Verbal

I realise I'm offending your emotional love-bunny, and I worry of course that you take it badly. Please try not to take it so personally. I see that Left Unity - one of the far-left cheerleading gangs for Corbyn - are listing those Labour MPs who voted in favour of military action in Syria as "traitors" and "worse than ISIS". No doubt they've come to that conclusion because some of the senior members of this particular band of Corbyn supporters regard ISIS as - I quote - "a progressive force". This was actually a motion proposed at Left Unity conference recently. So yes, Corbynists are terrorist appeasers, but there actually are a select few who, by their own admission, are terrorist sympathisers. Again, buctootim, please don't take this personally - I know you're merely a shiny faced acolyte.

It won't. The success was entirely down to a local candidate - and actually one who in Corbynist parlance is "Tory-lite scum" because Jim McMahon voted for Liz Kendall in the leadership election. It's a brilliant result - and one more problem for the terrorist appeasing Corbynist leadership.

Quite so. It was a brilliant, impassioned speech not so much about the situation in Syria as about the Labour party's historic role in fighting fascism. He was right also to open his speech with a condemnation of Cameron's silly "terrorist sympathisers" remark. Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott, et al are not terrorist sympathisers - they're terrorist appeasers. There's a big difference. Stella Creasy also emerged with great credit yesterday, by facing down intimidation and threats aimed at her and her staff from Corbynist Stop the War "activists", and by saying that she was voting yes because of Benn's powerful arguments. Creasy, by the way, has done more to help working class voters in the short time she's been in parliament (2010 + 2015 with a hugely increased majority) than Corbyn achieved in 30 years. Her campaign against payday lenders and their charges of up to 4000% has shamed the coalition and now Tory governments into introducing at least some regulation. Stop the War share with a Wonga employee as well as a putative rapist, now jailed, the "distinction" of threatening and abusing her. Such is Corbynist "kinder politics".

Powerful stuff from Benn Jnr. Pity Corbyn so utterly failed to articulate the case against.

You can convince yourself that there are no ground-based spotters in Syria if you like - it doesn't alter the fact that what you're saying is plainly untrue. If you read the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently site closely enough you'll know, for example, that the drone strike on Mohammad Emwazi was as a result of local information fed out to military targeters. Numerous other European and American jihadists have been killed after clearly being targeted from very localised information. ISIS regularly rail in their videos against informers giving details about precise locations of various fighters who've been killed by drone strikes. So there is no reason to think Western air forces are "bombing blind". And Iraq may have a legitimate government and a "ground army" (or at least the ineffectual appearance of one), but the bad news for Corbynists is that Iraq undoes their ignorant and inflexible argument that all Western bombing leads necessarily to bad things. Without the aerial bombardment by the Americans during ISIS's blitzkrieg race through Iraq in 2014, Baghdad would have been easily overrun, "ground army" or not. Even with aerial bombing, ISIS were just a few miles outside the gates of the city, murdering all and sundry and dumping their mutilated bodies in mass graves. The consequences had ISIS succeeded in taking Baghdad can only be imagined in anyone's worst nightmare. This is not to condone bombing in general, or even to suggest it's a good idea. The argument against it, supported by the evidence of repeated appeals from civilian groups in Syria, is that civilians want a no-fly zone to keep Assad and his genocidal barrel bombs away from their families. As ugly as ISIS are, they are seen as the symptom of the civil war, while Assad is unmistakably the cause. The West has the hardware and military skill to impose a no-fly zone. The problem is that Corbyn's knee-jerk selective pacifism (Western military = bad; Russian military = good) prevents his articulating the case for a form of Western military action that would actually work in protecting lives in Syria. The tragedy is that Syrians die while he fails miserably to hold the government to account for what happens next.

