The Coffee House Wall – 25th/1st October

Posted on September 28, 2017

This is the Coffee House Wall for this week. I won’t say that it is your chance to communicate with us, as we are all in this together. It is, nevertheless, the Conservative Blog post that has no particular theme, and where everything is on topic. Let’s just remember that we want to avoid ad hominem attacks on others. We don’t want to engage with trolls. We want to moderate our language ourselves as responsible and mature adults, choosing to use fruity language only where it is necessary. This is our opportunity to show what the Spectator Coffee House Wall could have been like.

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67 thoughts on “The Coffee House Wall – 25th/1st October”

  2. COFFEE HOUSE
    The West is delusional about de-radicalising jihadists
    Gavin Mortimer

    The error of Emma Kelty, the one that cost the British adventurer her brave life on the banks of the Amazon, was a failing all too common in Europeans: she had too much good faith. Raised in comfort and educated in compassion, Kelty had little concept of the savagery that lurks in some souls. Displaying a mix of naivety and conceit, she ignored warnings from villagers and went on her way, even posting a joke on social media mocking the locals’ concern for her welfare. Two days later she was murdered by a gang of ‘water rats’, young men with no regard for human life. What happened to Kelty is little different from what has been happening to Europe in recent years. The same naivety and conceit afflicts our leaders who struggle to understand that there are, living among us, a great many people who want to cause us harm.
    In an interview with a French newspaper at the weekend the German feminist and journalist, Alice Schwarzer, explained that Angela Merkel’s greatest mistake was that ‘even before the migrant crisis she had not understood the difference between Islam and Islamism, between the religion and the political ideology’. Schwarzer blamed Merkel’s failure to grasp the crucial difference on the fact she’s the daughter of a pastor, who preached tolerance and kindness. The same criticism can be levelled at Theresa May, whose father was a vicar, and no doubt delivered sermons on similar themes. The PM, like the German Chancellor, seems to believe that in the end the Islamists will come round to our way of thinking and embrace our set of values.
    They should read a book by a French reporter called David Thomson to better understand why their hope may be dangerously misplaced. Called Les Revenants [The Undead], the title is a nod to the French jihadists who fought for the Islamic State before returning home. It is a disturbing but masterly work of research by a journalist who, in his own words, was ‘humiliated’ on television in 2014 for daring to suggest events in Syria would cause terrorist blowback in France.
    There are hundreds of former Islamic State fighters now back in the West; at least 750, according to Europol Director Rob Wainwright, although as many as 2,500 European-born fighters are likely to be in ‘various stages of returning’. A few return claiming that they have renounced Jihad, like the Canadian who breezily dismissed his time fighting for Islamic State as something ‘that’s behind me, we all do things that we regret’.
    But of the numerous returnees Thomson interviewed, the majority were unrepentant and only one, Zoubeir, has co-operated with the authorities to promote an anti-Islamist message within his local community. ‘They’re still jihadists,’ Zoubeir said of his former comrades. ‘That’s the reason why most aren’t prepared to give evidence against others…because they consider France impious, an enemy of Islam, which fights their brothers’.
    Thomson’s book also reveals the contempt with which the Islamists regard the West’s attempts to deradicalise them. ‘I don’t see how you can de-radicalise these people because they don’t see themselves as radicals, but as Muslims conforming to what they follow, which is the Koran’, said Zoubeir.
    A female Islamist, Lena, who told Thomson that the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists was one of the most ‘beautiful’ days of her life, explained that the West doesn’t understand the depth of their faith. ‘It’s funny’, she said. ‘They talk to us as if we’re life’s losers…but for me, deradicalisation is just some fancy new word they’ve dreamt up’.
    Another woman, Safya, described losing patience with her intelligence service interrogators upon her return to France. Why wouldn’t she condemn Islamic State’s beheading of hostages? they asked repeatedly. ‘It’s in the Sharia,’ she kept telling them. ‘I don’t have to be for or against: Sharia is Sharia. Full-stop!’
    Many of the Frenchmen who fought for Islamic State remain in prison. Although that in itself is a cause for concern. Prison is described by Thomson as a jihadist’s university – as it is in across Europe – where Allah’s battle-hardened warriors can radicalise impressionable young Muslims serving time for petty crime. It was reported this week that in Belgian prison inmates now receive letters under their cell doors inviting them to join Isis.
    For the moment, Europe retains blind faith in its approach. ‘In the long term, authorities and local communities need to work together to resocialise or integrate returnees into society’, said a recent report published by the European Commission’s Radicalization Awareness Network. Alice Bah Kuhnke, Sweden’s minister of Culture and Democracy, said something similar earlier this year, declaring the need to have ‘structures locally, such as social services, around our country to integrate them back into our democratic society’.
    Has it occurred to people like Kuhnke that they may not want to be re-integrated, that no number of well-meaning social initiatives will bring them back into a secular culture they despise?
    Indeed, the greatest threat posed by the returning jihadists isn’t so much what they might do but what they might say, radicalising young and impressionable Muslims who never made the trip to Syria or Iraq. ‘We are even more concerned by that phenomenon right now’, admitted Rob Wainwright in a recent interview.
    Zoubeir shared a cell with such a young man when he was imprisoned upon his return to France. His cellmate was still a teenager, unknown to the French police when he was arrested by the Turkish authorities in 2015 on way to Syria. He rose at 4am to pray and scolded Zoubeir for listening to music. It wasn’t righteous, he said, unlike martyrdom. Zoubeir considered his cellmate more fanatical than the men he’d fought with in Syria because he felt he had to prove himself. Nonetheless ,in March 2016 the young man convinced a French judge he was no longer radicalised but was ‘a Muslim grounded in the values of mercy and goodness’.
    Zoubeir’s cellmate was called Adel Kermiche, and not long after his release he and another teenage Islamist walked into a quiet Normandy church and slit the throat of the priest. The judge had been warned by prosecutors not to release Kermiche but the advice was ignored. Naivety and conceit can be a fatal concoction.

