Verbal

I’m sure you would. Would you think differently if it turns out that an EDL-related thug were responsible for the brutal murder of Mohammad Saleem? I doubt it. The broader point is that a ‘cultural contamination’ theme unites the EDL and their Brown-shirted ancestors. While the Brown Shirts consisted of violent mobs attacking Jews as the enemy within, the EDL beat the crap out of Asian – any Asian – shopkeepers, women, and deface and destroy their property. The EDL has even issued threats against school children and college students protesting against tuition fees! If that’s your bag, that, as they say, is your problem. Keep in mind that the lineage goes like this: National Front >British National Party>EDL. The only change in this evolution is that far-right extremists, taking a leaf out of UKIP’s book, have realised they can stir up more reaction by campaigning on a single issue. All the other baggage that goes with being on the far-right is all there in the EDL. Sour Mash’s point about Islamisation is slightly different and is right for the wrong reasons. The term itself was coined by the Pakistani dictator Zia ul Haq, in the 1970s. In return huge amounts of cash – billions of dollars – from the Saudi regime, Zia undertook a programme that generously funded a nationwide network of radicalizing madrassas, ‘Islamised’ the army and setting up the proxy Jihadists in Kashmir. He also introduced Sharia law, which included the infamous Hudood and Zina Ordinances, under which rape victims were assumed to be guilt of adultery. The punishment they faced ranged from flogging to stoning to death. 15,000 rape victims were imprisoned and punished by the Zia regime. And Zia introduced the blasphemy laws that continue to cause huge misery to religious minorities in Pakistan. This ‘Islamisation’ has seeped into the Pakistani/Kashmiri community, as well as others, here. For example, 75% of marriages among Muslims in the UK are religious-only affairs. This means that when a couple divorces – which is surprisingly common – the woman is left with no rights and no means of supporting herself. (My wife, who is a Muslim, worked for a charity for a few years that tried to pick up the awful mess left behind by religious-only marriages.) Islamisation is also, I’d argue, responsible for the kind of infantilisation of young men that leads to the child abuse scandals. Islamisation in the UK among Pakistani Muslims in particular has meant that while moderates do exist among them, they are in a (still substantial) minority. You are much more likely to hear what in any context would be extreme views, especially directed at Jews. This needs to be moderated, but obviously the majority of people espousing such views are not about to become Jihadists. Jihadists are a quite different breed. They are members of a death cult – who see the rewards of the afterlife as a narcissistic justification for the terror they conduct in this life. They are invariably young and almost always disconnected from the conflicts they claim has radicalised them. (For all his rantings about Afghanistan and Iraq, the Woolwich killer’s actual history of ‘Jihad’ actually involved trying to struggle himself and others into Somalia to kill fellow Muslims, in a conflict in which the West has no part.) These death cultists revel in the blood of others. Beheading is a speciality. Here’s Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower, talking about the Luxor massacre of Western tourists in 1997: In February 2002, the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and then, in a gruesome video, beheaded, allegedly by the 9/11 ‘mastermind’ (such the wrong word) Khaled Sheikh Mohammad. Of course, the only regime that carries out this kind of barbaric act, and in public, is Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabi ideology was exported to Pakistan by Zia in the first place. There were 26 public beheadings at the last count in SA 2011, for a range of offences including murder, adultery and apostasy (renouncing your faith). So if you want to deal with the kind of extremism you saw in Woolwich, start at the source: Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism has corrupted the soul of Islam, and the Woolwich murderers were just the latest example of it. The EDL corrupts and obstructs any real attempt to tackle the problem of death-cult extremism at source, and instead creates yet more victims and more division.

