Verbal

While some of this is undoubtedly true, it’s an unnecessarily narrow and partial view of the broader consequences of Saudi actions over the years. Focusing on Saudi ‘foreign policy’ gives you a neutered view of wider Saudi (state and private) influence, and one that’s demonstrably misleading. And I don’t know your source, but it’s plainly out of date. Pan-Arab ‘Nasserism’ has ceased to exist, and Communism was only ever an indirect threat – and never a regional one – before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ‘designs of regional neighbours’ comes down to two countries: Iran and Israel – and of the two, Iran is far more significant, for the familiar reason: it’s the Shia powerhouse. Saudi Arabia has sought, where it can, to buttress Sunni influence, notably in countries with already strong Sunni populations. Across the Arabian Gulf, the obvious example is Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is also not a nuclear power; Pakistan is – and the closeness of their ‘special relationship’ has given the Saudis a nuclear shield to balance (if that’s the word) the other two regional nuclear powers, Israel and Iran. (Stories have circulated for years that the Saudis were heavy investors in the Pakistani nuclear programme – all officially denied.) But Saudi Arabia’s biggest influence in Pakistan has been in funding a process begun by the cartoonish dictator Zia ul-Haq called ‘Islamisation’. A more accurate description of this would be Wahhabification. I watched a lot of this happening when I first started travelling to Pakistan in the mid-1980s. Aside from funding the King Faisal mosque in the heart of the capital Islamabad, the Saudis poured vast amounts of money into the construction of mosques and madrassas. Before the Saudis got their chequebook out, there were fewer than eight hundred madrassas in Pakistan, and these were confined mostly to the hinterland regions of the Tribal Areas and Kashmir. By 1997 there were twenty-seven thousand madrassas – all of them funded directly by the Saudis. Remember, all this has happened in a country that was – like Afghanistan before it –overwhelmingly influenced by Sufism, especially in the most populous region of Pakistan, the Indus Valley. And the teachings in these madrassas - I’ve seen it myself – consist of two things and two things only: a rote learning of the Koran (in a language none of the children understand) and jihad. Children get this education free of charge, and so the madrassas have proved a magnet for a huge proportion of Pakistan’s population. To judge the local effect of this Saudi financed transformation of the hearts and minds of Pakistan, you get some pretty damning and alarming insights from the Wikileaks documents. A cable, written in 2008 by Bryan Hunt, a US Consular official in Lahore, describes how it all works in the southern Punjab – where many jihadis, including the Mumbai attackers, were recruited. Hunt describes a ‘jihadi recruitment network’ that had developed around the predominantly Sufi city of Multan. A note on word meanings: ‘Deobandi’ and ‘Ahl-e Hadith’ are Salafist extremist groups with a long but *****il recently) marginal history in Pakistan. He says: As for the funding of this Salafist terrorist network, Hunt reports: The “schooling” of children entrapped in these networks is characterised as follows: http://fpif.org/wikileaks_saudi-financed_madrassas_more_widespread_in_pakistan_than_thought/ With a focus only on Saudi “foreign policy” you’ll miss all this. There are other forces at irk outside the Saudi foreign ministry. And the impact has been huge. Given the size of the problem of Pakistan we tend to think it has deep roots in history. It doesn’t. The transformation of Pakistan into Jihadi Central has happened only in the last thirty years. Reversing it is equally possible – but only if the supply line of unlimited Saudi and UAE cash is cut off from Pakistan’s madrassas and someone invests in some good old fashioned schools – like the one Malala Yusufsai got shot for defending. Just one example, just one country.