I'd have to be Joseph ****ing Goebbels to produce the effects you're talking about: an "MSM" so unbelievably powerful and of one voice that it could reduce Labour to the lowest levels of public support in more than a century. It's worth repeating the finding of the YouGov poll so that it sinks in a little deeper with you than it evidently has: "Respondents from all demographic groups are united in their strong disapproval of Corbyn as Labour leader. Regardless of gender, age group, social class, region, education age, ethnicity or residential tenure, he is hugely unpopular in the country." Give Corbyn a little credit: he's blundered into destroying Labour as an effective opposition all by himself. If he had any help, it wasn't the "MSM" but the Spartist cretins surrounding him, like Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Seumas Milne, Andrew Fisher and Simon Fletcher. A more dismal bunch of far-left back-room aggressors it is hard to imagine - who've manipulated a major party into espousing views only uttered previously in extremist sects capable of delivering about 2,000 votes nationwide. It's the Day of the Political Triffids. Oh, and why do you think it's clever to back up your assertion about the "effectiveness" of Russian bombing with links to the Putin-funded Russia Today? You do realise you're saying that the Kremlin's campaign is working because the Kremlin says so, right? And when did you become pap, who if I remember correctly you called autistic? This was his tactic - spouting propaganda straight out of Putin's mouthpieces to justify Russian action. And, finally, isn't it morally bankrupt to assert, as per the principles-averse Corbynists, that precision bombing by the West is so much more reprehensible than carpet bombing by the Russians? As I say, there IS a debate to be had about military intervention in Syria and what form it should take: but so pathetic are Labour now as an opposition that it is not being articulated. We're now dependent on dissident Tories and a much more disciplined SNP to keep Cameron even vaguely honest. Not a fallacy of mine then as I didn't single you out as a Corbynist, just as someone gullible enough to resort to Corbynist tropes. The "real choice" is another of those ludicrous arguments that supposes that, before Corbyn, Labour was some kind of "Red Tory" party. Funny, then, that the very policies that Corbynists hopelessly claim to have defended, like tax credits, were put on the statute book by the very people now being lambasted as "Tory-lite scum". And how can a "dyed-in-the-wool" LibDem have the gall to talk about "choice" when your party, having proclaimed "choice" in the 2010 election, promptly colluded in condemning and entire generation of students in England and Wales to lifelong crippling debt? So if you don't mind, you can wish for Labour to be reduced to an incompetent, malicious rump - more presumably to mirror the Lib Dems in their current state - but I as a lifelong Labour supporter wish to have a party back that is at least trying to be a popular, responsible, social democratic party committed to social justice. Corbyn is no "choice" for me, nor is it for the former Labour voters who've deserted the party in droves at the prospect of the ludicrous posturing of Corbyn.

It's a familiarly arrogant Corbynist fantasy that any bad news for the object of their affections is always down to the evil "MSM", and that the voters are like easily led sheep who unlike the brilliant and wise Corbynists themselves simply don't engage with alternative media at all, or read quite plentiful pro-Corbyn material in the "MSM". I suppose the impending disaster in Oldham will also be down to the dumb-**** voters fooled by the "MSM". And "his generally consensus/inclusive decision-making" on Syria? Corbyn has made it clear all along that his preference was to force the issue with a three-line whip. He backed down in the face of what a shadow minister - a "Tory-lite" no doubt - called a "riot" in this morning's shadow cabinet meeting. Keep the faith - you're going to need it if you're going to wrap yourself up against evidence like the YouGov poll and what will unfold on Thursday.

Yet more evidence that Corbyn is leading Labour into the wilderness - and to an extent that is historically unprecedented. Data from the most recent YouGov poll, conducted last week, suggests the most damaging of conclusions: Respondents from all demographic groups are united in their strong disapproval of Corbyn as Labour leader. Regardless of gender, age group, social class, region, education age, ethnicity or residential tenure, he is hugely unpopular in the country. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/datablog/2015/nov/30/labour-losing-touch-public-opinion-research-suggests Not even in the Foot wilderness years were things even remotely as bad as this.

You "thought that was what I wanted"? What is wrong with you? Protection of civilians should be a Corbyn priority. It isn't. The arch-Corbynite Diane Abbott, for example, just laughs in Syrian civilians' faces. Here's a nice little video of her doing exactly that, very publicly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_LKwMJnT1g The precision of modern guided missiles is, by the way, far greater than the tactic for example adopted by the Americans of dropping bombs from B52s at high altitude during the dislodging of the Taliban regime in 2002. It would be ignorant to deny that munitions are now more precise, just as it is wrong the claim that precision weapons do not kill civilians. They do - though not on the scale of the casualties of carpet bombing. It is also obvious to anyone following events there that, regardless of the risks, there is considerable ground-based intelligence being fed to Western military sources. The issue of whether or not to take military action is far more complex than "let's bomb" vs "let's not bomb". As I say, Corbyn rejected the idea of stopping the genocide in Bosnia and the massacres in Kosovo with military intervention. Faced with the same choice over Kobani, my strong hunch is he'd do exactly the same and refuse intervention by air to support their ground forces. Corbyn's position is a mealy-mouthed pacifism - selectively deployed to the West, and poorly articulated. Worse than that, he is an apologist for dictators in general and Putin in particular. Plenty of examples here from a fellow-traveller on the far-Left: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/james-bloodworth-left-wing-case-against-comrade-jeremy-corbyn-1513969 Corbyn won't lift a finger to support civilians under a hail of cluster of incendiary bombs, as long as it's from Putin; nor will he nor his acolytes pay any attention to emerging civilian groups in Syria asking the West to help by protecting civilian areas. You might find it educative to read through some of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently journalism. Here are links to their website and twitter feed: http://www.raqqa-sl.com/en/ https://twitter.com/Raqqa_Sl