  3. In the current era of manipulative politics, spin and fake news we need to be cynical and suspicious of politicians. The media should be more challenging, not motivated by their own agendas but on behalf of the people, our eroding freedoms and our unwritten constitution.

    What you see is not what you get. Hopeful is for people with their heads in the sand and/or deluded dystopian lefties.

  4. Wall to wall ‘food banks’ and the failure of the Universal Credit roll-out on all news channels. The evidence adduced by both Sky and the National Agitprop channel this morning to exemplify ‘increasing poverty’ in the UK (as a result of government policy) was so arse-endedly ironic that I cannot believe other than that even the Gramscian brain-washed reporters and anchors are not only just taking the piss, but ‘rubbing the Tories noses in it’ as promised by their Blair-Brown oppos. To them the Corbyn Factor, must be like the Second Coming. One can only hope that the glittering-eyed ‘confidence’ among the Corbyistas at the New Communist Party conference this week, like Kinnock’s premature jubilation back in 1992 and Steel’s over-confidence in 1981, will be followed by the Nemesis of the silent majority hitting them like a juggernaut driven by a half drunk Belgian in a UK motorway fog, when the next election arrives. But that supposes that there still is such a thing as a silent majority in the UK (that usually prevents such obvious extremes from prevailing). I fear that the ‘silent majority’ has now become the clapped out mini-minority. So it’s no longer “cue Richard Kemp”. It is definitely and sadly ” cue Sir Dickie Mottram.” We well and truly are!

    And, as ever, your are also spot on Colonel.

    Btw – someone open the window again.

    Peter – can’t we afford to have the septic tank emptied again? The accumulation of rancid Shavian shite is wafting in on the remants of the transatlantic hurricanes again. It’s enough to have the tsunami of twaddle pour on to our carpets every time we turn on the telly, do we have to suffer it when we click into CHW?