I understand the sentiment, Blakey, and sympathise to a great extent. But it's wrong in one crucial respect. The jihadists are not 'twisting' the words of the Koran, in the sense that there 'must be' some correct version of it - at heart some peaceable religion. A religion is merely the expression of its adherents. And it is simply not the case, sadly, that the foul individuals in Paris, Belgium, Woolwich, Kobane and Raqqa are isolated cases of social pathology and unrepresentative of the religion itself, as its power base currently stands. The custodians of the two most important Muslim sites in the world, Mecca and Medina, are just as brutally perverse as the death cultists in ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Taliban, the TTP (Pakistani Taliban), Abu Sayyaf (in Southeast Asia) and Al Shabaab. The Saudis regard it as an essential part of their legal code to conduct public beheadings, unbelievably torturous whippings, and oppress women. They have also exported their ideas to these extremist groups and, in various forms, supported them financially. (Bin Laden himself was once a Saudi agent.) Neither of the last two Muslim empires to fall - the Mughal (1857) and the Ottoman (1923) - was Arab; and both, despite their political weaknesses, were repositories and beneficiaries of relatively enlightened interpretations of Islam. Both empires featured some variant of Sufism at their core - indeed, the Mughal empire was not so much created by conquest as by the spiritualist appeal of the Sufi 'saints'. Today, the majority of the world's Muslims are not Arab, and certainly do not subscribe to Wahhabi or (even worse) Salafist ideologies. The big problem, though, is that the Wahhabis have a stranglehold on the key religious sites, and the only serious threat from within Islam to that stranglehold is the even more extreme (hard to imagine) Salafists. Bin Laden's aim was never a world caliphate but the retaking of 'Muslim lands' and especially the overthrow of the House of Saud. As these extremist ideas are exported, the more tolerant, liberal strains of Islam have fallen away. Who would guess, for example, that up until the early 1970s, Afghanistan was a haven of Sufi mysticism, with Kabul, the terminus of the hippy trail, at its core? All that has now been wiped out - as is liberal Islam elsewhere. So Islam IS the problem - but most of all a problem for the majority of Muslims, who fearfully find their faith occupied by a vicious alien belief system. This is not about 'twisting words' from religious texts - it's about the majority of co-religionists reclaiming their beliefs from the 'true-believing' gunmen, torturers, mutilators of women, beheaders, whose idea of proselytising their faith is to hurl gay men from tall buildings. In this sense, Muslims, if they don't have something to apologise for, do have something to be embarrassed about. These appalling acts in Africa, the Levant, Europe, and south and southeast Asia are being carried out in their name. Which is why you see some Muslim protestors holding placards saying: 'Not in my name.' The extremists, of course, are playing a game, which goes like this: make Islam so repellent that Muslims are reviled wherever they live. This in turn will radicalise those Muslims because they will feel increasingly pushed into a corner by discrimination and physical assault. So for that reason your appeal for (mutual) tolerance is absolutely right. But that does not mean that the problem isn't with Islam itself.

Vous etes un dumbass if you think that adds up to some sort of French government conspiracy.

Quite so. I'd add that defending freedom of expression means (above all) defending the right of others to say/do things you don't like. I also think freedom of expression is much misunderstood in the sense of its being claimed as some sort of cornerstone of Western democracy. It isn't, and it has to be fought for every step of the way, protected against governments (all of which will display authoritarian tendencies of some kind or other) as much as against terrorists and those standing in line behind them with their 'they deserved it' garbage. Since Magna Carta, free speech is something asserted by the many (or more) against the few (or one, in King John's case).