According to the citizen-journalists of Raqqa is being Slaughtered Silently, the city is now being carpet-bombed with incendiary or cluster bombs, it seems by the Russians. Among the dead are children from a school. There's never been a better time for Corbyn to a policy of intervention that includes no-fly zones and that places the protection of Syrian civilians as a top priority. Will he? Of course not.

The reality is that Corbyn is a flea-bitten sheep's carcass concealing the wolf's internal organs of John "ballot, bullet and bomb" McDonnell, Diane "Mao did more good than bad" Abbott and Ken "Iraq has made all Muslims bombers" Livingstone. As Bertrand Russell once said, as if with Corbynists in mind: "Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them."

It seems that Corbyn's mealy-mouthed and fake pacifism is going to split the Labour party wide apart next week. The fact that, contrary to his ill-deserved reputation, he never actually articulates a principled political argument makes things worse. His arguments, such as they are, always take the form of "I'm not happy with [...fill in the blank...]." And that's it! So his and the Corbynists' arguments against military participation in Syria takes the form of mumbling: "It's never worked before so why should it now." As an argument it is little more than a lie. This has meant, among other things, that Corbyn's record is bloodstained by his refusal to support military intervention by NATO in Kosovo, which successfully halted an ongoing genocide, as well as in Bosnia after the mass killings, under the UN's direct gaze, of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebenica. To be clear: Corbyn opposed both of these highly successful military interventions - and had he got his way, the massacres and genocide would only have continued. Corbyn also opposed British intervention in the Sierra Leone civil war - an intervention that successfully ended the war and stopped appalling butchery. Corbyn also advocated standing by and doing nothing as the genocide in Rwanda unfolded. Corbyn would also presumably have opposed any British participation in the aerial campaign in support of Kurdish forces driving IS out of Kobani. The fact that the bombing was conducted almost exclusively by the Americans seems to have been an excuse for his silence. No one could doubt though that the aerial campaign was necessary - least of all the Kurds, who welcomed it. The shame of all this is not only that Corbyn is by default an apologist for genocidal murderers (his "friends" in the IRA and Hamas no doubt give him endless lectures on the virtues of pacifism). It is that his political inarticulacy prevents any serious discussion of a reasoned alternative to Cameron's position. One thing clearly absent from yesterday's debate was any reference to Syrian civilians. No-fly zones have been particularly effective in the past in preventing slaughter from the skies, and with Assad's barrel bomb attacks on civilian populations now routine, but any discussion is off the agenda right now. He could have put it there, but his knee-jerk anti-Westernism prevents him. Worse, as we saw with the appalling Corbynist Diane Abbott when she chaired a Stop the War debate on Syria, Syrian civilian women were ejected from the meeting room for having the temerity to want to speak. Stop the War's, and Corbynists', pro-Putin line must not be allowed challenged by these raggedy civilians who should be happy to sacrifice their lives for Corbynists/Stop the War's "principles". The sooner this mumbling ****wit is gone the sooner Labour can resume its responsibility as an effective opposition.

You're welcome to your opinion, but if someone says they are losing their job it might be an idea to have just a little ****ing respect.

Credit where it's due: the huge amount of effort by Corbynoids in the comments sections of today's newspapers is impressive. I've never seen so many long-winded attempts to explain McDonnell's 'joke' by the shiny-faced devotees. Or so much evidence that they have the tinniest of ears for political symbolism, or for the simple idea that Labour needs to communicate to an electorate beyond their no doubt fascinating selves. A word of advice, though. If you have to explain a joke, it probably isn't very funny. Meanwhile, an incompetent, politically inept Chancellor romps on, made by Corbyn/McDonnell's New New Labour to look like a political genius. What have Labour's natural constituency done to deserve this? ****ed over by Osborne and betrayed by Corbynism.

Corbyn and McDonnell promised us an opposition that would offer the electorate a real alternative to the rampant Nasty Party - and they've delivered. We've now got an opposition that is totally ****ing stupid. Great.

Ed Stone, the little red remake.