    Moreover, I fear The Vicar’s daughter has done for us all.

  5. An interesting comment on AB’s latest post ‘No poofs allowed’ by Fin (Sep. 27 08:27)

    http://www.alexanderboot.com/no-poofs-allowed/

    “I always thought of ‘fascism’ and ‘socialism’ as synonymous…

    The original ‘fasci’ were the Italian trade guilds (motto: ‘strength through unity’) and the renowned international socialist scholar, Benito Mussolini appropriated the term for his own brand of national socialism. As I believe you pointed out in an earlier piece, FDR’s ‘New Deal’, involving massive state spending on infrastructure, was called ‘a great fascist act’.

    Now, of course, it has become an insult, hurled by the left, at anyone who disagrees with them – much like that other form of national socialism – nazism – has become ‘far right’.

    It is because of this that I liken the political spectrum to a fork, with the tines on the left and the handle on the right. The tines represent the myriad forms of socialism (including fascism) based on their preferred ‘collective’ (class, race, nationalism, or the current vogue – identity) and involves all of the common traits such as large state control, mindless group think and slavish adoration of a personality cult leadership. The handle involves less and less ‘state’ rules, regulations and the like, and more and more individual self reliance as you travel down it, until you reach the end where resides anarchy.

    Your ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ point is a good one. Many ‘conservative’ Brexit voters love Le FN because they’re anti EU. Le FN are also rampantly socialist with an economic manifesto indistinguishable from the ‘far left’ Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s”. (end of quoted comment).

    Which is no doubt why Anne Marie Waters is able to slip so easily from far left politics to UKIP.
    Any disguise will do. Wouldn’t trust her as far as I can see her. A dyke dissembler. And of course with her success Farage’s impotence is writ large. There is no party which deserves my vote, at present. Why can’t we have a ‘none of the above’ option until somebody forms a party to represent the views expressed here? I suspect that the ‘none of the above’ would form a majority. Perhaps that’s it! The NOTA Party. Richard Kemp? Feel like leading it? You’d get a landslide. My vote is promised and assured. Only other solution – get together a posse of your old firm and overwhelm the wet wankers and their vociferous vaginas in a bloodless coup.

    Reply

  10. Frank P September 29th, 2017 – 16:04

    He’s an “ex” Liberal Democrat. Ex cavalry, commissioned in the TA, ex-Plod, spent 3 years working for the EU in Common (Purpose) Security and Defence roles. Says he wants to restore “credibility” to UKIP and “that the effectiveness of policies is more important than where they lie on the left to right political spectrum”. Hmm.

    Cuckoo and Cameron writ large all over him.

  13. Colonel Mustard (16:36)

    I concur. He tried to ‘lead beyond authority’ by running for the Mickey Mouse PCC for Kent, too.
    Another sign of a short-arse who thinks office (of any kind) gives him three inches in height and two inches on his dick. Napoleon the Umpteenth. My lapsed membership of UKIP remains firmly lapsed. (Yes – I know, what was I thinking?) Well it seemed like any port in a storm at the time. I think I’d rather drown this time.

  14. The more I read about Bolton the less I like him. Wouldn’t be surprised if there is now a war of attrition between him and the Waters ‘woman’ (just described on Agitprop’s 24/7 channel as the ‘extreme right wing candidate’ in the UKIP election. Bwaaaahahahaha.

    I would like to know more about his “extreme bravery award” during his short sojourn as a copper at Thames Valley. Seemingly no press reports of the incident. Modesty or exaggeration? Just askin’? Can anyone help? Wouldn’t like his light to be hidden under a bushel.

  16. Frank P September 29th, 2017 – 17:05

    When England and the Army were a foreign country he might have been referred to as “belt worthy”. The term referred to the belt of honour awarded to the top graduate in each Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU) intake and was not meant to be complimentary. In the American forces such types are referred to as “ticket punchers” and those who choose them tend to be cut from the same cloth as the chosen. Thus does mediocrity perpetuate itself. The real leaders are usually exceptions and maverick, like Nelson, who rise to occasions and confound the complacency.