I'll ignore the silly provocation about the EDL. The larger point is that you're guilty of a dangerous nonsense in suggesting that we should take all that's said by Islamic extremists like Choudary and his acolytes at face value (You really have some odd values - THESE are the people you trust!!?). If you were to switch your computer off and actually travel to places where some of the worst atrocities against Muslims have taken place, you would learn a thing or two. In Swat Valley in Pakistan, for example, the Taliban tore through the local population with a vengeance - all with the same deathly rallying call: "We will force you to adopt our extreme form of Shariah or we will kill you and everything you ever treasured." These are the madmen, remember, who thought that their war against other Muslims would be furthered by putting a bullet in the head of a 14-year-old girl because she dared to go to school. In Afghanistan, older forms of Islam, which were predominantly Sufi (hence the reason why Kabul was on the "hippy trail" in the 1960s and 70s), have been wiped out with the killing of hundreds of thousands of Sufi worshippers and the relentless destruction of their shrines. Shia and Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan are targeted by suicide bombers virtually every week, and the Sufi shrines of the Indus Valley are increasingly under threat as their believers are bombed and shot at. To relate everything back to 2003 is frankly stupid. As I've said to you many times, read The Looming Tower. This is a much older war. But you're missing a much bigger point. Why do extremists target the West? The obvious answer is the evil West. But that's the excuse. The real answer - and Al Qaeda have actually made this explicit - is that terrorist outrages against the West are designed as fund-raising 'spectaculars' (AQ words, not mine). The much bigger war is being fought not over 'Muslim lands' but Mecca itself. At the heart of AQ and all their dimwitted acolytes is the notion that Islam's weakness today is caused by two factors: the occupation of Mecca by the corrupt Saudis and the abasement of 'pure' Islam by more spiritual or more secular versions of Islam that had predominated. By committing outrages in the West, AQ and associates believe that they will create a vast overreaction from host populations against Muslims and drive embattled believers closer to their way of thinking. Which ultimately is why the EDL are so utterly dumb - they are doing the Islamists' bidding. It's as if Tommy Robinson and Anjem Choudary have worked out some sort of deal.

Your perspective needs perspective. The number of Muslims killed by other Muslims in recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria far outnumbers Muslims killed by Western military action. The problem of extremism isn't addressed by constant harping on about the evil anti-Muslim West - which isn't of course even unambiguously true (see Bosnia, Kosovo - even, to some extent, Libya and Syria). There is a fundamental disconnect between the extremists who commit these atrocities and the real victims of Western foreign policies. The 9/11 terrorists were mostly middle-class Saudis (plus a middle-class Lebanese and Egyptian). None of them was a Palestinian. The 7/7 terrorists were mostly of Kashmiri descent - the West has no involvement in the horrendous problems of Kashmir. The killers of Lee Rigby were of Nigerian descent and had no connection to the 'cause' of Afghanistan or Iraq. And so it goes on. The reason there is a disconnect is because Islamist extremism is a death cult whose aim is to make the lives of others (especially women) unbearable. Nothing more, nothing less.

The EDL are an unpleasant bunch of thugs - and wheeling out their manifesto to say how 'reasonable' it is doesn't wash. The 1933 Nazi Party manifesto called for Jews to be treated as 'guests' and denied citizenship. It did not say it was going to go on a rampage of mass murder against Jews and others. You judge by cretinous actions, not fine words. The only view Asian (by no means only Muslim) shopkeepers, women and others get of the EDL is when they are being physically assaulted by them or having their property trashed during screaming, inebriated outbursts of EDL mob violence. However, the EDL are also wholly irrelevant. Even if their pathetic demos have temporarily spiked in number, their behaviour on the streets will alienate anyone with reasonable objections to make against Islamic extremism, and the EDL will quickly shrink back down again to its criminal hard core. If anyone thinks extremism and violence is going to be tempered by allowing pathetic media tarts like Anjem Choudary and Tommy Robinson to go at each other hammer and tongs they are sadly deluded. Those two need each other as much as they profess to hate each other. The rest of us needs neither of them. Action against extremism needs to take many forms - including a serious (and belated) criminal investigation of Choudary, a failed medical student and failed lawyer who repeatedly finds himself the easiest and quickest answer in any game of Six Degrees of Islamist Separation. Robinson and convict mates, on the other hand, can just go **** themselves - they are nothing, stand for nothing and will achieve nothing.

You forgot the link, Batsub Boy. Or were you hoping people might think you wrote that? http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/6996#.UaCekOCK6OI

As the Woolwich thread was closed before the identity of the soldier was known, I thought a simple condolence thread (nothing more) for Lee Rigby would be appropriate. Heaven knows what his family has been through, having seen his death play out so publicly. I hope they get all the help and support they need, as well as some privacy. RIP.

