Verbal

Quite so. Johnson (an American citizen at least until recently) is just following a pattern of behaviour among right-wing Republicans in the US , who can't quite bring themselves to say what they're actually thinking, but let it slip anyway: that they're apoplectic that a black man is inside the White House, and that his ethnicity/'heritage', rather than his politics, determines his reactions. It's nastily, creepily racist, and I'm not alone among Londoners who are embarrassed that Johnson has anything to do with running this city.

Never mind who's leading?! Many of those who are leading the Brexit campaign will be leading the country if the referendum, as seems likely, goes their way. No doubt a prominent role will be found for this nasty, dimwitted little prat - who believe it or not is actually the campaign director for the official Leave campaign. Funny how the Brexit leadership proclaim the return of sovereignty to Westminster as a primary objective, and yet treat Westminster with such withering contempt. Passive-aggressive and devious Brexit leaders like Cummings simply reveal that they are, above all, liars.

I do find it comical reading McCann-hunter posters, past and present, defining themselves as selfless seekers of truth. When they do it by posting three-hour-long videos by the arch 9/11 loon Rich Hall you know they're as cracked as he is. And the tenor of the attacks on the McCanns are so preeningly self-aggrandising it makes me think the conspiro-nuts have something of their own to hide.

The reason it's an assumption is because they are not part of the argument. Of course there's a rag-tag of others wanting to leave. But the leave campaign is overwhelmingly dominated and led by the far right, and the non-extremist tagalongs are just being exploited in a sectarian coup within the Tory party. It's the most undemocratic motive behind a democratic campaign.

Say hello to Vote Leave's campaign director, an offensive little turd who freely admits to lying his head off ("what's a few decimal points."). As the article suggests, not so much an idiot savant as an idiot complete. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/20/accuracy-is-for-snake-oil-pussies-vote-leaves-campaign-director-defies-mps The politics and ugly personality of those who dominate the Leave campaign make it pretty clear that behind the Referendum campaign itself is an attempted Tory factional putsch designed to install the far-right of the party in power.

And so the pitch-fork witch-hunters creep creepily back out of the woodwork.

This should settle all the arguments. http://newsthump.com/2016/02/23/leading-brexit-campaigners-coincidentally-a-shower-of-cnts/

I'm baffled by this too. Where is the "implication...that they have the power to stop EU nationals from entering and settling en masse"? It's surely a statement about controlling and monitoring borders in a way that works against things like terrorism. I don't know how true that it, but terrorist incidents in the UK in the last decade have been carried by by home-grown dimwits, not those racing back and forth across open, unmonitored borders.

Nope. You're confused. You said Turkey wasn't a Muslim country. It clearly is, more so than Pakistan by measure of population. What you mean is that it isn't an Islamic republic. It's an important distinction. When Jinnah founded Pakistan he rejected pressure from more militant voices (like the port Iqbal) to declare Pakistan an Islamic republic. He wanted a home for Muslims, within a state with separation of powers. He died before seeing that he lost the argument.

What does this mean exactly? 98% of the countrt is Muslim. That's a larger percentage than Pakistan, which is 96.4% Muslim.

Those Brexiteers are real comedians. Now it seems one Brexit sect is threatening to sue now that the other sect has been made official. Is this how they intend to negotiate all those treaties that will have to be agreed over the next decade or more to repair the damage from their economic vandalism?

I assume it'll happen when the swivel-eyed loons on the right understand that today's tax avoidance is tomorrow's tax evasion. Ever heard of IR35?

It seems Corbyn may have failed to declare his pension income, which, if true, would mean he's evaded tax. This focus, though, on individual politicians' tax is becoming ridiculous - a pointless competition in applying the easiest label of all, 'hypocrisy'. There's an over-fixation with all this, when the real issue is what the Panama Papers tell us about the precise ways in which the 1% hide many of their assets and income, and how governments should respond in closing down the secrecy that allows it to happen.

If the result stands, aren't Leicester now mathematically guaranteed a Champions' League place? Pretty incredible.