If you ask most Muslims this question, the vast majority will tell you that mockery of Mohammad is completely out of bounds – and many otherwise moderate Muslims will also say that the penalty for such offence should be severe. I’d suggest that this opinion holds such powerful sway not out of principle but out of fear. Extremists in much of the Muslim world have threatened reprisals, and brutally carried them out, against those they consider transgressors against their viciously narrow, medieval interpretation of Islam. And such is the scale of this violence that it has successfully cowed governments and law courts in the Muslim world. In Pakistan, for example, the blasphemy laws (shamefully introduced by the British) were considerably strengthened by the drooling idiot dictator Zia al-Huq. He added the death penalty to the list of draconian punishments for even the slightest of perceived ‘insults’. Consequently, the Christian community in Pakistan – almost entirely poor and largely destitute, as prior to partition they were ‘untouchables’ - finds itself a constant target for this kind of accusation, and there are many on death row accused of blasphemy who have no chance of even a decent legal challenge. Law courts in Pakistan simply will not contemplate dismissing the thin-to-non-existent evidence against Christian defendants out of fear of reprisals against judges and lawyers. A Christian politician was murdered for speaking up on behalf of a Christian woman falsely accused of blasphemy, and his son was kidnapped and remains missing. Similarly, extremists’ predilections for honour killings, forced marriages and the imposition of the veil on women are tolerated rather than condemned out of fear of the consequences. Is all this a problem with Islam itself? Well, yes it is. It is becoming a religion in which violent extremism increasingly has the loudest voice. A religion in which the majority of its adherents become fearful of even mildly liberal views on freedom of expression. And that spills over to the West when we start thinking: Oh, well perhaps Charlie Ebdo shouldn’t have published mocking cartoons of Mohammad. This amounts to little more than blaming the victim – but, much worse, it is precisely the kind of capitulation to violent extremism that has already spread cancerously throughout the Muslim world.

I wasn't responding to you. You haven't said anything of any interest.

I'm quoting this because, not surpisingly, you haven't had an answer. If I were guessing, based on the half-witted argument above, we're supposed to believe that it was the West that really pulled the trigger on the cartoonists and journalists at Charlie Ebdo. We should all feel profoundly guilty about our appalling actions. In fact, the killers were motivated by the same blind hatred that led to Salman Rushdie having to go into hiding for having the temerity to write The Satanic Verses. The fatwa against Rushdie was 'issued' in 1989, so is rather inconvenient for the 'we must blame ourselves' idiots trying to make a mechanical link between the invasion of Iraq and the killings at the magazine. Once you turn everything into a global conspiracy, it all makes 'sense'. Of course, you have to heavily rewrite that history, adding in all kinds of patent rubbish (e.g. that Bin Laden et al were western 'heroes' during the Afghan war against the Russians) to make things fit. So no, the victims at Charlie Ebdo were not shot because the Americans invaded Iraq. They were shot because they dared to satirise the belief that religious figures are beyond discussion or even representation. They were killed by the very people, in other words, that they 'attacked' with their cartoons - the small-minded, ignorant, self-righteous, arrogant, violent, worthless pieces of **** who are so puffed up by their own deluded sense of superiority that they'd think nothing at all of pumping bullets into the heads of those who disagree with them.

It's not only far-fetched but you're aiming at the wrong targets. Extremists don't get much joy out of the New Testament, which is a 2,000-year-old manifesto for peace-and-loveys. And the Old Testament is so cartoonish that anyone citing it as a source for extremism is going to look more foolish than dangerous. Salafism, the ideological source for today's cretins, draws its justification from various Hadiths - supposedly religious texts written after - sometimes centuries after - the Koran, mostly by score-settling warlords and their more literate underlings. But this isn't about religious texts at all - it's about belonging to a death cult. And the desire to kill and maim is an essential part of that cult. To kill in the name of God, and be eternally rewarded for it, is deeply seductive, especially when the reward comes with your own death. (Witness the killing of Lee Rigby and the way in which his murderers hung around waiting to be shot.) The most essential part of this death cult, by the way, is not the destruction of the West, but the destruction of more moderate, liberal Islam (e.g. Sufism, the Ismailis, Ahmadis, Alowites, Kurds, many other versions of Shia Islam, etc, etc). Attacks in the West and on Westerners are merely 'spectaculars' (to use Bin Laden's phrase), designed to rally the death cultists and strike fear into other Muslims.

