More gentle, beautiful people:

Two men have been arrested on suspicion of money laundering by police investigating an alleged scam by extremists travelling to Syria.

Police said the fraud targeted "unsuspecting vulnerable and elderly victims" who were called at home by a person claiming to be a police officer.

The caller told them their bank account had been compromised and encouraged them to transfer money to an account under the control of the fraudsters.

One elderly man lost approximately £150,000 as a result of the fraud.

The two men - aged 23 and 29 - were arrested during searches at addresses in west and east London earlier today.

http://news.sky.com/story/1...

Ah, friends of yours.
Good friends, obviously.

Keep whining about the police doing their job.

Not gentle but still a beautiful person.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/u...

~alec

Thank heavens for Boris.

Thank heavens his predecessor is no longer there. Can you imagine the crap he would have come out with?

I'm totally unconvinced by Amnesty's actions now, after what they did to the whistle blower in their ranks a couple of years ago. The only thing they regret is being caught red handed - red with the blood that ISIS sheds. Amnesty is poisoned by this association.

The ever so predictable swuppie line: RACISTS!!!!

It's astonishing how dishonest he is in that article, especially the way he plays switcheroo with the chronology of events. He claims it was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that led to the formation of al qaeda.
The creep is just a liar, isn't he. A lying troublemaker. Why can't we deport the bugger?

“I personally believe that while he was clearly pushed and alienated by the way he was treated in Britain, that that is not enough,” Moazzam told Socialist Worker.
“In the end he is responsible for what he did in Syria.

“The nine people he beheaded were innocent from whatever angle you look at it.‘Jihadi John’s’ orders didn’t come from Britain, they came from Isis."

He didn't say that to the BBC, or did he?

I notice they've minimised his actions specifically down to beheading nine people. No mention of the mass executions he has personally led.

Boris v. Asim: Eton 5 Whitgift 0

Re: sorting out Labour: This is "rising star" Rowenna Davis' (PPE Oxon) idea of how to go about it: Adopt the Galloway brand of "genuinely emotive vision for a local area" and "meaningful relationships with faith and community groups.”
".. her party must learn from Mr Galloway, the Respect MP who secured a shock victory in the 2012 Bradford West by-election, a supposedly safe Labour seat.

Mr Galloway ran a grassroots campaign opposing the presence of British soldiers in Afghanistan and winning mass support from the Muslim community. Ms Davis says: “George Galloway has shown us what is possible when you have a genuinely emotive vision for a local area and some meaningful relationships with faith and community groups.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/t...

What I look for in a PPC is a commitment to serve all their constituents, equally and impartially. The best ones - and there are a number of good ones, try to do just that. I am not interested in voting for someone whose preoccupation is with commitment is to this or that 'community group' or 'faith group', even if I am/were to be part of one. The community I am part of is primarily a geographical one. It includes very different people but is a more meaningful actual community.

Apart from anything else, she doesn't seem to realise that 'emotive' has negative connotations, I.e. It is a bit of an insult. So her use of language is poor.

Just a couple of the innumerable atrocities committed by Amnesty International's beloved Cage's beloved ISIS in the last few days:

http://www.dailyrecord.co.u...

http://www.dailyrecord.co.u...

The first is 'merely' another instance (the fourth in several weeks) of a gay man being thrown to his death by ISIS, this time in Raqqa.

The second is of a mother who went to find her kidnapped son at an ISIS camp, was given a meal first and then told, "You've just eaten your son." The fucking monsters had killed him, cooked him and served him to the poor woman.

There's your 'defensive jihad', Amnesty International, you evil filth.

I'll never walk through LOVE Park when I'm down in Center City again...

If you check out the twitter stream for #guardianlive, you'll get bon mots like Snowden ( speaking from Moscow) wittering on about the need to speak 'truth to power'.

Especially coming after the murder of Nemtsov, It makes me want to SCREAM

Happily I have never had anyone actually use that dreadfully pompous phrase, 'speaking truth to power' to my face. And in the becalmed ideological climate I now inhabit (i.e. the rural midlands), I am not likely to hear it.

