Verbal

Once again, standards on Saintsweb are slipping. I see that the Fulham fans forum now has a Latin catchphrase, which I thought meant "What just happened?" but apparently is translated as: "Stand up if you still believe." They even have a thread debating the grammar of this: http://www.friendsoffulham.com/forum/index.php?topic=32114.0 What should our motto be? I'll throw "reductio ad absurdum" into the hat.

You're right (!) The idea that the niqab is a cultural issue doesn't account for the fact that many women are from cultures where it is not worn. If you ask them, they will always say that they wear the niqab for religious reasons. This DOESN"T mean that the niqab is an integral part of Islam - it isn't. Nor can you find any justification for it in the Koran (there are only vague references to "modesty"). But when the niqab is worn, the reason given is always "religious", which is why Muslim converts, like the one in court refusing to remove her covering, stand on their rights. They don't rationalise it by saying "that's what I've always done in my culture" because they plainly haven't. The niqab is in any case a recent "innovation" and was introduced by an eighteenth century woman-hater called Mohammad bin Wahhab, who, after being expelled for his violence by several bedouin tribes, finally did a deal with a tribal head called Saud... And then they discovered oil.

Who are you talking about exactly? Who's insulted you? This thread seems to be a perfectly reasoned debate. And if you're going to use cartoons, could they please be (a) relevant ("positive discrimination" has nothing to to do with the issue of veils), and (b) at least vaguely literate? As I suggested earlier, I personally don't like veils and I don't think it is a multicultural issue, or even a religious one, but rather one, historically, of male power being exerted over women. I don't advocate blanket (no pun...) bans, but there are clear instances when veils cannot be worn, and one of those (of many) is in a courtroom with jurors.

Don't joke. Within five hours of the shooting there were at least ten conspiracy "theories" out there, all of them hilariously stupid as usual. http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/10-conspiracy-theories-people-are-already-circulating-about

The niqab conceals not just physical features but motives for wearing it. The issue of consent vs coercion is incredibly hard to untangle. What is certainly true, however, is that the majority of women wearing them in the UK do NOT have cultural reasons for wearing them. Aside from a very small minority from the Arabian Gulf, most women wearing them are South Asian and come from communities where head covering, but not full-face covering, was the norm. Even those women from Saudi Arabia and other 'conservative' states on the peninsula have a cultural tradition that is barely three hundred years old. The niqab is about male power, and always has been since Muhammad ibn Wahhab, a violent extremist, entered a pact in 1744 with a bedouin called Saud. Wahhab's violence was always directed with special venom at women. The niqab and its variants is the result.

The UN inspectors report their findings very soon, possibly as early as Monday. Let's suspend the preposterously amateurish stabs at understanding Middle Eastern geopolitics until then. Finding out who committed the atrocity in Ghouta - if the inspectors go that far - is critical to having informed public views about the next steps by the UN and the international community (especially the Americans and the Russians) in Syria.

In which case you probably did Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM), which tests non-verbal reasoning and can be administered to just about anyone of any age, from very young children. The longer-standing Wechsler tests, which are more heavily linguistic, are really for adults only (and are on their 4th version now I think).

And herein lies the paradox. IQ scores are not immutable. In fact, they age and "go off" like food, and have to be recalibrated every few years, with a mean re-set at 100 (that's to say, whatever score an aggregate of people get, the mean is re-set to the average of their scores. Google "Flynn Effect" for an explanation of this). I hate to break it to the geniuses on here, but it's likely that if you took an IQ test that was "fresh" you'd get around 100. Mensa tests do NOT count, and actually the only institution which regularly uses properly calibrated IQ tests in this country is the NHS. So in reality, Glasgow has either been conned or sectioned.

As much as I hate to say this, I though Rickie missed the runs of Danny Wellbeck. I hope this partnership gets another go.

The BBC are obliged to quote it. You're not obliged to believe it.

IF that were true, it must have been either a special one-ff payment or they were agency nurses or more likely both. That figure nowhere near reflects the usual earnings of an NHS nurse - unless you have evidence that nurses earn £208,0000 a year based on that daily rate.