I think VW's point, which you've missed by a country mile and seem incapable of understanding, is that the dead soldier and his family do not deserve your disrespect. As with your posts on the Boston bombings, you display to the outside world (or to the rest of us on here at least) a pretty sorry combination of paranoia and narcissism. Paranoia because every public tragedy has to have an alternative explanation to the one that's blindingly obvious, and always the alternative is that some mysterious supra-government superforce is at work. And narcissism because - if you actually look at your posts - you're constantly self-referring, idly wondering about blood splatters, or the supposed lack of them, and how this might fit into the narrative that only you - such a brave, lonely soul - can see. Just as a word of general warning: narcissistic behaviour can tip easily in sociopathic behaviour and worse. Consider, as evidence, the fact that you share a number of things in common with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. You both believe 9/11 was a false-flag operation, you both regurgitate extreme right-wing paranoid guff from Infowars, and you both have an astonishingly high opinion of yourselves that transcends others' suffering to the point of denying such suffering could even exist. I'm not suggesting you're even close to Tsarnaev as a murdering cretin (and of course you would deny that he was even that), but the character traits should give even you (hopefully) pause for thought. As for the appeal of conspiracy theories in general, I despair - I really do. They all work the same way. So without a detailed knowledge of mathematics, most people take it that Kepler's Laws do a pretty good job of explaining the motions of the planets. 'Theorists' (such a self-aggrandising and inappropriate term) would deny the validity of the mathematics BECAUSE they don't understand them, and insist that the planets are actually being controlled in their orbits by pilots buried beneath the surface. The good news is that most people don't give conspiracy theorists the time of day - and so I'm not going to say any more on this thread about your favourite subject: you. I just hope that your juvenile, solipsistic musings go no further than this board, and certainly nothing like your views reach the family of the dead solider.

Actually, it's quite a revealing clip. In the background of one particular shot is a white Muslim convert now serving a six-year sentence for plotting attacks against British soldiers at Wootton Bassett. Anjem Choudary is also interviewed; he radicalised the convert and, I suspect, will be the focus of attention with respect to the Nigerian-born dimwit videoed today with blood-covered hands, who was also radicalised during his time in Choudary's one of organisations. Choudary is likely to be accused of being the common link: he has frequently called for jihad against non-Muslims, and has saved his most provocative remarks for demos against British soldiers. He has also called for David Cameron and Barack Obama to be killed. I do wonder whether the security services are going to find themselves in a tricky position on this - especially if, as seems likely, the Nigerian was on their radar as yet another one of Choudary's dumbass 'Four Lions'-lite acolytes. We'll see, but it seems yet again it's the usual suspects. You can even tell the connection between them by that weirdly pompous, over-enunciated estuarine English they all seem to speak.

Just to pick up on Jimmy D's point, and at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I do recommend reading Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower' to understand the mechanism at work in attacks like today's. Bin Laden and his sidekick Zawahiri have always been explicit about the motives for this kind of appalling crime. It is to corner Muslims themselves - to make them feel under siege. The staple Al Qaeda logic is that if moderate Muslims in general are subjected to abuse and threats, it will radicalise them and drive them to Salafist Islamism. So the worst thing anyone can do is to generalise today's attack into abuse aimed at a religion or people in general. To do so, is, in effect, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with that murderous idiot in the video and say, 'I'll give you a helping hand.' As things stand, a large number of Muslim organisations in Britain have lined up to utterly condemn the attack. THat should be welcomed and encouraged. More often than they care to admit, Salafists get their own calculations horribly wrong. The attack in 1997 at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, in which 58 Western tourists were hacked and machined gunned to death, caused such public outrage in Egypt that Zawahiri, who organised it, initially denied responsibility. There were no terrorist outrages in Egypt for many years afterwards. Having said all that, I personally would like to see concerted action at a number of levels to make it easier and less intimidating for people to abandon their faith. The idea that it is a crime on a par with murder (and therefore a capital crime) to renounce one's adherence to Islam has taken hold in far too much of the Muslim world. But I know of one or two acquaintances who've become profoundly disillusioned with the faith they were born into - they just dare not say so publicly or admit it to their families.

Hang on, you've lost me. You've said you're married but now you want a civil partnership. Is this with another woman or another man? And since you've also said you've been DISCRIMINATED against, is this DISCRIMINATION against you personally or against you as a (presumed) heterosexual? Either way, who exactly DISCRIMINATED against you?

You should pay more attention to Robert Reich (among many others) on this. Inflated asset prices, which benefit only a tiny proportion of the population, is the recipe for another disastrous bubble, not recovery. Much of what's stoking the stock market revival is share buy-backs by companies, financed by cheap credit - a classic bubble generator. At the same time, real (inflation-adjusted) wages in the US and especially in the UK continue an unstopable-seeming downward spiral, which will continue to depress the real underlying economy outside of the gilded palaces of the Square Mile and Wall Street. So basically while the stock-owning rich get even richer from the consequences of the flatlined economy (notably near-zero interest rates), the less well-off continue to see the value of their pay packets steadily eroded and credit restrictions imposed on them getting ever tougher - even when there are momentary upturns. These are the green shoots you see after a forest fire.

Would that have been in a wooded area by any chance?

Not forgetting Honda, who'll be powering McLarens again like the good old days. (Not that I believe this 'F1' rumour...)

