The timeline of shame

In March 2018 the Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman began a month-long tour of Western nations, securing new arms deals with Britain, the United States, and France.

In early March 2018 the brutal Islamist tyrant received a warm Tory welcome in London. Against a backdrop of widespread criticism of the repressive Saudi regime and their ongoing campaign of war crimes in Yemen, Theresa May agreed a new arms deal with the Saudi regime to supply them 48 Typhoon jets. This deal was signed off by the UK government despite their full knowledge that the Saudis have been using British-manufactured weapons to commit horrific war crimes.

Later that month Bin Salman rocked up in the United States to meet Donald Trump. The President of the United States demeaned his office and his nation by begging the Saudi tyrant to "share the wealth" by buying more American-manufactured weapons. The trip concluded with a new $670 million deal to supply the repressive kingdom with anti-tank missiles and spare parts for tanks and helicopters.

And then Bin Salman appeared in Paris to meet Emmanuel Macron. The trip concluded with the French government agreeing to essentially scrap their managed arms export strategy in order to hawk weapons to the Saudi tyrants directly. Of the three leaders Macron is under the most domestic pressure to halt arms sales to the Saudis because of their appalling human rights record and their war crimes in Yemen, but he ignored public opinion in order to make French arms sales to Saudi Arabia even easier!

And then just one week later France, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to launch missile attacks on Syria (including targets that had been declared free of chemical weapons just weeks earlier by the OPCW).

It's absolutely obvious that the main beneficiaries of these attacks on Syria are the Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists who have been losing the war there. We know they're Saudi backed because the US government admitted as much in the leaked Hillary Clinton emails.

We also know that Saudi Arabia has produced the second most ISIS fighters (after Tunisia), and that the country is the single biggest source of pro-ISIS propaganda on social media.

Within five weeks of starting his arms deal tour all three of his major arms-dealer nations have decided to bypass their own parliaments in order to militarily support the Saudi destabilisation agenda in Syria.

The truly alarming thing about this scandalous situation isn't that France, the US and the UK are selling weapons to tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia (they're three of the five biggest arms dealing nations on earth), nor that they're actively assisting the Saudis in their strategic destabilisation of their Middle East neighbours (they've been happy to watch Saudi Arabia spread Salafi Islamist extremism all over the globe for decades), but that the mainstream press in all three countries simply refuse to explain the Saudi role in all of this.

All three leaders cynically bypassed their parliaments to carry out these attacks. All three leaders defied public opinion to carry out these attacks. And all three leaders are sickeningly close to the vile and repressive Saudi regime whose Islamist proxies in Syria are the main beneficiaries of these attacks.

If mainstream media hacks were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the scandalous involvement of democracy-hating Saudi Arabia in all of this would be a central theme of the Syria airstrikes coverage, but it simply isn't.

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A message about Saudi Arabia from your Tory lords and masters

When you see lovely Theresa sucking up to the Saudis and flogging them weapons, remember that they're the lovely fanatical Islamist tyrants, and that it's ISIS (who are, of course, in no way funded, armed and trained by Saudis) who are the nasty fanatical Islamist tyrants.

It's not like the leaked Clinton emails prove that the west have known all about Saudi Arabia arming ISIS since at least 2014. No. No. No!

It's not like the Saudis themselves admit that there are thousands of Saudis fighting for and training Islamist terrorist organisations in places like Syria, Libya and Iraq. No. No. No!

It's not like Saudi Arabia have a long history of destabilising the Muslim world by pushing their violent and barbaric Wahabist interpretation of Islam in their petrodollar funded madrasas. No. No. No!

No!

Just No!

Saudi Arabia are our wonderful friends, and they're perfectly within their rights to behead people for renouncing Islam or being homosexual, to repress women, to literally crucify and behead teenagers for attending a pro-democracy march, and use British manufactured weapons to commit horrific war crimes in Yemen.

Just don't worry your pretty little head about Saudi Arabia.
Now look at this picture of Jeremy Corbyn meeting the leader of the Sinn Féin political party during the peace process in Northern Ireland and let the hate flow through you.


That is all.

