Sun’s Boris Campaign Is A Sham

The Sun is hidden away behind a paywall, but the latest instalment in the shameless campaign to make London’s occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson the next Tory leader, led by non-bullying political editor Tom Newton Dunn, has been copied and made available to me (see how that works, Rupe?), from which it can be seen that someone is being extremely creative with the actualité.

“POLITICIANS and academics have backed Boris Johnson for exposing British jihadis as porn obsessed losers” told Newton Dunn, citing a very selective quote from the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet, as evidence. But there is also something from Jonathan Russell of the Quilliam Foundation. The problem here is that Russell’s quote cannot be found anywhere else.

Russell did, however, comment on Left Foot Forward back in March last year on the subject of those experiencing an “identity crisis”, an expression Newton Dunn quotes. But he was not the Quilliam Foundation representative who commented on Bozza’s rant: that honour fell to Charlie Winter, who said of Johnson’s suggestion that “the whole thing is ludicrous”. He wasn’t talking about the alleged jihadis, either.

No he isn't

There was more: “It is a completely unquantifiable thing to try to second guess whether a jihadist is suffering from isolation and loneliness. To imply that they don’t have social skills is again a generalisation … that has no evidence behind it”. So not the response from that quarter that Newton Dunn is trying to pitch to Sun readers, then. And there were others passing severely adverse comment on Bozza’s baloney.

“Abdul Waheed Majeed, from Crawley, West Sussex, believed to have been the first British suicide bomber in Syria, died when he drove an armoured truck carrying explosives into a jail in Aleppo … was in a reasonably well-paying job with the Highways Agency, and was raising three teenage children with his wife” told Shiv Malik in the Guardian.

He also mentions the July 7 bombings: “Going back further, the person who orchestrated the multiple suicide bombings on London’s transport system on 7 July 2005, Mohammed Sidique Khan, was a teaching assistant and youth worker largely beloved in his community, and had a wife and child”. And it gets worse.

Mohamed Khaliel of Islamix, who Newton Dunn also quoted, said “As you know, jihadists have been doctors, lawyers, dentists – that type of category … So, I don’t think the points that Boris raises are even relevant to any academic discussions … When I spoke to police colleagues in counter-terrorism, they didn’t find them helpful … I would challenge anybody who says that MI5 reports used the colourful language that Boris has used”.

All of which shows that the headline “BORIS BACKED ON JIHADI PORN JIBE” should have contained the qualifier “Only in the fantasy world of Tom Newton Dunn”. No wonder Rupert Murdoch hates social media - it stops his hacks getting away with it.