The Tory Right and Ukippers are responding to - and only to - their own 'grass roots'. In the Tory Party, these are the same grass roots that Cameron is desperate to modernise (or rather, marginalise) because they are increasingly a vote-losing, mean-spirited, tiny-minded embarrassment who are one step away from the political grave/UKIP. As for the claim that 'British people' are against gay marriage being on the statute book, that is clearly nonsense. When the idea was first proposed in 2005, opinion polls showed a majority in support of it. Ever since then, British public opinion has grown steadily more favourable. Two polls this month alone have shown that the majority in favour remains - with 58% of people saying they'd be more likely to vote for a Party supporting gay marriage.

Friends of Ariel Castro said the same about him, as did many who knew the Tsarnaev brothers. Being 'nice' is not a particularly helpful way of categorising alleged sex abusers, terrorists or Tory politicians - unless you want to argue about what they have in common.

The only PM on that list with real working class roots was Ted Heath. All the others had dodgy (Major, and Callaghan for being born in the wrong place) to comfortable (Wilson, Thatcher) middle class backgrounds.

You're confusing two separate votes. The Euro elections are seen (wrongly) as a cost-free way of declaring a knee-jerk anti-European sentiment. Anti-Europeans in the UK have always done well in these elections - it's why Farridge can win a Euro seat but not get close to a Parliamentary one. But when it comes to the referendum, the opinion polls will favour the antis going in, as they did in 1975, and the pros will win, as they did in 1975. Cameron's 'renegotiation' lingo is all to do with protecting the Square Mile, nothing more. This he did quite shamelessly and ineffectively when he vetoed in 2011. Once those concessions, and those alone, have been wrung out of the EU he will throw the weight of the Cabinet, the Banks and big business behind a Stay In vote. In any case, the only part of Britain able to withstand the economic damage of being outside of the EU is London. Its financial and creative industries are worldwide in reach, helping to make London the global city-state that it really is. The rest of Britain - and especially a provincial England that has always been heavily subsidised by the economic powerhouse of London - will not be able to cope. (If anything, London should seek independence from the rest of the UK, a process which Boris is actually starting with his repatriating tax proposals.) British industry is notoriously bad at developing new markets outside Europe, and has been out-fought and out-thought by other Western companies for decades. Just take a look at the relative trading positions with India and China of France, Germany, even Spain and Italy. So, yes, the Euro elections will go to the ukippers (at the cost of yet more lost influence in European institutions). And the referendum will go the way everyone surely expects: people will vote to stay in, if for other reason than out of naked fear.

The terms 'Pakistani' and 'Muslim' are thrown around too loosely in this whole discussion, and in some ways the problem is more severe, and much more specific, than many seem to realise. You'd think that immigrants from Pakistan to the UK would come from all over their homeland. They don't. Around 75% of all Pakistani migrants and their families come from one small area of Pakistan, Mirpur District, in what Pakistanis call 'Azad ('free') Kashmir'. This district is deeply conservative religiously and poor, with all the problems that come with it: low rates of literacy, appalling outcomes for women, and all else that accompanies living in a war zone (as it is, with India on its doorstep and a proxy war being fought there since 1947). The reason the original migrants moved here was because they were villagers displaced by the construction of the Mangla Dam in the 1960s. Their extended families followed the original migrants to the UK. Two general observations about this: one, when we think of Pakistanis and assume we know who and what they are, what they look like, etc., we're horribly wrong. We're only looking at a tiny group (and their descendants) of Mirpuri villagers. And two, when Mirpuris return to Pakistan, they all say the same thing: they are shocked by how 'liberal' and permissive is Pakistani life. Even two Mirpuri women who've gone on to become TV presenters in this country have told me this - they are scandalised. But the more worrying facts are these: of the 7/7 bombers who were Pakistani, 100% of them were from families with Mirpur connections. The same goes for the many Pakistanis convicted for their part in several failed attempts at terrorist atrocities in the UK. Of the convicted Pakistani child abusers, 100% were, I believe (you can tell by names and other indicators), from families with Mirpur connections. The problem, in my view, is the intimate connection between the oppressiveness of conservative Islam as indoctrinated in these Kashmiri villages, and the propensity towards Extremist violence towards the two groups of people most despised by these religious tenets: 'kuffars' (which can include other Muslims, such as Shia and Ahmadis, but also Christians, Hindus, etc) and women. I don't know what the solution is, and I'm sure that demonising the community won't help. But I'm equally certain we'll see more terrorist recruits emerging from within the Mirpuri community, although perhaps - and hopefully - fewer child abusers.

Nope.