The "chap" you quoted, Wade Garrett, was perfectly correct in singling out "those city types" who virtually destroyed the banking system, and among whom not one ended up in jail. He didn't label everyone in banking a "city type". So I simply don't understand your criticism. As for "morons" in the Labour government, it's clear that both Labour and the Tories wanted laxer financial regulation as a way of boosting the City's international standing - and the process of deregulation has been going on since the Big Bang in the eighties, a Thatcher initiative. You only have to drive around the bits of London now owned by the City - notably around Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street to appreciate the colossal power the City has. Its power is not only undiminished by the credit crunch and the recession; it has been a critical lever in an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in this country.

So you think that the bankers who brought their own companies to their knees and dragged entire national economies down with them were managing "clients"? What a quaintly old-fashioned idea that is! If, as you claim, you know "a few city-types", and they were involved in the sequence of events that led to the credit crunch and the bail-outs, ask them how they actually work (assuming they are still in work). It really isn't "that simple".

It does indeed. Without unions, pay and conditions would crash. With them, we can continue to live in a high-wage high-tech economy - and live in a place where workers' rights are not left undefended, regardless of the antediluvian views of the myopic, southern-softie, petit-bourgeois wannabe (neverwllbe) magnates of SWF! Well done comrade!

I'm not qualified to comment on the science behind the EU's ban, but you might consider, at least, that your hysterical ranting may make you a tad less persuasive than you evidently think. For one thing, it's clear that Pugwash is not a closet Kim. In trying to pin this ridiculous label on him, it's also plainly false to argue that the absence of modern farming techniques is the cause of the many famines in North Korea. Famines are always associated with wars and extreme political upheavals, not the absence of pesticides. As the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said, no famine has ever occurred in a democracy (not that democracy solves the problem of hunger). Your comments about DDT are also distinctly odd. You rant about "leftist ideologues" banning DDT - and then say that this ban was introduced by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1972. This would be the "leftist ideologues" appointed by the famously Marxist Richard M Nixon? The actual head of the EPA at the time - the first one - was William D. Ruckelshaus, a very senior figure in the Republican Party, and recommended for the role by (Watergate conspirator) John Mitchell. The tone of your response is a little nightmare for scientists in this country who take seriously the idea that they have a mission to explain their science to wider publics. Where they use a tone of patience and care, you've adopted the approach of petulant yelling, with some paranoid right-wing politics attached. As I say: nightmare. Anyway, following this discussion, and your post in particular, I've signed the petition.

Despite it's claim to "fairness" it's not a particularly balanced or well researched piece. With regard to the Mint Press News article, it fails to mention that they had originally pretended that Dale Gavlak, the AP freelance, had been one of reporters on the scene in Ghouta. She hadn't, and they were forced into a retraction. So while the "Fair" article says "Mint are honest in the limits of their knowledge," that is not actually true. They're also wrong in stating that the 24-year-old owner of the company is Palestinian in origin, because her father is from a well-known Jordanian tribe; and she has refused to name any of the financial backers of her one-year-old Minnesota company, despite her call for "transparency". The Reporter (Yahya Ababneh) they do claim was on the scene in Ghouta was another 24-year-old Jordanian currently doing an MA in journalism in Amman (or possibly Petra). It's entirely possible that he scored a reporting coup in gaining the information he did, but he may just as easily have been duped. The problem is that online sites like "Fair", without any proper journalistic resources of their own, will have no better picture than we do of what is true and what is not, in an information war that has become as intense as it is confusing. This is similar to the murkiness surrounding the Telegraph report of an alleged meeting between Putin and Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, in which the latter is supposed to have said that as he controlled the Chechen rebels he would tell them to call off any attacks on Russian targets during the winter Olympics provided Putin withdrew his support from Assad. That article was written by a journalist who's previously claimed that the Oklahoma bombing was a "false flag" operation conducted by the US government and that Timothy McVeigh was a patsy. The sources for his Bandar story were the Russian FSB (ex-KGB), who leaked the bare bones of the story, and Hezbollah, who provided the detailed quotes from it. So there's much to be cautious about here. It's certainly the case, though, that Kerry has singularly failed so far to offer real, hard evidence for his claim that there's conclusive proof of the source of the bombing. Personally, I'd prefer to await the findings of the UN inspectors' report.