That quote rather precisely illustrates the problem. There is no sacred text that can be the arbiter of whether something is or is not "Islamic". The Koran and all the thousands of hadiths are, by their very nature, capable of interpretation - even diametrically opposed ones, such as Islam=peace and Islam=violence. Religion is the sum of the varied beliefs of the people who adhere to it, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing about these beliefs can, or ever have been, subject to a single "correct" interpretation. So in a religion with no hierarchy - no judicial or governmental centre like Catholicism - the sad and unavoidable news is that Jihadi John is also no less "right" than the Imam you quote. And there is likely to be no less sincerity in Jihadi John's belief in the Islamic correctness of his actions, than in the opposite belief by your (self appointed - always self-appointed) Imam. Those who call for a reformation in Islam do so for precisely this reason: to make the Jihadi John interpretation so toxic that no one wants anything to do with it. (Of course, so long as the Saudis, with their Wahhabi Islamism, maintain control of Mecca and Medina, such a change is not immediately on the cards.)

I appreciate where you're coming from, SOG, but I don't think anyone's arguing the position you think they are. One can accept that US foreign policy has made things worse without going the whole hog and blaming the West for the emergence of IS. One can accept that many innocent Muslims have been killed but we can rule this out as an arguable motive for extreme violence perpetrated by a maniacal few. Anti-semitism is the go-to rhetoric for Jihadists and their far-left sympathisers in the West. Islamophobia is often blamed by said sympathisers for radicalising European jihadists. The latest example is with the Belgian suburb of Molenbeek. And, yes, Islamists can be a threat - not that I understand your distinction between "Islamists" and "extremists". Islamists ARE extremists.

I hadn't wanted to get into this argument because I think it's been done quite a few times and always entails ducking into the ideological trenches. The history of Islam is mostly the history of the great empires (Ommayad, Mughal, Ottoman, etc). All of them were founded not quite so much on war but on conquest (sometimes but not necessarily the same thing). And all of them, at their height, were remarkably successful. (The Mughals for example governed a quarter of the world's population in the 17th century and had a GDP equivalent to over $90 billion.) In all of these empires existed a tensions between liberal progressiveness (of a kind unheard of elsewhere, least of all Europe) and religious conservatism, including extremism. When the religious conservatism and extremism became dominant, it tended to be a signal of the end for the empire. For example, the brilliant Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal among other great architectural wonders in India and Pakistan, being displaced by his murderous and fanatical son Aurangzeb; the result was the factionalism and violence and, ultimately, serious decline (the British were lucky to catch the severely weakened tail-end of the empire). So it is reasonable to argue historically that Islam has always been a religion of conquest, but its also been one of enormous progress, allied with a liberality and progress we'd recognise today. But when conservatism and extremism take over, it has also historically been a sign of weakness and collapse. You can apply that to events now: the conservatism of the Saudis, for example, which has been desperately exported to countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, is a sign of weakness and decline. Similarly, the hyper-violence of IS is a symptom of a strand of the religion that is on the wane. Islam has always been most successful when it's been the most open and tolerant. I know this is counter-intuitive - a current moral panic in the West is that it is being Islamised - but history supports the idea of decline much more strongly. Therefore probably one of the worst things we can do now is demonise Muslims living in the West (or elsewhere). And one of the best things we can do is help them and ourselves by getting rid of IS, as quickly and with as little "collateral damage" as possible.

Now that the UN security council has, after Paris, found a preciously rare occasion to unite on a resolution to tackle IS, the scene is set for Jeremy Corbyn to show some leadership and back military action against IS in Syria. He was the one, after all, who laid down the condition that any action must have the backing of the UN. Of course, he didn't expect for a minute that such authorisation would ever happen, given the routine vetoes by China and Russia. He no doubt expected a permanent get-out clause in justifying his inarticulate pacifism. But the murder of a Chinese hostage in Syria and the downing of the Russian airliner over Sinai, and then Paris, have changed all that. So let's see how the conversation goes with his closest advisors: John ("the IRA won the peace") McDonnell, Seumas ("Joe Stalin was my hero") Milne and Andrew (currently suspended form the Labour Party) Fisher. I expect a fine outcome.