Then I'm confused. You've said that you're playing devil's advocate, but to point out what you think of as inconsistencies isn't playing devil's advocate at all - it's judging the case to be seriously flawed. Period. If you think the latter, then you must have read the entire court transcript, and not just the highly truncated media reports (even legal media reports) of the case. Is that really the case? And It's not playing devil's advocate to state as if some kind of fact that the victim has suffered no psychological ill-effects. Only a professional psychologist consulting with the victim herself is in a position to make a statement like that, and even then it would probably be heavily qualified. It may seem to be some sort of logical conclusion to you, but bystander 'logic' and first-hand experience are often (mostly) two wildly different things.

When you say 'you do realise', you mean, surely, that it's Evans' case in his appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Commission that the judge misdirected. In other words, it's an as yet untested allegation before the panel, not a 'realisation' (although allegations of misdirection have previously been rejected in appeals hearings). And it is an allegation made only by Evans and his keenest supporters and paid-for legal team. Let's see what the outcome of the CCRC review actually is. Unless I'm mistaken, furthermore, the CCRC can't declare Evans innocent - only the courts can do that. The most the CCRC can do is refer it back. As for actual appeals heard in Court, Evans has had two of those already, in 2012 - both rejected.

As a senior railwayman on a number of rural lines in Kent, my father was one of those called out to disentangle the sliced and mangled body parts of suicides from under the trains. He was also often one of the first on scene, and was almost always confronted with a deeply traumatised train driver. We knew one or two drivers who never stepped into a train cab again. So it's not a 'great way to go', and I'm not sure why you'd want to inflict that kind of harm - or 'massive mess and inconvenience' - on others who've done little else to you other than provide a service.

He could have thrown a pretty starfish shape if that would have made you happy. Same outcome though.

Thank you. And as a gift, a suggestion - probably the best book written on why the highlighted sentence is one of the great misperceptions of our age. http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0141034645

You've got this exactly the wrong way round. Even in war, soldiers have a really difficult time killing each other. That's why the Christmas truce happened in the first place - and why a lot of military training is geared to trying to overcome this deep-seated reluctance. Humans, like practically all other animals, are hard-wired not to harm members of their own species. And this applies even in war, when death seems to be all around. In the Vietnam War, for example, the ammunition-to-death rate was 52,000 bullets to 1 dead person. Either the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were superhumanly resilient or the Americans weren't really trying that hard. No wonder you didn't get the ad. On that thought, Happy Christmas.

The 78% is nonsense by his own admission. This supposed figure is for MPs AND members of the House of Lords. There are far more members of the latter than the former (over 800 as against 635) and, with age on their side, so to speak, and having being drawn as life peers extensively from business, are far more likely to have assets of £1 million. Of course there are some wealthy MPs, but to suggest that almost four-fifths of the House of Commons has liquid assets of over a million is utter rubbish.

Weird that you've been tempted into yet more juvenilia about the 'moronic' British electorate. You haven't quite got the hang of this democracy thing, have you? A democratic sensibility means disagreeing with the vote if it goes against you or your interests but accepting it all the same - and learning to fight another day. There will be other chances. That's how democracies work. What it doesn't mean is slagging off with the most stupid of playground insults people who, in their majority, happened to vote against something I'm unclear you even want. (As the electorate are, in your word, 'moronic', then they can't be trusted with anything at all.) Incidentally, you might want to look up the etymology of 'moron'. You really should drop it, but I doubt you will. Have you tried these views out on your new best friends in Left Unity? My guess is they'll give you a bit of a talking to. Still, you're in the right company. And since you entitle yourself to vote but deny it to the 'moronic' British electorate, which way did you vote on the Left Unity motion last month that ISIS has 'progressive potential' because it breaks down the imperialist drawn boundaries of the Middle East? I can guess, but hope that I'm wrong. Still, I trust you to vote - and to be outvoted.