This is very confused, and mostly untrue. After 9/11, The war in Afghanistan was one fought by proxy, with the West, and the Americans in particular, relying largely on the Afghan Northern Alliance as front-line troops. By the time British troops arrived in Afghanistan, and even later in Helmand Province, the source of the “worldwide terrorist threat” was long gone. British troops casualties were entirely – or almost entirely – at the hands of the Afghans, and mostly the Taliban. The Taliban are many things, most of them bad – but they are not international terrorists. They are ethnic Pashtuns fighting what they see as a national-religious war against invaders – a tradition in Afghanistan that goes back centuries. They are NOT and never have been Al Qaeda, which had largely been driven out of Afghanistan by early 2002. So there is a separate and quite distinct argument to be had about how the hell the British found themselves in Helmand, but it’s got nothing to do with any supposedly unique political impulse to police remote parts of the world, nor was Helmand ever a fight against “international terrorism”. With regard to the UN fatalities league table, I was responding you your own argument that Britain thinks of itself as “special” in its need to be the world’s police. This is simply not true. As crude a measure as it is of other countries’ international obligations, that league table shows that the UK, per capita, isn’t even particularly high up the list on what is specifically an international policing force. But I stress (I thought it was obvious but evidently not) the UN peacekeeping force is only one of many international and regional commitments other countries have been involved in (the French in Mali, the Australians in East Timor, the Vietnamese in removing Pol Pot, etc). By all means let’s have a debate about what, if any, action to take in Syria, but let’s not base it on the arrogant presupposition that Britain is doing something that no other country does. On another point about “mission creep”, there is, firstly, nothing “inevitable” about military action of a particular kind leading inexorably to mission creep. The French have managed their specific objectives very well, and with a great deal of popularity locally, in northern Mali, and have mostly withdrawn to be replaced by a large UN peacekeeping force of 12,500 troops and police officers drawn mostly from other African states. Even Blair managed some military interventions without mission creep – in East Timor using Gurkhas and special forces in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000. Secondly, no one should underestimate the HUGE loss of political capital that has followed the Iraq war and, to a lesser extent, Libya. Even viewed at its most cynical, no leading politician, in the near future, is going to risk causing such awful damage to their own prospects – and remember, Cameron has an election to fight in only a year or more’s time. And this loss of political capital was, after all, the reason the Parliamentary vote went the way it did. But I repeat: I think the chances of mission creep in Syria are as close to zero as it's possible to be. Mission creep tends to happen when quite high troops numbers are present on the ground (American “advisors” in Vietnam, to quote the worst example). No British politician – or American one for that matter – is going to risk putting ground troops into Syria. The regional politics of what used to be called the Levant are so devilishly complex, and forever poised on a teetering knife-edge that any large scale military intervention with ground troops is going to make Iraq look like a summer picnic. What’s been missed in all the noise about what to do in Syria is the simple fact that the positions advocated by Obama, Cameron and Miliband all have one thing in common: they are espousing a doctrine first set out by Tony Blair during the Kosovo war. It is known as the “Blair Doctrine”, or, to give it its full name, the “Doctrine of International Community”. At its heart was the motive for intervention: humanitarian need. It was supposed to be a bulwark against Bush’s scattergun approach to intervention, which often came down to regime change. (Of course, Blair broke the terms of his own doctrine in his supine behaviour once Bush made it plain he was invading Iraq come what may). There were, said Blair “five rules” for intervention: be sure of the evidence; exhaust all other options first; ask if military operations can be “sensibly” undertaken; prepare an exit strategy; and clearly identify whether your own national interests are involved. Miliband’s amendment comes closest to following this, but Cameron’s resolution was not far off. I’d suggest that on Blair’s own rules, we’re not at the point here military intervention could be authorised – but with the UN inspectors having now departed Syria, humanitarian intervention following these rules is at least arguable. Of course, whether you agree with the doctrine itself is another matter...