If I ever do hear it, I am not sure whether my reaction will be hysterical laughter or, shall we say, 'defensive jihad'.

Hilariously, Amnesty are now putting it out that they intend to cut ties to Cage. Why? What's changed since yesterday?

In his marvellous "Cultural Amnesia [I originally typed Amnesty, for obvious reasons]", Clive James skewers an account of Goebbels life which claims he didn't know about the holocaust but refers to the possibility of Jews wanting to exact revenge after the war. Why, he asks, would they want to do that? Had something bad happened?

Similarly, one might ask of Amnesty's decision to sever links with their former friends, "why, has something bad happened?"

On a related not, it's claimed that the killer's mother recognised his voice but kept quiet; the father, too. Yes, our asylum policy has worked well: let families in, the son's a murderer and the parents conspire to conceal evidence about it. Another fine example of the benefits to British life of unchecked immigration by bogus "asylum" "seekers".

According to a report in the Times, the whole family was under a cloud in Kuwait, way back before he was even born. They finally fell foul of the authorities there when they came under suspicion of collaborating with the Iraqi invasion. I got the distinct impression that the son may well be simply a chip off the old block.

To describe Emwazi as a Kuwaiti has been a little disengenuous. Though born in Kuwait he was born to non citizens. His father was from Iraq. Apparently there are many people who reside in Gulf countries like Kuwait who have no citizenship. Therefore CAGE's claim that MI5's interference prevented him from starting a new life "in his own country" is another of their fantasies. The Kuwaitis refused him a visa. He was not entitled to go and live there.

I may have been slightly unfair the Radio 4 presenter in another post. He does deserve some credit for asking Crawshaw (as he should have asked him, but an alert Cage sympathiser doing the interview might have avoided it) "Will you be partnering again with Cage?"

There was no answer to give that could reflect well on Amnesty, but to say 'yes' would have brought media opprobium down on its head. By his desperate wriggling 'probably not', Crawshaw may have formulated Amnesty's new 'policy' for them then and there. They had no choice but to confirm it. And he's effectively been forced to admit Amnesty got it horribly wrong. They were warned this would happen.

OT(ish) - interesting comment from Peter Hitchens

https://www.facebook.com/wo...

I agree that the result of mass immigration and the cultural beliefs and aspirations that come with that will inevitably have an impact on us. I regard this as a disaster. I do not want to have any aspect of Islam impinging on my life any more than it is...( self censorship of the press, political correctness applied to avoid charges of racial discrimination, cultural commentators who castigate those of us who do not see multi-culturalism as overwhelmingly positive, etc). On the other hand, Hitchens' hand wringing about the so called moral bankruptcy of the west is just nonsense.

Not keen on his suggestion that 'most of us' don't believe in anything. Most people in the UK believe in democracy and the rule of law and equality before the law. Those who reject these things should consider moving to somewhere that they would find more congenial.

With Hitchens the country is always going to the dogs. He would have said the same about the cocktail-drinking, jazz-listening, scoffing irreverent young things of the 20s & 30s - the ones who put on their uniforms when they had to.

Peter Hitchens is a pillock.

History will show that we defeated ISIS at the gates of Tower Hamlets and Bradford West, :)

Have CAGE explained why Tommy Robinson doesn't go around beheading people?

Dear Fas--

* Did Jewish survivors of the Holocaust behead Nazi sympathizers in Europe?

* Did/do Copts behead Muslims in Egypt?

* Did/do American Blacks behead Whites in the US?

* Will Syrian Christians and Yazidis eventually behead or crucify members of ISIS--or Muslims at large?

There are tons of grievance holders all over the world--some of them are grievances *against* Muslims. Why is the grievance at hand so special and terrible that it requires the measures taken?

Grievance share holders, and Islam is the new Apple. (Christianity must be Google then, and Microsoft is Buhddism.)

Dear Jurek--

Where does that leave Judaism?

