifying troubles heaped on their heads - and what they want, at a minimum are no-fly zones that take Assad's Russian-supplied helicopters out of the air. The chemical attacks and barrel bombs have been targeted exclusively at civilians. Yet when civilians try to express this view to Stop the War, they are thrown out of meetings and have the police called on them. Stop the War is a deeply unpleasant, Trotskyist-inflitrated nest of vipers with some very nasty views - not least a complete and seemingly guilt-free willingness to sacrifice thousands of civilian lives in order to hide behind the fig-leaf of "taking no position" on Assad. Corbyn has until very recently been the Chair of that organisation. He demonstrates by his continuing association and unquestioning support (unlike the admirable Caroline Lucas) that he is a truly sickening individual.

Jeremy Christ and the Corbynettes does have a certain 60s beat-combo appeal - although most of them at that time had Chuck Berry, Elvis and Muddy Waters as heroes, not Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and Hoxha. I've just seen this, which is The Guardian's less than scientific canvas of views about Corbyn, for or against. I'm torn. Do I support the Labour party-hating, terrorist-loving, criminal-apologising black hole of a leader...or not? It's a tough one. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/09/how-do-you-rate-jeremy-corbyns-performance-as-labour-leader-so-far?CMP=share_btn_fb

And so it goes on. Today's speciality: going to the Christmas party of a supposedly anti-war pressure group, the heavily Trotskyist-compromised Stop the West Coalition, which ran a call to arms [sic] in 2014 with the headline: "Time to go to war with Israel as the only path to peace in the middle East". This piece was published while Corbyn actually led the organisation. It has, of course, been shamefacedly taken down but can be found here, along with two other quietly buried gems: http://www.buzzfeed.com/sirajdatoo/stop-the-war-take-down-a-third-article-from-its-website?utm_term=.kgqwNDOvM#.jmNza073l

I read that story and thought the Telegraph had to be making it up. But no - it's actually worse! Proceeds from the fraud were used to fund terrorism in Syria. Jeremy Christ on a bike!! http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/10/terror-suspect-scammers-elderly-savings-fraud-syria

Jeremy Christ, that's appalling. After jokingly quoting the "difficult" socialist leader Enver Hoxha yesterday, he's playing a blinder.

Do they still teach that old **** at IDS? They should seriously update their reading lists. Oh, and vis-a-vis Paris, Corbyn is still a cretin whose acolytes have all the moral superiority of a teenager who's just discovered vegetarianism.

I hate to introduce shades of grey into a black-and-white argument, but here goes. Any question asked publicly by PEW or anyone else in Pakistan will elicit a public answer. Privately, things are very different. Homosexuality is not punishable by death in Pakistan – but it is if you are ‘convicted’ of it in ‘shura’ courts in some more extreme areas. Yet amongst the Taliban homosexuality is rife. You wouldn’t think there’d be much in the way of an LGBT movement in Pakistan. In fact, it’s been there in one form since the Mughals. Hijras – transgender men-to-women – are despised publicly, but because they are also thought to be bringers of good luck are regularly invited to Pakistani weddings. Hijras have this status partly because they were essential items at the Mughal court, and have remained deeply ingrained in the culture. In the hijra tradition, the most famous TV chat show host a few years ago was an ostentatiously gay man dressed as a woman. Islam in its modern virulent Wahhabi form is sexually repressive, including in its alien presence in Pakistan. Yet the country’s most famous living painter is the son of a prostitute, who paints prostitutes for a living, who exhibits these paintings in a building that overlooks and faces onto one of the world’s most important Islamic sites, the Badshahi mosque in Lahore. You can view his paintings and then go upstairs and sit and have food on his veranda with the most spectacular view of the mosque. His house is in the city’s red light district, which is now in the process of being preserved. I think it’s even been designated a world heritage site. In that red light district is a rather grand and very beautiful house which is a kind of Playboy mansion. During the festival of Basant (kite-flying, ostensibly), the house parties were something to behold, with its ‘harem rooms’ – it felt like the last days of the Roman Empire. Let’s leave it at that. I remember asking a Karachi-ite what people did of an evening and he said: we’re in the midst of a population explosion – what do you think? Intoxication of any kind of prohibited, but in the tribal areas alcohol runs like water. In fact, that’s what it’s called – Khyber water. It’s purest, neatest hooch and will knock you out. Drug-taking is also publicly taboo. Yet in Karachi there is an entire street (by the main bus station if you’re curious) in which every single of about thirty shops sells various kinds of hasheesh. People I knew there had a taste for it so refined that they were like the most committed wine connoisseurs. When I once asked for fake bundles of hash as a film prop they brought in the real stuff. Outwardly, all Pakistanis dress more or less alike in shalwas, etc. But go into the walled-off fashion college in Lahore and you’ll see the most daring stuff being designed and cat-walked. If you go to see Pakistan’s most famous Sufi musicians, including those who perform around mosques, you’ll be joining in a drugged-up, hippy-ish audience – and the drugs are very much part of the experience. Always have been. This is because Sufism has always been the most popular form of Islam in the population centre of Pakistan (basically the Indus Valley), and spiritualism is accessed by way of some variant of cannabis. It’s also why Kabul was the terminus of the hippy trail up until the 1970s – you wouldn’t know or even guess today that Afghanistan was also the centre of a Sufi tune in/drop out religion that dominated a people’s lives. Go to a place like Sehwan Sharif in Sindh province, and you’ll be in a headlong party every single night. Sehwan Sharif is so holy that Hindus travel to it from India, with all the risks that entails. Or go to the wondrous Sufi shrines in outwardly super-conservative Multan – and you’ll notice that the shrines themselves dominate the skyline, and have tiny mosques attached – a very physical representation of priorities. This isn’t the half of it – there’s lots I can’t say because it might put people at risk. But it does illustrate the difficulty of cut-and-dried categorisation. So Pakistanis in Pakistan aren’t so much different to us – they just party harder. And answer PEW questions with pre-approved censoriousness. Things are not always as they seem.