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Check out this brilliant Twitter thread

This is a brilliant Twitter thread from a middle East expert called David Wearing. I'm reproducing it here for the benefit of people who don't do Twitter.

Follow him on Twitter here if you do: David Wearing

Remember what you've read here, and remember to follow David Wearing if you found what he said interesting.

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The UK keeps selling £billions worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia

The UK sells more weapons to Saudi Arabia than any other country. £3.3 billion worth since the Saudis began bombarding Yemen in 2015.

Saudi Arabia has committed numerous war crimes in Yemen including "double tap" bombing a wedding party (a double tap strike is one bomb to do the damage, then another a few minutes later to kill medics and rescue workers) and attacking a boat full of refugees with a helicopter gunship.

British MPs have openly admitted that British weapons have been used by Saudi Arabia to commit war crimes in Yemen. Here's a statement from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

"Given that the UK has a long history of defence exports to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, and considering the evidence we have heard, it seems inevitable that any violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by the [Saudi led] coalition have involved arms supplied from the UK." [source]

Cartoon credit: Peter Brookes

Aside from their war crimes in Yemen the Saudis also fund terrorist organisations all over the middle east, including ISIS/Daesh. The leaked Hillary Clinton emails made it clear that the Americans knew perfectly well that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are pumping money, resources, and fighters into ISIS.

Even the UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson admits that Saudi Arabia is guilty of funding proxy wars all over the middle east, yet he's determined to continue writing £billions worth of arms export licences for British arms companies to sell the Saudis weapons. His excuse being that if Britain don't sell weapons to this brutal terrorism-funding bunch of Islamist war criminals, then someone else will!

Johnson is so confident of his appalling "we need to cash in on this or someone else will" argument that he even stated it in parliament!

Arming oil rich Islamist regimes is a lucrative business and it really doesn't matter to the Tories how many innocent civilians the Saudis massacre in Yemen using British weapons.

Neither are the Tories bothered that that the ISIS terrorists that UK forces are bombing in Syria and Iraq are full of Saudi fighters and funded by Saudi cash. After all, selling weapons to both sides of a conflict has got to be more profitable than just selling weapons to one hasn't it?

What we can do

• Sign the CAAT petition against Britain selling weapons to Saudi Arabia.

• Spread awareness of British complicity in Saudi war crimes by sharing articles like this, and by talking to people and letting them know that the UK is arming the disgusting Saudi regime.

• Write to your MP and ask them questions about their stance on British arms exports to Saudi Arabia given 1. the war crimes in Yemen 2. The fact that ISIS is awash with Saudi fighters and Saudi money.

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Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban is a gift to extremists

Make no mistake. Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban is an absolute gift to extremists.

It's a gift to the fascistic white supremacist demographic who propelled Donald Trump into the White House, and made the extreme-right propagandist Steve Bannon one of the most powerful men on the planet. They've been baying for this kind of bigoted arbitrary discrimination for years. By giving them a bit of what they want Trump and Bannon have rewarded them for their votes.

White supremacist racists adore the idea of ethnicity and nationality based discrimination, but they're not the only extremists who will be delighted at Trump's Muslim travel ban. Islamist extremists all over the world will be ecstatic at this collective discrimination against Muslims, because it represents evidence to support their narrative that the West hate Muslims. 

It's a massive boon for them because it feeds into their divisive "clash of civilisations" agenda. "Look at how the West hate and discriminate against Muslims" is the perfect recruiting tool for these appalling savages.

Trump's Muslim ban is also a gift to the extremist Islamist theocracy in Saudi Arabia, which for some reason is one of the Muslim majority countries in the middle east to be excluded from the travel ban list. Let's not forget that 15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudis; that it's widely acknowledged that Saudi Arabia spreads Islamist extremism and terrorism all over the world; that the leaked Clinton emails showed that the Americans have known for quite some time that Saudi Arabia is funding ISIS; nor that even the Saudi Arabian ministry admits that there are over 2,000 Saudi Arabians fighting for ISIS to create their barbaric Islamist caliphate in the middle east.