I doubt it, and it's all a bit tiresome. For once, Boris Johnson - of all people - got it right the other day when he said that Europe is a scapegoat for problems in the UK which are actually caused by "chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and under-investment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure." If you actually ask how the EU negatively affects Ukippers and their fellow travellers personally and directly, they seem suddenly to lack the ability to form words.

9/10 suckers.

Craven Cottage is really a LOT easier. The real surprise is Arsenal, which is a nightmare to get away from after a game.

With one hand you giveth, with the other you taketh away.

That's not true, though, is it? You've only attempted to "pull me up" on two references to you. Nothing else. The bulk of my earlier post, which consisted of a number of published facts and figures showing that we've all actually done rather well out of the EU, seems to have passed you by completely. On that subject, the EU certainly has a democratic deficit, although in Britain's case, there's a self-fulfilling element to that: while we decry the EU as "dull", it nonetheless animates the huge and enduring rift in the Tory party that allows Farage's weird farrago of a party space to capture the (overall) disaffected, comfortably-off, older, white, right-wing vote. So EP electoral turnouts are appallingly low in the UK compared with other member states, and yet we kvetch about European institutions endlessly - and endlessly confuse them (eg the ECHR is NOT the EU!). By the way, did you know that Farage's real surname is Farridge? Weird that such a Europhobe should Frenchify his name, don't you think? As for your own political views, let's start with a corrective on the nature of human communication. It consists of what people say and what they don't say; what is made explicit and what is implied; what is heard and what is inferred; what claimed and what is logically deduced. In your case, it's possible to put together your admiration of strong-man Nigel with the conclusions I drew about you in your recent posts about the Boston bombings, in which you adopted a position regarded as too extreme even for the right wing of the Republican Party. Your unquestioning adoption of Infowars' 'false-flag' claims, and your utterly distasteful disparagement of the dead and severely injured as play-actors, leads me to some clear conclusions about your real 'when-the-chips-are-down' political proclivities. You may object to this characterisation, but it's a reasonable inference to draw. Now let's get back to the wonders of the EU and Farridge's exploitation of this ragbag of over-weened moaners.

You know you've reached a special kind of Saintsweb nadir when pap and Tender get into an icky embrace. To counter that snapping sound of jerking knees, here's a very brief summary of Simon Kuper's interesting op ed in the FT this weekend. "Europe," he says, "is having a terrible time - except compared with probably every other continent and any time in history." The average Spaniard lives to 82 - seven years longer than in post-Fascist 1980. Most countries where people can expect to live to 82 are European (WHO figures) Despite the crisis, the average Spaniard's income is nearly double what it was in 1980 Crime rates have been consistently falling across Europe - British streets have not been this safe in 30 years (ONS figures) Seven of top-10 rate countries on the World Economic Forum's gender gap index are European (ie have the most gender equality) When the CIA (!) ranked 136 countries for income equality, the 17 most equal were all European Russia, Brazil and China all lag well behind even Greece in average incomes (World Bank figures) There has been no terrorist outrage in europe since 2005 When even Serbia and Kosovo make peace, something is right "No one would predict a war in Europe involving very large powers" according to FRIDE, the European think tank on foreign policy. "Europe looks like a very pleasant suburb of geopolitics." Keep in mind that UKIP appeals to the paps and Tenders of this world, and those like them - grumpy haves who want yet more because of their specialness. UKIP attracts proportionately only a tiny number of votes from those who have some genuine, non-smug claim to having been frozen out of the economy, particularly the young unemployed and under-employed who've been hardest hit by what followed after the credit crunch. UKIP appeals to the faux-rage of the provincial petit bourgeoisie, with their winter-fuel allowances, free bus passes and free TV licences, protected final-salary pensions, unearned equity in their properties. It also appeals to the out-and-out racists, including BNP members who were tasked with the job of infiltrating UKIP as councillors-elect. It appeals to those fuming at the conspiratorial gall of scientists faking all this talk about climate change, because action taken to deal with it would infringe on their small lives. And it appeals to a particular constituency represented by one-man (it's always men) 'business owners' who resent being taxed at all, or rage at having to compete for work with much better motivated and better skilled East Europeans. UKIP is not a protest. This local election was not a protest. It resulted in not one council where UKIP had any say in local government. It is, though, a cheap, convenient declaration of war against a personally perceived impotence - the kind of impotence and discontent that tends to fester when you have it all and are fearful of losing your featherbedding, even though the facts and figures suggest you won't. It is the wimpish howl of the little men, who invest in the supposedly sparkling 'personality' of strong leaders rising 'above politics' (where have you heard THAT before?), for which their model is Nigel blue-blazer Farage!