    Earmarked for great things but those around them on their way up often wonder why.

    UKIP deserved outspoken charisma and someone prepared to rock the boat, not someone intent on wetting it so that the horses are not scared.

  17. Seems the flakes are already falling:

    https://mobile.twitter.com/Ned_Donovan/status/913788412733337601

    Ah well. Back to the drawing board. Farage should be ashamed … he was the only political figure to emerge from the morass of politics of the last 40 years who could have changed things. His boasts about Brexit will sound ludicrous in five years from now as it transmogrifies into a gigantic fucking fudge and still with its jackboot on the necks of our quisling politicos. Brexit? Bollocks!

  18. … and that’s always s’posing Dim Wrong ‘Un or Vlad don’t kick off WW3 as an opportunist move whilst The West is manifestly on its knees, despite the posturing and braggadocio of the Pentagon and the Nato bullshitters.

    I despair.

  22. Frank P September 29th, 2017 – 14:55

    I full endorse Frank’s penultimate paragraph. It is difficult to understand why the pest is able, time and time again, to evade eviction to pursue his agenda of mischief and provocation here using a succession of thin disguises.

  26. I always feel a soft wave of revulsion whenever I see or hear the creepy Matthew Parris but his article on Brexit in this week’s Spectator reaches a new low even for him.

    However for overweening pomposity the ghastly gargoyle Armando Iannucci (“Scottish satirist”) gives Parris a run for his money with his “Notebook’. He describes Trump as “America’s first balloon-animal-inflated-by-potato-gas” President (not just factually untrue but juvenile) and is equally insulting about Boris Johnson. He has some astonishing ideas about climate science too where apparently you are an idiot if you subscribe to his worse than dodgy spoof of “Denial”. He is being fawned over for his Stalin comedy, where “the internal political landscape of 1950s Soviet Russia takes on darkly comic form” and features “an abundance of horrors – innocent people rounded up and murdered, threats of torture, and more; while Iannucci finds ways to make these massacres morbidly amusing”.

    Not such a barrel of laughs for the real victims though. And the regime was spawned from the October revolution that the BBC is busy celebrating. No revulsion at that from the unelected establishment, even though it ought to be treated with the same disgust as if they were celebrating Germany 1933.

  27. AB nails yet another stratagem of the leftist culture warriors.devised by those who now run Criminal Justice and and implemented by the craven useful idiots who have fhe audacity to call themselves ‘police officers’. Pawns in a diabolical path of societal destruction. The evidence is manifest in myriad ways around us in everyday life. In the family, the workplace, ingrained in a media activity and throughout academia and schooling from nurseries to 6th form. And worst of all in the military services.

    http://www.alexanderboot.com/rape-is-in-full-bloom/

    Insanity. And the sad thing is that faux rape and the resultant distrust and frustration between men and women may well lead to more ACTUAL rape.

  29. Gloom.
    I have never woken to such gloom. Miserable fog and rain and in my customary trip down to the newsagent to exchange my voucher for a diminishing paper of distorted news, I see headines across the board of more gloom.
    Why?
    We have a bright future outside the straight jacket of Europe.
    Thank the Good Lord Jesus for Charles Moore.

    “You can see why Theresa May said in Florence that the British wished the European Union well in its plans for greater integration, while choosing a different path ourselves. There is no point in causing antagonism over what we cannot prevent. But in fact greater European integration will do great harm to all Europeans, including us. The rise of AfD in the German elections was caused almost entirely by Mrs Merkel’s extraordinary decision to admit a million Middle Eastern migrants in a year. The spread of the Schengen area — proposed by Jean-Claude Juncker — combined with recrudescent migrant pressure can only confirm freedom of movement as the impossible issue of our time. The attempt to support the euro with banking union and pan-eurozone economic government will continue to penalise the poorer members, while ultimately enraging German voters who have to take on everyone else’s debts. Yes, we have an interest in EU stability. But no, it will not be achieved by the Merkel/Macron/Juncker visions.”