Sorry, but this is stupid - a kind of white liberal nothingness. All sacred texts are loaded with ambiguity and contradiction by definition - they wouldn't be sacred otherwise. The problem isn't the beliefs or tenets as found in the books of a particular religion. It's that gay men are being slung from high buildings, Yazidi women raped, non-Sunni Muslims, and others, beheaded, and 'sorcerers" crucified - all in the name of a particular religion. That religion is Islam - there's no getting way from it. And there's also no reason to think that the brutality is carried out in anything but absolute belief in that religion. There are far, far more adherents of the religion who do none of these things, lead peaceful, graceful lives - and who believe the exact opposite of IS. Many of these adherents would be the first victims of IS's cruelty. That doesn't mean there's not a problem with the religion itself - because a religion exists only insofar as it is expressed by the people who claim to believe in it. And some of those people - albeit a quite small minority - are murderers and torturers. It's why the demand for a reformation from within is rising...

There is practically zero cultural tradition of the niqab or burkha in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Wearing shawls among Christian women is decidedly NOT the same thing - that, like the religion itself, is a Western import. In both countries (as in Indonesia), the phenomenal spread of this form of dress has directly accompanied the spread of Saudi-financed Wahhabi ideology in both countries. The only common instances of the face-veiling of women in Mughal India were of high-born women in the ruling courts. So unfortunately it's down to religion, not culture. What is also unusual about both Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in the UK is how un-diverse they are. 75% of all British-Pakistanis are from families from the environs of the Kashmiri city of Mirpur (look up the history of the Mangla Dam to find out why). 97% of all British-Bangladeshis are from families from the city of Sylhet. Both communities here are almost entirely Sunni Muslim. Pakistan and Bangladesh have a much more diverse religious and ethnic make-up. (I've met African-Pakistanis in Sindh and blue-eyed, blonde-haired Pakistanis in Balochistan, as well as Christians, Jews (none indigenous, sadly) and Hindus, and several varieties of Shia Muslim.) Lots of consequences flow from these diaspora demographics, but one of them certainly is that the deep religious conservatism of the cities of origin has in some instances been magnified in the diaspora. (This is partly because of the difficulty of arranging marriages among a smaller pool, and the diverging functions of arranged marriage between home country and here.) That's the real difference between the two communities here and people from their respective cities of origin. HOWEVER, only our neo-Nazi friend would deny that very many second and third-generation Mirpuris and Sylhetis have integrated and become successful here - and many are role models, even in professions (like fashion or acting) that wouldn't exactly be high on the list of their traditional forebears. You won't find many niqabs, or advocates for Wahhabism, among this secularised lot... As the generations unfold, this is the future - they are the clear majority even now, over the few benighted idiots tempted by the IS death cult.

The "Islamification of the UK/Europe" is the paranoid fantasy of every neo-Nazi ****wit. I "don't want to see it" because it isn't happening. Shari'a courts in particular are laughed at or ignored by the majority of Muslims - they're certainly not destinations of choice for any that I know. But that won't get through your diseased defences. There are fewer than three million Muslims in this country therefore there are, in your bizarro world, three million enemies.

It can't happen fast enough, Shari'a Mash. What a wonderland you see through your neo-Nazi spectacles. And you're in London too - how do you even breathe the air shared with all those black and brown people?

I'll take that as your admission that you are a neo-Nazi sympathiser. One more question: are you active in these neo-Nazi groups?

Britain 2015 right here. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/05/far-right-muslim-cultural-civil-war Friends of yours?