This really is so many miles from the truth. Just in my travels I've encountered Indian troops in Haiti, Ghanian, Kenyan, Nigerian and South African troops in Sierra Leone, New Zealand troops in East Timor, French in Mali, and any number of nationalities in the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman. As for the "body bags" argument elsewhere on here, it's also quite untrue that we've historically been the only ones stepping into danger zones. Here - to give just one example - is a "top 20" of troop deaths by nationality on UN peacekeeping duties between 1948 and 2013: India 154 Nigeria 139 Pakistan 133 Ghana 131 Canada 121 Bangladesh 113 France 109 UK 103 Ireland 90 Ethiopia 82 Zambia 74 USA 71 Nepal 69 Sweden 67 Jordan 56 Denmark 50 Kenya 50 Fiji 49 Senegal 49 Poland 48 As you see, we're far from "special".

The Saudis are already supplying copious amounts of small arms, ammunition and some heavier kit like rocket launchers to the rebels (who exactly is not entirely clear). As are the Qataris. The Russians are also already heavily involved in Syria - probably the heaviest of any single country, because almost all of the Syrian regime's weaponry is Russian-made (with some Chinese armaments as well). And other countries, including the UK are already involved too - with medical supplies, some unknown covert activities, etc. There seems to be some assumption on here that the resolution committed British troops on the ground. What it actually said was that the House Note the phrase "international community", not "British ground troops". The Labour resolution gave much greater weight to the need for evidence of culpability and time for the weapons inspectors to do their jobs, and then for this evidence being presented to the UN Security Council for a vote. It still, however, calls for "proportionate" military action in support of the humanitarian objective of deterring further use of chemical weapons. It seems clear in both motions that this "action" consists in the usual targeting of command-and-control facilities in Syria. Talk of body bags for British soldiers is, so far at least, hysterical nonsense. There is precisely zero chance, after 2003, that a British government would sanction regular British troops on the ground in Syria, and exactly the same chance that the Americans would do something similar. Not only would there be no exit plan - there'd be no exit. Hence the catch-all protective clause "proportionate".

Trousers, that Telegraph piece is simply incomprehensible. The vote yesterday was not a vote against "progressive interventionism". It was, for the most part, a vote against taking action before two things have happened: one, the production of some credible hard evidence of the source of the attack; and two, time to allow the UN inspectors to do their work. These two issues are actually quite separate because the UN inspectors are not allowed - as a result of a compromise in their terms of reference insisted upon by Russia and China - to apportion blame. So that has to come from other sources like wiretaps, forensics and satellite imagery. While much attention has been focused on the danger of parallels with the "dodgy dossier", the real damage before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was done by the US and Britain in particular harrying the WMD inspectors to complete their search, and then to brief against Hans Blix, the inspectors' leader, for incompetence in not finding any WMDs. This time, the inspectors MUST be given time to do their job, at least insofar as the Assad regime will allow them. However, none of this means that Britain has necessarily become "isolationist". It is, rather, a pretty common-sense response from the HoC which suggests that some politicians have learned from the experience of the 2003 debacle. If strong, credible evidence is presented, and if the inspectors produce the kind of findings that pinpoint exactly the poison used against these poor people, then I strongly suspect that a Parliamentary vote will go the other way. In any case, the "do-nothing" option is unlikely to be a free ride, as we know, again, from Iraq. After George Bush Snr gave Saddam a $1billion loan following the chemical attack on Halabja and the genocidal attack on Iraqi Kurdistan, it clearly emboldened a regime into thinking it could get away with anything. Less than two years after Halabja, Saddam invaded Kuwait - after some amazingly clear statements from the American ambassador there that the US would not intervene. When the first Gulf war ended and Bush Snr allowed Saddam's forces to retreat without pursuit into Iraq, Bush then encouraged the Shia uprising in the South of Iraq with strong statements of support - which he then abandoned. Consequently, Chemical Ali was reappointed by Saddam to wipe out the Shia rebellion, which he did with his customary genocidal enthusiasm. Again, none of this was opposed by anything more stringent than a no-fly zone policy. Ultimately, this serial inaction created the conditions which led to the second Gulf war. A similar domino effect is certainly possible in Syria.