Indeed, Lou. I also think his speech and his twitter feed points to a military strategy that the West can adopt that would actually do something to protect the Syrian civilian population. A rigorously enforced no-fly zone would take Assad's barrel-bombing helicopters out of the sky. The bombs are not dropped on IS-held territory, and are used exclusively against civilian populations. A no-fly policy, therefore, would be a military action with a clear humanitarian aim. It needn't be the only spoke to the wheel, and it doesn't deal with IS - but it's sad that this idea has gained no traction at all so far, let alone discussion, among Western powers active in Syria/Iraq. The other thing to consider with barrel bombs is that many of them are dropped on some of the most extraordinary historical sites in the world, including world heritage sites. The citadel and the souk in Aleppo for example, which are both World Heritage sites, have been, respectively, severely damaged and completely destroyed. I've been to both, and they were unforgettable places. Heaven knows what can be done now to restore them. Syrians themselves drew enormous pride from their architectural and archaeological heritage, which is second to none. Assad and IS, on the other hand, are an alliance intent on destroying not only lives but the physical world of ordinary people. And in case someone feels the need to reach for that tiresome meme of 'it was the West wot done it', the Assad family has form on this. Hama in central Syria was once the preserve of a beautiful system of medieval water wheels, which are now of course in ruins. In 1984, Hama was also the location of a huge massacre of civilians by Assad senior. Most of the bodies were dumped in a mass grave, as I discovered too late. On our first night in the city a few years ago, we were directed by our government minder (a spy, basically) to stay in a luxury hotel in Hama called the Sham Palace. It was completely deserted, and I asked why. The guide fell silent. Our Palestinian driver quietly told us the reason the following day. The hotel was built on top of the mass grave, as an insult to the victims and their families of the Assad massacre. No one but Assad's entourage and outsiders were permitted to stay there. We had inadvertently colluded in humiliating the city's people. It's still chilling to think of that incident. Anything that relieves the suffering of a people who do not want to be refugees - who do not want to leave a place they deeply love, and who desperately want to rebuild it - would be a huge step. I doubt it'll happen.

There is one group of people who deserve to be listened to more than anyone in or about Syria: Syrian civilians. They are the pawns in all this: barrel-bombed from their homes by Assad's helicopters, brutalised and murdered by IS, and now hated by elements in Europe and the US as they attempt to escape an impossible situation, not unlike those who clung to the outside of the upper floors of the twin towers on 9/11. Fortunately, the voice of Syrian civilians are starting to be heard. Here is one of them, Abu Mohamed, the leading figure in the remarkable citizen-journalist organisation Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. He gave a speech to the Dutch parliament earlier this month. Allowing for the fact that he is speaking in a second language, it is not crystal-clear expression of a view I've heard many times from Syrian civilian groups: that Assad and IS have colluded to destroy people's lives. He is also frighteningly prescient about what happened in Paris, predicting a major attack on a European city by IS fanboys. It's worth a read - and certainly more so than the petty squabbling on here. http://www.raqqa-sl.com/en/?p=1529

He leads the Labour Party but has effectively denied voters a choice by leading it so incompetently that the party effectively does not exist as a parliamentary opposition. And the campaign against tax credits is effectively conducted by dissident Tories and New Labour members of the House of Lords like Patricia Hollis. Corbynist Labour is nowhere to be seen, and has been rendered a monumental irrelevance. Not a surprise, since an inconvenient truth is that tax credits were the creation of politicians the Corbynists despise more than anyone - the 'Tory-lite' 'scum' who are their colleagues.

As do the majority of Muslims - and others - under their murderous thumb. This is all so sad. The events of the weekend remind me how immensely fond I am of France, and of Syria.

SOG, what you're arguing against is not so much a reasoned position but a feeling of rage. You're trying to make a finely drawn distinctions when the mood is one of "the religion itself is responsible". It's a hopeless argument but an understandable one, given the events in Paris, even if one or two of those saying this weren't already ludicrously addicted to knee-jerking. Here's another distinction that won't be appreciated by everyone, probably including you. The Koran is many things, but among them it is certainly a code of war. This is not surprising given the conditions from which it emerged. However, that code is not a lot different to a modern and relatively progressive code. It was applied by brilliant military tacticians like Saladin, who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 but who allowed Christian and Jewish practices and people to continue in the city under his protection. If Saladin were around today his views and actions would result in his beheading as an apostate by the nihilists in IS - if ever they had the wit to capture him. When they reach for justification for their genocidal killings, IS have little use for the Koran, with its inconvenient caveats about mercy, but for obscure and bloodthirsty Hadiths. But it doesn't really matter what document they claim to be acting on: they are a self-serving, blindly violent death cult. They exist to kill, to revel in the killing, and to profit from it. There isn't a lot more to them than that. The justifications they claim are worthless and idiotic, and discredit a horrified Muslim majority.