You're going back too far, though, for a starting point for 'jihad' as an anti-Western tool. Wahhabism dates back to the 18th century, but that was an Islamic 'purification' movement confined to the then tiny bedouin communities and potentates of the Arabian peninsula. The Deobandi movement began after the 1857 uprising in India, but that was not so much an anti-Western revolt as a revolt by Sepoys against the use of pig oil in the lubrication of gun barrels. The idea of jihad as an anti-Western tool dates back only to the first world war and was invented by a German military officer called Max von Oppenheim. In order to try and provoke uprisings against the Arabian bits of the British empire, and to fire up soldiers among their wartime allies the Turks, Oppenheim orchestrated a strong connection between anti western warfare and more traditional idea about 'jihad'. He did this as a way of galvanising Muslim soldiers fighting not just occupiers but unbelievers. The pacts he sought with the Arabs and Turks were laced with the idea that the Germans were the true supporters and liberators of middle-Eastern Muslims, and that the British were intrinsically anti-Muslim. This pernicious idea was unfortunately perpetuated into the second world war, when the leader of the Palestinians and grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sided with Hitler and sang the praises of the Nazis' attempts to exterminate the Jews. (Palestine at that time was under a UN mandate administered by the British.) There are, sadly, photographs of Hitler and Husseini enjoying friendly chats. Husseini's hard line fundamentalism led directly to the Palestinian rejection of a deal offered by David Ben-Gurion, which, when compared with anything that might have been offered today, was decidedly workable. By the time of the siege of Mecca in 1979, when Wahhabi extremist insurgents had to be dislodged from the holiest site in Islam by French paratroopers, the jihadist=anti-Westernism die was firmly cast. So as much as we love to locate anti-Western jihad in the frightening exotica of an alien, ancient civilisation, it has a lineage in this form that goes back to 20th century Germans.

There's definitely something wrong with you. You didn't ask about "Islamic immigration into Western Europe". You asked about Muslim culture. I gave an answer to that question. As for the contributions of immigrants, I already dealt with this in post 2148: To which your response was "still obsessed I see." Pathetic. So if there's anyone avoiding issues on here, it's you. And the reason you avoid them is clearly because you suffer from a particularly creepy form of racism.

This is no doubt going to teach you to suck eggs, but we're all standing on the shoulders of giants to be where we are - and in terms of the visual arts, a vital part of what we call western culture, some of those giants are Muslims. For example, Florentine Renaissance art was revolutionary because of its incorporation of two things: perspective and volume (the latter achieved through chiaroscuro lighting). Combined, they were revolutionary because they allowed the illusion of a 3-D image on a 2-D surface (the canvas). These principles were later refined in the paintings of the late-Renaissance Dutch master Vermeer (who according to many experts, including David Hockney, used a camera obscura to render perspective precisely), and they still apply today in literally everything you see at the cinema. Where did these ideas comes from? They began with the publication of the seven-volume 'Book of Optics' by the 11th century Arab scholar Alhazen. He was born in Basra, now in southern Iraq, and developed his mathematical idea during the Fatimid dynasty in Cairo (which of course you'll know all about). The book was translated into Italian - importantly, not Latin - just as the Renaissance was getting underway. His work in optics included the first mathematical formulation of how the camera obscura worked, and they still hold true today. Alhazen didn't spring from nowhere as a stand-alone genius. Much of his work draws on Euclidian geometry, and his cosmology was deeply influenced by Ptolemy. But as you know, the Ptolemaic system was supplanted by Copernicanism - yet the interesting thing is Alhazen had spotted many of the mathematical flaws with Ptolemy's picture of the universe long before Copernicus and Galileo. And you'll find Alhazen's influence in the work of the great European scientists Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibnitz and (I hardly need tell you) Robert Hooke. So the bigger picture is this: as this one case shows, the influence of Muslim scholarship on western culture and science was profound, but those same Muslim scholars were drawing on ideas, many of which originated in ancient Greece (Euclid and Aristotle, for example). Which means we arrive at the happy conclusion that classical Greco-Roman culture, Muslim-Arabic science, and western culture and science are all intimately inter-linked. So next time you go to the National Gallery or the Science Museum, fighting your way through all those nasty brown and black faces, face East and give a little prayer of thanks.

I'll let you into a little secret. The leak from Mossack Fonseca happened over a year ago. The vast amount of material, including four million emails, had to be analysed - which was done by over 400 journalists assembled by the consortium of investigative journalists. One of the largest groups of journalists was from the BBC. So this is every bit a BBC-led story as a Guardian one, and they'll run with it, while giving plenty of air time to the denials, etc. Given the vast amount of data, don't expect the revelations to dry up any time soon.

No, he's not. He was asked by Sky News today whether he had benefited personally from the offshore company his dad owned. He did not answer the question. It's reasonable therefore to conclude that he did benefit. For the leader of this country to campaign - apparently - against tax evasion and industrial-scale avoidance, only to have benefited from it in the first place, is some breathtaking hypocrisy. So if he continues to duck the question - and so long as it remains unanswered he'll be asked it again and again - he has no way out. Incidentally, what 'EU privacy law' enables Cameron to hide his tax affairs from the public? Can you name the Act? He is a public servant and if his private affairs (such as tax evasion) infringe on his public life they are not protected by any right to or privilege of secrecy.

You're confused. There is a distinction between positive discrimination and diversity policies. Positive discrimination is illegal in this country. Not that you'd think so. While it is just as illegal to discriminate in favour of, say, a young black woman as it is a middle-aged white man, the latter, in vast disproportion, occupy the commanding positions in banks, companies and government departments. And that's quite aside from salary discrimination in favour of white men. Diversity and equality policies, including the 2010 Equality Act, aim to combat that positive discrimination - which is a good thing, wouldn't you say?