I suspect that Cameron is pretty much snookered on what he can and can't say about the quality of evidence. I doubt he'd be prepared or allowed to present hard information before the Obama administration. The problem, though, is that he's left with no option but to ask that the public take on trust that the evidence is convincing. Either that or the evidence isn't very strong at all, which I personally doubt, given that US newspapers are reporting some credible detail about those who committed this atrocity. It's not the worst chemical attack this century. Halabja in Kurdish Iraq has that dubious privilege. An air attack that lasted an entire day in March 1988 initially killed 5,000. Then "Chemical Ali", Hassan Ali Al Majid, Saddam's cousin, ordered further chemical attacks on surrounding towns and villages. These attacks continued from April to August. Those villagers who escaped the deadly clouds of gas were shot on the orders of Ali, who had an enthusiasm for filming his mass murders and keeping fastidious records. Much of this awful archive was captured by rebels in 1991 and all eighteen tons of it are now held at the University of Colorado. Initially, Saddam strenuously blamed Iranian plotters and Kurdish rebels for attacking their own people. He also demoted Ali. When Ali was accused at his trial of killing more than 200,000 in his chemical-genocide attacks, he snapped back: "You always exaggerate. The total can't be more than 100,000." So no, not the worst, but there are some appalling echoes from Halabja, both in the attack itself and in the disinformation campaign that seems to have followed it. We might hope for a different response from the US this time. After Halabja, the George Bush Snr administration loaned Saddam $1 billion.

I hope your friends in Damascus remain safe, Phil. It really is, or was, a quite lovely city, surprisingly. I know the area around "a street called straight" and the virtually unused but beautiful Ottoman railway terminus quite well, and I have the fondest memories of sitting at an open-air rooftop restaurant for regular dinners and looking across to the lights of the city on its seven hills. The Umayyad mosque, with St John's remains inside, was also quite special. The souk in Aleppo was perhaps the most spectacular I've ever seen and was a UNESCO world heritage site - now completely destroyed (Ironically, Mohamed Atta - remember him? - did his postgraduate thesis on that souk). I was speaking to a friend of mine - a rather different kind of UN inspector because she helps protect antiquities - who had tried in vain to prevent the Americans wrecking the remains of Babylon in the aftermath of the Iraq war (they not only bombed the cradle of human civilisation but then built concrete bunkers on it, an act which she thought was deliberate and calculated). She said that if we look beyond the immediate horrors of the human tragedy in Syria, the damage to the country's archaeological heritage will be found to be immense and unprecedented. To put this into some sort of context, I remember travelling in parts of southern Syria where Roman and pre-Roman ruins lay all around and in some cases had even been incorporated into simple (but nonetheless strangely colonnaded) dwellings. The Victorians used to paint depictions of these kinds of places all over the Middle East, but until now Syria, because of its inaccessibility, was the only place which hadn't been picked clean by tomb raiders and antiquities thieves. Once this is all over, and people have mourned their terrible losses, the destruction of Syria's fantastic physical record of past civilisations will prove a huge loss. For this reason alone, the idea of tomahawks landing among such archaeological splendour hardly fills me with joy... But it's odd to find myself in agreement with you (!) about the use of "threat" and Alpine (!!) about the moral stance - although personally I find it best to ignore the juvenilia that's found its familiar voice on this thread. As I say, I hope your friends stay safe.