It's extraordinary that Saudi Arabia gets a free pass on this Muslim travel ban despite their obvious links to Islamist extremism, but it's hardly surprising given the vast amount of US weapons the Saudis buy, the vast amount of US currency, stocks and bonds they hold, and the fact that the Trump business empire has investments in Saudi Arabia too.

Social liberals find it easy to see the wrongness of Trump's arbitrary collective discrimination against Muslims from some countries but not others.

• Turning away refugees fleeing persecution and abuse is appalling. 

• Arbitrary collective discrimination is bigoted and inhumane. 

• Discriminating against people based on their religious beliefs is profoundly unconstitutional.

• Barring people who just need to fly through American airports to get to their final destinations is egregious. 

• Barring people who are just visiting temporarily to spend time with dying relatives is sadistic.

• Barring people who actually served alongside American soldiers during their imperialist wars is an obvious betrayal. 

• Expecting countries in Europe and the middle east to carry the entire burden of the refugee crisis that stemmed from the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is astoundingly selfish.

• Turning away refugees from Iraq (a country suffering the appalling consequences of US imperialism) whilst welcoming Saudi Arabians (a country that funds, arms and supplies ISIS) is completely unjustifiable.

Anyone with any basic human decency can see how unjust Trump's Muslim travel ban is, but you don't even need to recognise the injustice of it in order to see the biggest problem of all, you just need to be a pragmatist:

You just have to look at who actually benefits from this kind of cruel and arbitrary collective discrimination, and the answer is extremists.

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David Cameron's warmongering in Libya resulted in catastrophe, but only 15 MPs opposed it at the time!

It hardly needed a Foreign Affairs Committee report to tell us that the 2011 military actions in Libya turned into a massive humanitarian disaster, but if you want to read the full report it can be found here: Libyan intervention based on erroneous assumptions; David Cameron ultimately responsible

The intervention in Libya happened eight years after the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq had resulted in the creation of a violent and lawless power vacuum in the region in which Islamist fanatics thrived, eventually culminating in the rise of ISIL/Daesh.

The very first lesson that should have been learned in Iraq was that toppling a government (no matter how bad it is) is a terrible idea if there isn't an extremely robust and coherent plan for what comes next. If the plan is inadequate it results in a power vacuum and huge numbers of innocent civilians end up suffering the appalling consequences.

It's absolutely clear from the fact that only fifteen of the UK's 650 MPs voted against David Cameron's gung-ho military action in Libya that the British political establishment completely ignored what should have been the most obvious conclusion from the humanitarian disaster in Iraq.
Findings of the Libya report

The Foreign Affairs Committee report is absolutely damning. Here are some of the key findings:

• "A policy which had [supposedly] intended to protect civilians drifted towards [the illegal policy of] regime change and was not underpinned by strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya".

• "Decisions were not based on accurate intelligence."

• "The UK Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians [from Gadaffi] was overstated."

• "The UK Government failed to identify that the rebels included a significant Islamist element."

• "The consequences of the military action were political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal welfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa."

• Libya purchased some £30 billion of weapons and ammunition between 1969 and 2010. After the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, some weapons fell into the hands of the militias. Other Libyan weapons and ammunition were trafficked across North and West Africa and the Middle East. 

• "The international community’s inability to secure weapons abandoned by the Gaddafi regime fuelled instability in Libya and enabled and increased terrorism across North and West Africa and the Middle East ... It is probable that none of the states that intervened in Libya would have been prepared to commit the necessary military and political resources to secure stocks of weapons and ammunition. That consideration should have informed their calculation to intervene."

• "Political instability in Libya has led to a permissive environment for terrorist groups in which to operate, including ISIL affiliated groups."

• "ISIL has used its presence in Libya to train terrorists. For example, Sefeddine Rezgui, the gunman who killed Western holidaymakers in Tunisia in June 2015, was trained by ISIL at its base in Sabratha along with the two gunmen who killed 22 tourists at the Bardo museum in Tunis."

• "Political engagement might have delivered civilian protection, regime change and reform at a lesser cost to the UK and Libya. The UK would have lost nothing by trying these instead of focusing exclusively on [the illegal concept of] regime change by military means."