Presumably a dictatorship under pressure from street protest only. I don't know. He thinks the British electorate are, in his exact word, 'morons'. That must include, for example, the Scots, who not only came close to winning independence using their votes but in losing managed to extract further concessions on devolution from the Westminster government. It must include the constituents in my council wards, where a solid Tory majority was overturned at the last local election because everyone was incensed at the previous council's kow-towing to the NHS Trust's attempt to destroy a major and well regarded teaching hospital. And the most moronic voters of all - how stupid can you get? - are those who risked and in some cases lost their lives in the fight for the vote or in defence of it. 'Not voting' doesn't deny anyone legitimacy - it just leaves them in power with a lesser sense of threat from a watchful electorate. And actually, voting has rarely been more of a lightning rod issue. With the Scots result, the issue of English votes for the English, and other devolution questions, have reasserted the power of the voter. In London, the role of the elected Mayor has been critical in driving a more co-ordinated economic development of the city. It's a now a role model for stimulating real growth and infrastructure in the regional cities. As any voter knows who's passionate about something, voting isn't the only part of the equation. Street protests, boycotts and other measures, up to and including civil disobedience, are all part of the armoury of a democratic citizenry. But you take the vote out of the equation and those other liberties will quickly disappear. Just ask the Egyptians. So who's side to take? Martin Luther King, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela, the protestors of Tahrir Square, the Australian Aboriginal campaigners for the vote who only achieved their objective in 1962? Or a chest-hair-straightening comedian/actor and acolytes casting all voters as 'morons'?

That's not strictly true. The one clear solution he does offer is: Do Not Vote. I was at a preview screening of the movie Selma last night, which was about the 1964 marches in segregationist Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, in protest at the denial of voting rights to black Americans. In fact, blacks had the right to vote already but were persistently obstructed by voting registration officials demanding all kinds of ridiculous information from black applicants designed, supposedly, to demonstrate sufficient knowledge to use the vote wisely. One demand - a true story - was made of a middle-aged black woman that she name all 67 of the circuit judges in the state of Alabama. Several people - black and white - died or were badly injured in Alabama in the effort to secure what became the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And yet black voters still find their efforts to register in the South frustrated (the 2000 Presidential election was arguably stolen by obstructing black voters in several Florida districts). In this country, the struggles for universal suffrage also cost lives and were hard fought. The idea that it's a smart thing to do to just disengage from this essential democratic right is shockingly ignorant of history as well as of the continuing centrality of free and fair voting to the well-being and protections of citizens. The electorate, contrary to some of Bland's acolytes, are not 'morons'. They are a fundamental guarantee of political freedoms, even when - or especially when - those freedoms are challenged.

Thanks. The first-hand knowledge is actually rather more than I'd have wanted. In 2008, after another working trip to Karachi, a fixer working with me, a Hindu and a well known figure in Pakistani media circles, was kidnapped and held hostage for six months by this group. He was released when a large ransom was paid, but he returned, not surprisingly, in terrible condition. Just to give a sense of how embedded the Pakistani Taliban are within certain parts of the military establishment, the kidnapping itself was carried out by a serving Pakistani army major.