The evidence for the Assad regime’s responsibility for this attack is becoming a little clearer. It seems to consist of the following: An Israeli Defence Force wire tap, the exact contents of which have not yet been released, but seem to consist of a highly placed – and highly panicked – senior Assad official yelling at a Syrian officer for ordering the attack. The general impression, apparently, is that the call raises the question as to whether the Syrians’ central command have proper control over their weapons stocks. Some shells in the chemical attack landed without exploding, and so still contain their warheads. Rather like bullets, the shells will give up forensic evidence of what fired them and from where. The word is that was from a gun battery in a government-held military base to the West of the city. The base is under the command of Assad’s brother, Maher – and the shells were fired by members of his the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armoured Division. This unit, apparently, controls ALL of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks. The unexploded shells will also, of course, enable the inspectors to definitively identify the toxins used in the attack. And the inspectors have collected – and will collect more – tissue and other bio-samples from the dead and inured. Satellite imagery – as yet unspecified. It remains to be seen, of course, whether much of the actual hard content of this evidence finds its way into the public domain. The Israelis may not be so keen, for example, to reveal the extent of their penetration of coded Syrian communications. However, the widespread public reluctance to support even limited military action against the regime may mean that a good amount will come out, without ever being compiled into a “dossier” (!) It seems to me there are two distinct issues here which get confused: the evidence, and the US and British government’s historic misuse of that evidence. It seems highly likely that the evidence itself, taken together, will prove overwhelming that the regime committed this atrocity. Personally, I’d still hope that the weapons inspectors – unlike last time in Iraq – will be given all the time they need to complete their work before the tomahawks start landing.

Agreed, we don't know what the US and UK governments know - and others suggesting that they have "no evidence" are being foolish, quite frankly. The "there-is-no- evidence" line assumes that governments have only the information already publicly available, which, to say the least, is a bit of a stretch. I doubt anyone on Saintsweb has a satellite in geostationary orbit over Syria, but it's not unreasonable to assume that Western governments do, as, in all probability, do the Russians. If they do, might they have the capability to detect heat signatures of missiles fired? I don't know. Can they pinpoint locations very precisely? I don't know. Do governments have other intel - hard to believe not, but I don't know. Governments may choose to share this information, or we'll have to wait for another whistleblower. And it's reasonable to put pressure on politicians to come clean on what that evidence is. But to say categorically "there is no evidence" is absurd. From various briefings in Washington in London, it appears the Obama administration is pinning direct responsibility for the chemical shelling on the notoriously unstable (and now one-legged after an assassination attempt) Maher Assad, Bashar's "enforcer" brother. The attack on the suburbs was in revenge for an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Bashar himself two weeks ago, which left his closest bodyguard dead and Bashar cowering in a mosque. The assassination attempt was mounted by rebels based in the suburbs that were subsequently hit by the chemical weapons. As to the quality of the evidence to back all this up, we wait and see. As for Western governments itching to get rid of Syria, in the Middle East it's fair to say that nothing is so simple - however "obvious" it might appear to be. Nor does the claim of "natural resources" stand up - WHAT natural resources? Finally, the "doing nothing" option is obviously appealing, especially if we falsely convince ourselves, in time-honoured fashion, that xyz "do not have the same respect for life as we do." The problem, though, is now not confined to Syria. The use of chemical weapons poses a much wider threat regionally. The use of chemical weapons (as distinct from biological weapons) has also been banned since 1925, and the only two instances, prior to the Syrian conflict, when that ban has been breached was by Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish town of Halabja and Mussolini in what was then Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Not even Hitler used them. So the issues of evidence, motive, and consequences are all far more complex than they might appear. Some open, reasoned, open debate by our leading politicians would not go amiss in presenting the case for any action taken - and perhaps in doing so they might construct a response that does more good than harm in a place where far too much harm has already been done.

Neda Agha-Soltan. The regime made strenuous claims that her death was faked by the leaders of the Green Revolution, and that she was alive and well. Actually there was some confusion in the West because a file photo used repeatedly in British and American papers mixed her up with an Iranian academic called Neda Soltani, whose life was made hell when Ahmadinejad's goons tried to force her to admit publicly that she was her dead near-namesake. It's a telling example of the ferocious regime misinformation campaigns that have accompanied all uprisings in the Middle East.