• "Former Prime Minister David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy."

• The UK’s actions in Libya were part of an ill-conceived intervention, the results of which are still playing out today.

Lessons not learned

David Cameron's gung-ho rush into Libya resulted in many of the same disastrous outcomes as Blair's invasion and occupation of Iraq. Political and economic collapse, sectarian warfare, a huge refugee crisis, untold civilian suffering and a continuing legacy of violence and chaos, and the empowerment of ISIL/Daesh.

The factor that makes the intervention in Libya so much worse is not the scale of it, which has never quite reached the utter devastation Blair achieved in Iraq, but the fact that Cameron's gung-ho warmongering in Libya proved beyond doubt that the British political establishment had completely refused to learn the single most important lesson from Iraq: Toppling a government (no matter how harsh it is) tends to make things an awful lot worse if it is done without a robust and coherent plan for what comes next.

The 15 MPs who had the sense to vote against Cameron's warmongering

13 MPs and two "tellers" voted against military action in Libya. Here is the full list of the tiny minority of MPs who demonstrated that they had sense enough to learn the most important lesson from the Iraq catastrophe:

Graham Allen (Labour)
John Baron (Conservative)
Ronnie Campbell (Labour)
Jeremy Corbyn (Labour)
Mark Durkan (SDLP)
Barry Gardiner (Labour)
Roger Godsiff (Labour)
Caroline Lucas (Green)
John McDonnell (Labour)
Linda Riordan (Labour)
Margaret Ritchie (SDLP)
Dennis Skinner (Labour)
Mike Wood (Labour)
Katy Clark (Labour)
Yasmin Qureshi (Labour)

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Imagine if Corbyn had suggested we negotiate with ISIS

During a televised Labour leadership debate the challenger Owen Smith made a catastrophic blunder in answering a question about ISIS by saying that he thinks that they should be invited to the negotiating table. Jeremy Corbyn (so often portrayed as a terrorist sympathiser by an incredibly hostile corporate media) was unequivocal in saying that "no" they shouldn't be invited to peace negotiations.

Just imagine the howls of outraged condemnation from the Blairites and coup-supporting Labour MPs if Jeremy Corbyn had've been the one to say that the journalist beheading, ancient monument destroying, homosexual murdering, terrorist atrocity committing ISIS savages should be invited to the negotiating table. But because it was their own puppet Anyone But Corbyn candidate Owen Smith, they're either staying silent about his appalling gaffe or pitifully trying to create revisionist stories about how he didn't actually mean it, and that he actually meant something else entirely.

Corbyn's ISIS policy

A lot of the mainstream press have been far too busy demonising Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as terrorist sympathising Trotskyist Nazi stormtroopers to actually bother explaining what his actual policies are, so it's worth briefly detailing them here.

Corbyn's policy on ISIS has two main strands. The first is that the west should try to get the opposing forces in the region (the Assad regime, the anti-Assad insurgents who aren't ISIS sympathising Islamist fanatics, the Kurds, Iran ...) together to negotiate a truce between themselves so they can focus their attentions on defeating ISIS, which is actually a much greater threat to all of them than they are to each other. 

The second strand is that the west needs to do a lot more to prevent people/organisations/nations from buying oil from ISIS, funding them or selling them weapons. As long as weapons, cash and fighters are flowing into ISIS from our so-called allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Egypt, the situation is not going to get better because fighting them is like trying bail out a boat without trying to repair the holes in the sides.

It's absolutely clear that fighters and weapons are flowing one way and oil is flowing the other way across the incredibly porous border with Turkey. It's also absolutely clear that ISIS has been massively bankrolled by private backers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The problem for Corbyn isn't that his plan of cutting off ISIS supplies isn't a sensible one, it's that the countries trading with and funding ISIS are powerful allies of the UK political establishment, and he's pissing a lot of powerful people off by highlighting their complicity.

Cutting off ISIS supply routes and finances and encouraging all the opposing forces to co-ordinate their efforts against ISIS are sensible policies, but the majority of the mainstream press prefer to keep Corbyn's policies well away from their political coverage because it's much easier to programme people to hate a person if you stick to character attacks and studiously avoid mentioning any of the sensible stuff he's actually talking about.