The article is nonsensical on its definition of Deobandism though. It is certainly not "a highly orthodox spiritual version of Islam." It is explicitly hostile to the spiritualist traditions in mainstream Sufism (the latter which is actually the dominant form of the religion in Pakistan). It's a slightly watered down version of Wahhabism, and was a direct Islamist reaction to the 1857 uprising against the British which finally put paid to the Mughal empire. One thing the article does get right is this: There is most certainly a Corbynist attitude that Islamism can be included as among liberation ideologies against the imperialist West (and therefore all Muslims as natural allies with this) - which is the mirror image of the extreme-right racists' garbage that Muslims are synonymous with Islamism. As I've said many times, it's liberal Islam in all its forms that needs defending - and both the far-left's and the far-right's feeble-minded equivalences merely wave on the extremists. This makes dubious and gullible individuals like Sour Mash as much cheerleaders for Islamic extremism as any Corbynista.

The motives behind the Lahore attacks are much more complex than knee-jerk reactionaries like Moore would allow. If he knew who 'the Christians' in Pakistan actually were, he'd see there's more to this than some stupid liberal-elite/BBC conspiracy theory about obscuring 'hatred of Christianity'. The vast majority of Christians in Pakistan come from families who were, pre-Partition, 'untouchables' or Dalits - the lowest, poorest and most despised caste in the Indian social hierarchy. That stigma persists in all kinds of ways: these people variously are enslaved (in 'bonded labour' in the Sindh and Punjabi brick kilns, mostly); are the victims of organ trafficking (many in bonded labour are promised freedom from slavery if they donate a kidney - then are not paid); are the victims of false 'blasphemy' charges which are in fact land-grabs by greedy neighbours; and are forced to live, at enormous cost, in slums (some of the highest priced real estate square footage in the country is in these slums). In Lahore, the Christian slum is right in the urban heart of the city. The two Christian slums in Islamabad are a bit more set apart but still pretty central. If there were simply the victims of religious hatred they wouldn't be there - it would be far too dangerous. In fact, they're there because they are both the most exploited social group in the country, and the most necessary (many are employed to keep the cities clean - one of the worst jobs possible, but essential to the functioning of cities with desperately weak infrastructures). The attacks on Christians in a children's funfair, of all places, indicates contempt just as much for these people's social position as for their religious beliefs. And in any case, the Islamists' real target is the Pakistani government - they want to discredit the state's ability to be a state, and what better, cost-free way of doing it is there than bombing women and children of a social group no one cares about?

And the gift to the Tories that keeps on giving... Now Corbyn has been outed as having voted against banning Al Qaeda from the UK just six months before 9/11. Naturally, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell voted with him. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12207392/Labour-grandee-criticises-Jeremy-Corbyn-for-voting-against-Al-Qaeda-ban-before-911.html He could hardly claim ignorance of their murderous violence. His vote came after the Al Qaeda attacks on the USS Cole and the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Interesting fact from Gus O'Donnell (former chief secretary to Blair) in the Guardian today. The only country to vote to leave the EU so far has been Greenland, which has the population of Croydon, and whose economy is all about fish. It took Greenlanders and the EU not two years, as allowed by the Lisbon Treaty, but three. Just to deal with fish and a few people. Add that to the fact that Canada, the great 'model' for Brexiters like BoJo, STILL doesn't have a treaty with the EU after seven years of negotiation. Canada has only about half the population of the UK and already has a huge trading partner on its doorstep. This whole treaty thing is not something Brexiters are very good at. Maybe, instead of adopting their silly Pollyanna stance, they might actually address how the UK will struggle on in the decade or so that it is outside agreed treaties with its largest trading partner, and as individual EU states and companies take advantage of Brexit by snapping up market share of UK companies presently trading in the EU.

For the same reasons, I'd suggest, that people joined the Manson family or Jonestown. The appeal of ISIS for local fighters is intimately related to the politics of the Sunni triangle and the spill-over into Syria. For western terrorist recruits - many of whom are converts (which is a category wrongly ignored) - it's something else entirely. The appeal is not so much the promise of an afterlife but the heavily promoted End of Times guff that accompanies any death cult. And for some reason, historically death cults have been particularly appealing to recruits middle class or comfortably off, quite stable families. (You'll notice the absence of Palestinians - the most downtrodden of all Arab peoples - from these Jihadist groups.) Western jihadists also tend to be committed conspiracy theorists, with all the gullibility that goes with such a simplistic, controlling-agency, mindset. It is a mindset that is closed and absolutist - a perfect fit for ISIS. This is why I think you get a pattern of thought among a certain sort of far-leftist which feels strikingly similar to those of western ISIS recruits. It explains widespread Jew-hating among Corbynists, for example, as well as deflecting arguments about how Brussels/Boston/Lee Rigby/9-11 are all 'false flag' operations.