I think his name is Jason Burke, who's spent a lot of time reporting from Pakistan. The Pakistan Taliban itself isn't really a lot of different groups - it's dominated by one clan and is a merger of essentially two groups. The Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, were the same people who shot Malala Yusufzai and her schoolfriend, and are the same people who bombed and/or demolished schools (especially girls' schools) in Malala's home region of Swat Valley. I was in Swat a few weeks before it was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban in 2007 and the sharp rise in the political temperature - a real, overwhelming sense of fear - was unmissable on the streets. What actually happened was even worse than the worst of those fears, with ISIS-style murders and torture and destruction. Aside from the human cost, Swat Valley, which is in an important sense the birthplace of Buddhism, lost many stupas which I'd seen lining the tops of the lush hills and mountains, as well as the prince's former palace and a rather nice ski resort. Most of all, though, it lost all those schools. So why do the Pakistani Taliban target schools and schoolchildren so regularly? The answer lies in government policy, manipulated by the Saudis. In the 1980s, the Pakistani military dictator Zia Al-Huq accepted billions of dollars to start a network of madrassas in the country. This was part of a process he called "Islamisation", but was actually more accurately described as "Wahhabification". The Saudis' aim was to create a Wahhabi hinterland across from the Arabian gulf, and Zia did their bidding - cutting investment in state (secular) schools and allowing the Saudis to pay for the madrassas. Three decades later, now that the children from those 'schools' have graduated, Pakistanis are reaping the whirlwind. Remember: madrassas 'teach' one thing and one thing only: the literal word of the Koran, rote-learned in a language that Pakistani children do not even understand. So alongside the ability to recite the phonetic sounds, but minus the ability to understand anything at all, madrassa children are also spoon-fed Wahhabi conspiracy theories about the evils they must confront. These evils are not even primarily the West. They are the 'wayward' practices of non-Wahhabi Islam or of any form of secularism - and teaching a child mathematics, or biology, is tantamount to a capital offence, both for the teacher and the child. This is why the sadists who attacked the school outside Peshawar reserved their most vicious attack for the headmistress, who was burned alive in front of her pupils. The Pakistani Taliban could be wiped out with relative ease - they are not embedded with centuries of tradition but rather are just three decades old. They are unpopular among the populations they hide within. The only real sustenance they've received in the recent was from the ISI (Pakistani military intelligence). If only the three critical power blocs in Pakistani politics - the government, the army and the ISI - could agree a common plan, the Pakistani Taliban will be gone. Unless there is such a common plan, you can be sure that someone within the Pakistani power elites wants them to continue. The longer term solution is to rebuild the state school structure and starve the madrassas of pupils. If only Western aid contributed to that, rather than weapons for a deeply corrupt and greedy military establishment, you'd see a huge difference. It sounds like bad taste to want something good to come out of such an appalling tragedy - but there is a chance that the Pakistani Taliban, who, as you'd expect from their schooling, are as thick as bricks, have just brought about their own downfall.