I asked the question myself and I am unable to to this actual time to propose an answer.

I was thinking of HP (Hewlett Packard of course), also IBM, Oracle or AT&T, but they all seem to be not really fitting.

Maybe it is because that Jews are generally not grievance shareholders.

Dear Jurek--

Oh--Jews have their grievances. They just don't take the same form of expression as what we are seeing now.

I think there was even a (aborted) plan to poison the drinking water in Germany, or something like that, just after the war by some irate Holocaust survivors. They ultimately decided not to do it. I read once (don't remember where) that one person was watching the Eichmann family in Argentina--got close to them--and even took one of the sons boating, thinking to drown him--but at the last minute, decided not to--and rowed with the boy back to shore.

Maybe it has something to do with the way *honor* is differentially reckoned--but--that may be too simplistic an explanation

A group called Nakam formed after the war to carry out revenge missions against Germans. As you say they planned to poison millions of Germans with contaminated water but this plan failed/was foiled and so a related group instead distributed arsenic laced bread loaves to former SS officers at the Langwasser pow camp. I think about 2000 soldiers became ill and 500 died as a result.

Dear MeMow--

That may indeed, be so. I have some vague memory of reading about all this--but can't recall the details. If I had had more time, I would have checked in more detail. Still--this is not quite the same sort of thing that we are seeing with ISIS--and was directed at military people, not civilians. And then--it all stopped. I also believe that Armenians carried out bombing attacks for a while against Turkish officials (as I recall, during the 1970's)--again--not directed at ordinary citizens--and not what we are seeing now with ISIS and related grievance-holders.

Dear VC--

I have vague memories of reading that somewhere--but I don't remember where. I didn't pursue the matter at the time, because it seemed not to be a widespread reaction by survivors of the Holocaust against their former tormentors. One didn't see anything in the order of: "I'm so distressed by the way I've been treated, I just have to go off and behead someone"--and, I might add--there is no comparison in the way the respective distressed parties had been treated.

Dear VC--

I agree. I had something of a shock when I read it--maybe because I grew up with tons of Holocaust survivors around me--and I never heard any desire for such sort of retaliation ever voiced--either as something that was done, or something that they wished they had done. I heard a lot of different sorts of sentiments voiced--but not that. That doesn't mean that I doubt it happened. Interesting.

Another key fact is that the other grievance holders have a direct experience of injustice at the hands of the groups they may target but the islamic nutters going off to Afghanistan or Iraq have much more tenuous links to the troubles in these places. What ethnic or linguistic ties to Somalia or Syria does a Malaysian jihadi have? The victimhood narrative is spurious unless you factor in something from the religion : a sense of religious supremacy over others as expressed by the founder's battle cry and flag.

l'chaim

One bizarre aspect of this is the almost homo-erotic tropes about
the beauties and sweetness of young bruvvers (rather than them just being misunderstood blokes) are par for the course among Islamists...

There's a strange sickliness about it - these guys seem to be literally in love with themselves and their "friends"...

Homo eroticism is in no way alien to homophobia. It is in some regard a very important precondition for it. The companionship of men who express their commitment to each other does somehow support the hate against gay men. Homosexual intercourse would break the bond that exists between them, it is in such environments considered as corrosive.

Homo eroticism is allowed because it creates dependencies that can be exploited, sex has a more explosive consequence such men like to spare for real explosives.

add to that the Islamic contempt for women, with the exception of the Kurds.

There is also that well known animosity between islamist butches and fairies/femininity/women etc.

Many men left Europe for gay adventure certain of its delights in Morocco and beyond.
A colleague of mine years ago told me his grandfather, Sir Richard Burton had said,"The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with the Persian vice

"Kuchi Kuchi Koo"

Richard Burton was also an extreme antisemite, who peddled "ritual murder" slanders, especially in his "The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam" (1898).

And they are still peddled although modified. The al-Dura hoax was a way of reintroducing the Jew as child killer. The fulminations against Cast Lead rely on dead children for their potency.