Owen Smith's backtracking

As soon as Owen Smith's team realised that he'd made yet another appalling gaffe, this time very much worse than accidentally claiming to be pro-austerity on live TV, threatening to "smash Theresa may back on her heels" or using the plight of desperately exploited Sports Direct workers to score cheap political points against Jeremy Corbyn they set about trying to "clarify" the comments with the ludicrous stipulation that ISIS would have to "renounce violence" before Owen Smith would invite them to come to the negotiation table.

Of course they had to try to do something to mitigate the damage, but the addition of a "renounce violence" stipulation is ludicrous stuff that betrays a complete lack of understanding of the sheer ideological fanaticism they're dealing with.

Expecting ISIS fighters to simply "renounce violence" is like expecting fish to stop swimming around in the water. The whole bloody point of ISIS is that it's a clash of civilisations insurgency against everyone and everything that doesn't comply with their warped fanatical interpretation of Islam. If these fanatics are so full of hate that they'd gladly kill themselves for their beliefs and take a load of innocent civilians with them, offering them a sit down and a chat if they just promise to take off their suicide belts is an absolutely ludicrous strategy.

Owen Smith isn't the only out-of-touch politician

It doesn't matter how much Owen Smith's supporters try to retroactively spin what he said, the damage has been done. Owen Smith has demonstrated a catastrophic misunderstanding of the threat posed by ISIS. Alarmingly he's far from the only politician to desperately underestimate the threat either. It was less than three years ago that David Cameron became the first Prime Minister since 1782 to lose a war vote when his insane rush to war in Syria was defeated in parliament.

Even though it was absolutely clear by that point that ISIS had been born in the power vacuum created by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, David Cameron actually wanted to massively increase the size of the power vacuum for ISIS to operate by toppling the Assad government.

The plan was so hopelessly idiotic that thankfully sufficient Labour, Lib-Dem and rebellious Tory MPs saw enough sense to vote against Cameron's efforts to hand control of Damascus to ISIS.

Theresa May was one of the Cameron loyalists who endorsed his failed effort to help ISIS take over the rest of Syria. Jeremy Corbyn was one of the majority of MPs with the sense to vote against the bloody ridiculous folly of actively siding with ISIS and inviting them to take over Damascus.

It is absolutely amazing how many people have chosen to forget that it's just a few years since David Cameron and Theresa May tried to convince parliament that creating a power vacuum so that ISIS could take control of the rest of Syria would be a super-great idea.

Conclusion

If it had've been Jeremy Corbyn calling for ISIS to be invited to the negotiating table we all know what a hate-fest it would have triggered, but because it was the establishment approved candidate to become Labour leader the condemnation has muted to say the least.

In 2003 Tony Blair helped to create the appalling power vacuum in Iraq that ISIS thrived in. Just three years ago David Cameron and Theresa May were intent on handing ISIS the huge strategic advantage of a power vacuum in Syria. Now the establishment approved candidate to usurp Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader has said that we should actually negotiate with these barbaric fanatics rather than cutting off their supplies and trying to unify regional forces against them.

In reality Jeremy Corbyn is one of the few politicians who actually talks some sense about ISIS, but it's as clear as day that the right-wing press will continue to portray Corbyn as a "terrorist sympathiser" whilst letting Westminster establishment politicians like Blair, Cameron, May and Smith off the hook for their idiocy.

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Why signing the "Close the Borders" petition is such a shameful reaction to the Paris atrocities

In the aftermath of the November 13th atrocities in Paris, over 400,000 British people reacted by signing an absurd petition calling for the UK borders to be closed "until ISIS is defeated".

Firstly I'm going to look at what people actually mean when they say "close the borders", then explain why taking such a reactionary stance is such a shameful reaction to terrorism.

What do they want?

The idea that the UK borders can just be closed is fantastically naive. Hundreds of thousands of people per day transit in and out of the UK. Are the 400,000+ people who signed this petition calling for every UK airport to be shut down, our ferry ports to be closed and the Channel Tunnel to be bricked up until some distant date in the future when "ISIS is defeated"?