You’ve taken a very specific point I was making about the Arab sources of Western science (and against the view of a 'different' Arab logic) and wafted in a bunch of historical/faux social evolutionary generalisations about ‘faith’ and (by implication) mindset. Firstly, the ‘Arab world’ is not some undifferentiated mass. Try visiting the Levant – Beirut, say, or, in quieter times, coastal Syria. Cultures there are distinctly Mediterranean, outward-looking, secular and modern. Beirut in particular – the ‘Paris of the East’ before the ruinous civil wars and Israeli invasions – has a remarkable capacity for reinvention. It is cosmopolitan, tolerant (surprisingly so, given its recent past) and technologically inventive. On the other hand, try a visit to Dubai or Qatar or Jeddah and you’ll see the dull, baleful dominance of petrodollar wealth, beneath which lies – well, nothing, really. The Arabian Peninsular is culturally as different from Beirut as it is from London. In Dubai, the illusion is in full swing – the ultimate emperor with no clothes. Once its oil-rich neighbours run out of the black stuff or miscalculate the West’s supposedly insatiable appetite for oil, Dubai will follow them into ghost town status. The religious culture of the peninsula is overwhelmingly Wahhabi. The religious culture of Beirut is a mix of Christian and various sects of mostly liberal Shia-ism including the Druze. (Hezbollah fit into this in interesting ways but it’s outside the scope of this thread). Secondly, Arab science flourished by standing on the shoulders of ‘Western’ giants – which underscores how integrated it was into the ‘logic’ of science itself. Ibn al-Haytham resolved, for example, the contradictory positions of Aristotle and Euclid on theories of light and the human eye. Euclid believed that the world was visible as a result of rays projected from the eye (the theory of emission), while Aristotle thought that we saw the world as a result of light reflecting on the apparatus of the eye (the theory of intromission). Al-Haytham resolved the issue in favour of intromission with a brilliant mathematical proof which was then further proven by him experimentally. He also gave the first mathematical expression of the camera obscura – an object credited by some with the linear precision of Vermeer’s work, but which had first been developed by the ancient Chinese. The broader point here is that there is no such thing as an Arab mindset, which could account the brutality of ISIS. Never has been, never will. Nor can such assertions account for any lack of development in the Arab world. Things are far more complicated than that. You cite the Chinese as some sort of contrast – presumably because of their industrial progress – but you seem to have forgotten that they went through a Communist revolution, with collectivisation, Five Year Plans and the Cultural Revolution, all of which were designed to force through – at phenomenal human cost – an Industrial Revolution. The Maoists were merely following the path set out by Stalin, whose brutality, in terms of lives lost, was aimed predominantly at the kulaks (peasant smallholders) because they were the ‘enemies of history’ (ie industrial development). The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, never had an industrial revolution. The Turks – rulers of what was by some distance the longest lasting of the Muslim empires – were and are not Arabs! The Turks ruled large swathes of the Arab world until the First World War, and only finally collapsed in 1923. If you want to grasp something of the complexities as to why an industrial revolution didn’t happen in the Ottoman Empire, try Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’. It’s also worth reflecting on the fact that Lawrence of Arabia, and the British government, chose to arm and fight with what were, a century ago, the ISIS of the Arab peninsula. And when you factor in the British and French colonial influence, however brief, on Arab affairs, as well as post-colonial Western support and encouragement to the most brutal of pan-nationalist dictators (yes, we really are responsible for their longevity), you’re looking at some pretty gargantuan obstacles if you think the end-game is Western-style liberal democracy. There is, though, in all this a connection between religion and under-development. Fundamentalism has always been associated with extremes of under-development, and the Peninsula, and Saudi Arabia in particular, is only able to mask that by its vast oil fields. This connection of religious power and underdevelopment can be found in the Christian world too. You can be sure that where the Catholic Church is not separated clearly from the state, as in some Latin American countries. The Arab Spring has been evidence of the secular, democratic impulse at work – revolting against religious oppression and military tyranny. Too many people seem to think that the Arab Spring is over, but it’s far, far too early to call a result. Much depends on, for example, whether the Green Revolution in Iran can regain momentum. But in any case, we’ll just have to wait and see – if you’d called the result of the Communist uprising in Russia on the 1905 revolution you’d have missed a pretty big picture! As for torture, no one – including, presumably, you – is making the argument for the serial incidents of torture in the CIA and in the US and British Armies being part of a broader ‘cultural/religious failure’ of the West. The tortures resorted to by ISIS, the Assad regime and the CIA are all pretty indistinguishable, both in gruesome technique and in the low desire to humiliate and destroy. They are also, regrettably, sourced in a powerful belief in the cultural/religious inferiority of the victims. So I think a little less of the ‘Arabs don’t think like us’ attitude – so reminiscent of the ‘Vietnamese don’t value human life the way we (Americans) do’ – would be a good thing. At least it would undercut the torturers’ self-serving rationalisations.