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/junckers-vision-of-greater-european-integration-wont-end-well/

  31. Marshal Roberts October 1st, 2017 – 08:40

    Beyond the less than crowd pleasing but distracting sleight of hand of May and her cloaked Remainer government the EU marches on to the sound of jackboots and the schellenbaum:-

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/julian-thompson-weve-stumbled-brexit-trap-defence/

    May’s proposed tuition fee tinkering is PATHETIC. Not only does it utterly fail to address the inequality in this “United” Kingdom but it manages to suborn itself to Corbyn’s narrative just enough to attract ridicule from the very identity group it is trying to bribe.

    That woman and the people advising her appear to be terminally stupid. A hybrid of insulting bribery constrained by Hammond’s tight fist as money is hosed overseas and at every emerging knee-jerk does not a good strategy make.

  32. I cannot abide that woman. She is weak and wooden and her actions have denied us a strong position with Juncker, Barnier et al, while domestically she has given credence to the most left wing duo we have ever had at the top of a major party.
    People scoff at Corbyn but he is driven by a rigid Stalinist ideologue McDonnell who will destroy everything we hold dear.

  33. Marshall Roberts (13:07)

    Who are ‘we’ and what do ‘we hold dear’ that hasn’t already been irretrievably flushed down the shitter by successive ‘governments’ comprising solopsistic shitbags, traitors or a combination of both, who seemingly deliberately destroyed our armed services and our police; who have all used the NHS as a ‘political weapon’ and as a milch cow for administrative accolytes? The front end heroes of our societal infrastructure have been used and abused by parasites that have all milked the system and none of them have ever been brought to book. None of them have ever tasted porridge in confinement in HMPs – their just deserts. Our once exemplary education structure has been infiltrated and destroyed during the covert implementation of alien inimical game-plans, devised by leftist revolutionaries who finally realiised that free market capitalism can only be destroyed from within. In more recent decades Islamic jihad (despite its own internecine and bloody factional disputes over ideology and methodology) have joined forces with the left and copied the left’s m.o., in order to defeat their common enemies – America and Israel (and of course the allies of both, particularly the UK). We are all involved in a process that can only be described as a rout. ‘We’ (seemingly confined to about a dozen CHW stalwarts) seem to be the only group in our nation who are fully aware of our predicament; as most of us are admittedly past our sell-by date, are as impotent as the generations of wankers we have spawned and nurtured – by default and an unwllingness to offend by reiterating hard truths at crucial stages of their development. Mea culpa.

    That’s my honest and sad lament as I stare stoney-faced at the depictions of the latest travesty emerging from my TV screen, and read the idiot copy from so called journalists, regarding the ‘Conservative Party Conference’ (my arse!).

    The spectacle is so enervating as to prevent me even from following Voltaire’s advice, “Now let us tend to our gardens” – my usual distraction from the antics of my species.

  37. Are the BBC about to trash another piece of British history by stuffing it with their leftist bilge?

  43. As a devoted admirer of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and the rest of the Barcelona team, I have been watching the Catalan debacle with interest.
    The papers seem to be emphasising the violence of the Madrid Government, but I take this as a good lesson to the Ayrshire and Glaswegian Fishwife.

  44. And as a lapsed member of the Conservative Party, I contemplate renewing my membership and getting on the train to Manchester to give Ms May some backbone. I note David Davis who I admire is being kept under wraps.
    Why?

  45. Re 06.38
    I see the Fishwife is already running scared:

    ” Nicola Sturgeon
    ✔ ‎@NicolaSturgeon

    Statement from @foreignoffice on #Catalonia is shamefully weak. A true friend of Spain would tell them today’s actions wrong and damaging.”