Just think about how long it took the US to kill Osama Bin Laden, and the fact that Al Qaida hasn't been defeated yet, 14 years after the September 11th attacks on the US. Anyone who thinks that ISIS could be defeated in the course of a few months or years is clearly pretty delusional.

Calling for the borders to be completely closed for an indefinite period of time is clearly a very ill-considered and impractical response to a terrorist attack. Just think about the hundreds of thousands of British tourists and business people who would be trapped abroad indefinitely. Surely few people are naive enough to actually endorse the staggeringly impractical appeal this petition makes, so what do they actually want?

Exemptions

The idea of completely shutting the British borders for an indefinite period of years, or even decades is an astonishingly impractical thing to ask for. The idea that nobody should enter and nobody should leave is so ill-conceived it's beyond words, so there must be exemptions.

Departures

I'm pretty sure that most of the 400,000+ people who signed the petition would agree that keeping people trapped inside the UK would be an irrational response to terrorism. Maybe they would allow an exemption to allow anyone who needs to be deported to go, and anyone who just wants to leave to get out?

British citizens

I'm pretty sure a lot of the people who signed this petition would become extremely angry if they were told that they could go on holiday abroad, but that they wouldn't be allowed back in "until ISIS is defeated". The majority of people who signed this petition would probably want an exemption to the "closed borders" for British citizens.

The problem with this of course is that the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the UK have been perpetrated by British citizens, and most of the attackers in the two major Paris atrocities in 2015 appear to have been French citizens too. Shutting the borders to all foreigners seems like a pretty impractical solution to the risk of homegrown terrorists.

EU Citizens

I'm pretty sure that a significant proportion of the people who signed such an incoherent petition must be of the Ukipper persuasion, so they'd be absolutely delighted if the terrorist attacks in Paris could be used as an opportunity to rescind European freedom of movement.

More fair minded people might argue that there will soon be a referendum on membership of the EU, so the democratic thing to do would be to wait for the result of that referendum rather than opportunistically using the tragedy in Paris to enforce the end of free movement between the UK and the rest of the EU.

Anyone who believes in democracy and isn't foul minded enough to use the deaths of so many innocent people to push their personal political agenda would say that unilaterally shutting the borders to EU migrants would be a very harsh move, especially considering the inevitable tit-for-tat recriminations against the 2 million British migrants now living in other EU countries.

People with the correct paperwork

The next question must be about people coming into the UK with the correct paperwork. Do the people who have signed this petition really want UK universities to collapse because foreign students are locked out of the UK? Do they really want to wreck the tourism industry by shutting out foreign tourists? Do they really want to rip apart any family that contains non-EU citizens? Do they really want to prevent foreign sports stars, artists, academics, musicians, actors from entering the UK "until ISIS is defeated"?

So who would the borders actually be closed to?

I'd guess that rather a lot of people who signed this petition would admit that when they say "close the borders" they actually mean "leave the borders open to pretty much anyone who wants to enter or leave the UK, but close them to a small minority of people". So which small minority of people are they wanting the borders closed to?

The answer is obvious: They want the border closed to Muslims, and specifically Muslims who are fleeing the appalling conflict in Syria.

Syrian refugees

The civil war in Syria and the rise of the barbaric ISIS fanatics has caused a vast refugee crisis. Some 12 million people have fled their homes. 8 Million of them are displaced in Syria and almost 4 million of them have fled to neighbouring countries. 1.773 million have fled to Turkey, 1.175 million to Lebanon, 629,000 to Jordan and even 250,000 to Iraq (imagine how bad things must be in Syria if they're running away to seek sanctuary in Iraq).

Of the millions of Syrians to have fled their homes only a few hundred thousand have ended up in Europe, far fewer still in the UK, which is pretty unfair given that it was the UK/US policy of eradicating the government in Iraq and creating the kind of stateless sectarianism infested society which created the perfect breeding ground for murderous Islamist fanatics like Al Qaida in Iraq and ISIS. It wasn't Lebanon or Jordan who pushed so relentlessly for the destabilisation of the region, it was the UK government.