The simple, unarguable fact is that what we call 'Western logic' derives overwhelmingly from the Arab world. Next time you look at Leonardo's Last Supper or Vermeer's Milkmaid, just keep in mind that the mathematics - the logic - of perspective in these paintings was derived directly from The Book of Optics by the Iraqi scientist al-Haytham. When his works were translated into Latin, and then into Italian, they had a tremendous impact on the Florentine Renaissance. Al-Haytham's theories of light and optics also preceded Newton and Kepler by centuries, and their remarkable works would not have been possible without a thorough grounding in Arabic scientific breakthroughs. Another 'first' for al-Haytham was that he was really the first rigorously experimental scientist (and got into some difficulty because of it). On the flip side, Edward Said has long ago settled the argument that 'Orientialism' - the view that Arabs in particular and the Orient generally have an alien logic to the West - is a byword for a persistent, pernicious racism. There really is little more to be said than that about such 'logic' arguments - they're plainly, unadulteratedly racist. What you really mean, I suspect, is that the ideology of ISIS is self-sealing. Just like a conspiracy theorist who believes and will only believe that, say, Lee Rigby and other brutally murdered or maimed victims were 'crisis actors', Jihadists have an internal logic that allows for the most illogical conclusions. There was a famous Al Qaeda missive a few years back which stated under what conditions it was permissible to murder Muslims. It turned out that so long as the killer 'believes' and is 'devout' then he may take any Muslim life, knowing that that Muslim would be transported straight to Heaven. Where do such bizarre ideas come from? Certainly not 'Arab logic'. They come from where all Salafist ideologies come from - extremist, medievalist ideas that emerged in the eighteenth century with an obscure, ultra-violent cleric called Wahaab, whose vicious nonsense only gained traction with the discovery of oil under the feet of his Saudi acolytes. Please don't be polarised into your position by the narcissistic hissy fits of someone who has turned a serious thread into yet another about himself. There really is no opposition of Western logic/Arab logic. The latter gave rise to the former and actually did all the heavy lifting for it before our own Western scientific greats could add one plus one.

Torture is mostly for the gratification of the torturers, and little to do with "information-gathering", no matter how often that pathetic rationalisation is trotted out. The two "psychologists" hired at colossal expense by the CIA - they could spend several lifetimes trying to spend $81 million, the price paid for their racked-up torture techniques - are little more than sadistic monsters, differing from "Jihadi John" only in the desire to conceal their actions. They share with ISIS murderers and torturers the desire to humiliate and glory in the pain and suffering of an "enemy combatant" (all too often a misidentified and innocent bystander). The US government does now need to widen its focus and deal with these and other atrocious abuses in the law courts. The case of Dilawar, the Afghan taxi driver killed by his US army interrogators in 2002, is well documented and absolutely horrific. He was beaten over his entire body with a level of violence that defies belief. His legs, for example, were so badly damaged in the days-long assaults that they were, in the words of the autopsy, "pulpified", and if he's survived, he'd have had to have them amputated. The US Army interrogators were court martialled: one had the charges dropped after recounting the torture in great detail, and the other, facing possibly sixteen years in jail, was merely demoted. When the Abu Ghraib photos were published by the New Yorker in 2004 there was uproar and condemnation. But condemnation of what? And of whom? Judged by the people who were prosecuted and went to jail, it was the low-grade US army personnel taking the photos and humiliating Iraqi suspects (note: not convicted terrorists) who were to blame. This was despite the fact that some of the photos featured dead Iraqis, killed by their CIA interrogators. What was the fate of these interrogators? Total exoneration and immunity from prosecution in 2012 by Obama's Attorney Eric Holder. Holder did this because, in his words, "it would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the justice department." The precise meaning of that sentence is horrifically chilling, and should be revisited after the Senate Intelligence Committee's report. In the light of the publication of the Senate report, these immunity certificates need to be withdrawn and the CIA interrogators prosecuted. When they, if found guilty, are jailed, the US government needs to prosecute those in the DoJ and the White House who, in Holder's own accidental admission, sanctioned all of this, and profited from it, in the first place.

History is going through something of a publishing boom at the moment and there's plenty to choose from. My own personal favourite is the extraordinary Third Reich trilogy by Richard Evans. If you only buy one of the three, I'd suggest starting at the beginning with The Coming of the Third Reich - but all three would be a terrific present. Richard Evans' scholarship and fluency in German gives him access to much original materials and so his books read as 'as it happens' stories, and are the best page-turners I've read in a while. (Evans was also the leading historical consultant for Martin Amis's Zone of Interest, a terrifying 'inside' account of lives in a death camp, and was the lead expert witness in the legal demolition of the Holocaust denier and falsifier David Irving.)

Excellent points, all well made. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/24/cameronmustgo-twitter-users-decry-david-camerons-record