  46. BTW
    David Gawke must stick to his guns on Universal Credit. The Benefits Culture must be destroyed.
    While Spreadsheet Phil currently warbling on Today should keep it buttoned.

  48. How much influence did the EU junta have on the Spanish reaction to the Catalonian referendum?

  49. @Frank P, 1st – 15:17

    “Now let us tend to our gardens”

    Been doing that for a while, now. “The garden” has responded with total indifference.

  50. LAS VEGAS

    I have tried over the last few years to draw on the riches of the reporting in the alternative media better to understand the political economy. My first response to the news of the massacre in Las Vegas is to paraphrase the Chinese saying which has been quoted on the Wall before and say that when the fool looks at the massacre the wise man is pointing at the collapse of the economy caused by the incompetence and malice of the owners of central banks.

  51. We need to be mindful that the Catalonians are rich and wish to secede to preserve resources for themselves. The rest of Spain will be poorer. Madrid and the EU have right on their side.

  52. David or tele. There are a lot of Africans looking at your house and bank account, Why in a fair world should you have these things when they have nothing.
    And you never mention how the asylum seeker/migrants you invited in are getting on in your house.
    All going well is it, I expect with the shortage of doctors and teachers they are all in jobs now.

  53. @Marshal Roberts, 2nd – 08:14

    When Nick Robinson was interviewed upon his appointment to the ‘Today’ programme he described his style of questioning politicians as that of a devil’s advocate. Seems he’s got tired of the middleman’s job and gone for the top spot instead.

  54. Frank P at 23.26 ; 1st Oct.

    BBC trashing British history : BBC ONE ; `The Last Post`; Sunday,9pm.

  55. Las Vegas: Have monitored both Fox. (on live Stream) . and Sky simultaneously. Fox fair and factual – Sky hideously political (anti-Trump). Trump delivers faultless appropriate address. More later.

    O O.

  56. ISIS claiming responsibility for Vegas attack. Hmm.
    Weeell they wouldn’t they? Is he a recent convert? Wait ‘n’ see at the moment.

  57. I know country music can be irritating, particularly the modern exponents, but Jeeez! It would be more understandable if it was a Bruce’s Springsteen concert.

    Shouldn’t be flippant, but in the face of such senseless atrocity, it’s my only escape from despair at humanity’s fault lines.

  58. In name of diversity and equality …… New movie of `Huckelberry Finn` to be made with Hugh Grant to play Nigger Jim .

    (satire)

  61. I have just watched Fraser Nelson being interviewed by Jon Snow.
    This prompted me to search him on google and came across this in relation to the Charlie Hebdo thing:

    “What does a massacre in Paris have to do with [Muslims]? To denounce this would accept the premise that, as a Muslim, you are somehow caught up in all of this. The difference, of course, is that the IRA murdered in the name of Irish republicanism, not Catholicism. Few people in Britain thought that the former was an extension of the latter. Any priest who voiced support for terrorism, anywhere, would be excommunicated – so no one could credibly claim any overlap. Islam is not so lucky. It has no effective means of banning hate preachers, and now has a new breed of fanatics happy to murder in its name… Overall, British Muslims have been poorly served by their leadership.”

  63. LAS VEGAS

    Let’s take it slow.

    Stephen Paddock was in the rooms where the guns were and from which they were fired.
    Paddock was dead when the police entered his room.
    Paddock is called the gunman.

    Using classical logic, there seems to be an undistributed middle here.

  66. The Catalans have spoken. There is a clear democratic wish expressed. I expect the UK government to recognise the aspiring State.

    If this seriously pisses off the Spanish government, they might stop to consider, before howling their outrage, their interminable animosity and interference with Gibralter.

  67. Read Enemies – Foreign and Domestic by Matthew Bracken.

    If Las Vegas is not a false flag incident, I’ll eat my didgeridoo.

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