Then there's the fact that the UK even tried to join in the Syrian civil war on the same side as the Islamist fanatics just a couple of years ago. Thankfully David Cameron was prevented from assisting the full ISIS takeover of Syria when he became the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782, but that doesn't detract from the fact that he wanted to make the situation a whole lot worse by removing Assad and creating a power vacuum that the Islamist fanatics would have absolutely thrived in.

Then there's the fact that Cameron is still cosying up to the Saudi Arabian regime when he himself admits that they're guilty of exporting militant Wahabist fanaticism all over the world. Anyone who can't see that Wahabist Islamist death cults like ISIS and Al Qaida are the children of Saudi Arabia is deeply ignorant. Cameron shouldn't be pathetically prostrating himself before the Saudis to win arms contracts, he should be doing everything in his power to stop them from supporting and funding ISIS.

Anyone who imagines that UK foreign policy has had no role to play in the rise of ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis is under-informed at best and delusional at worst, and anyone who accepts that UK foreign policy has exacerbated the crisis in Syria, but believes that the refugee crisis should be handled exclusively by other countries as we "close the borders" is hardly fair-minded. Why should other countries be left to bear the burden of the UK's foreign policy disasters?

Fuck you everyone

The idea that the UK should just raise the drawbridge to keep out refugees from a horrifying conflict is cowardly and selfish.

Not only does it ignore the observable reality that the vast majority of terrorists in Europe are homegrown, it's also a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world.

Firstly it's a "fuck you" to people who are fleeing an unimaginably appalling conflict. Signing the "close the borders" petition is essentially saying that the horrors people in Syria have endured are nowhere near as important as our fear about what happened in Paris. It's saying that we don't give a damn about the very real horrors you've suffered, because there's a small chance that a few of the indescribably barbaric Islamist fanatics you're fleeing from might sneak in amongst you so fuck off.

It's also a very big "fuck you" to Syria's neighbouring countries, who have taken millions of refugees. By signing the "close the borders" petition we're saying that it should be left entirely up to countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey to deal with the catastrophic human consequences, while we refuse to help anyone.

It's also a big "fuck you" to all of the countries in the Schenigen Area, including France. It's unquestionable that Syrian refugees are going to continue flowing into Europe as long as ISIS continue to run amok there, but what people who have signed this appalling petition are saying is it's a problem for the rest of Europe to deal with because were shutting our borders to it.

At a time when we should be standing in absolute solidarity with the French, instead hundreds of thousands of us are signing a cowardly petition saying "fuck France, fuck Europe, fuck Syrian refugees, fuck the rest of the world. The Syrian refugee crisis is your problem now because we're washing our hands of it".

It's a big "fuck you" to the victims of terrorism (the Syrian refugees and the shellshocked French) and a "fuck you" to the other countries that are carrying the lion's share of the humanitarian disaster (especially Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey).

Fear and cowardice

It's clear that the vast majority of people who signed this petition don't actually want the borders to be closed, the airports to be shut down, and the Channel Tunnel to be bricked up. They've just been motivated to sign such a selfish and incoherently written "fuck you" petition out of fear.

It's understandable that people are afraid. Anyone with the faintest shred of human empathy must be utterly horrified at the atrocities in Paris and frightened at the thought of similar atrocities being carried out against the British public. Nobody is saying it's wrong to be scared, but people tend to act irrationally out of fear, and (aside from the Ukipper opportunists who see the attacks in Paris as a glorious opportunity to promote their insular little Britain ideology) I'm pretty sure most of the people who signed this petition did so without realising that it was such a cowardly "fuck you" to the actual victims of Islamist terrorism.

If the terrorists get us so afraid that we end up saying "fuck you" to their victims, then they've won already haven't they? They've cowed us in fear to such an extent that we've given up our human decency, our empathy, our compassion.

If you've signed that petition you've admitted that the Islamist fanatics have already beaten you into submission and reduced you to such a cowardly and incoherent state of fear that you'll abandon your human decency and turn on their victims by signing a petition that doesn't even make any sense.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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