Dear Philip Hammond, what exactly is a ‘Moderate Jihadist’?

What exactly is a “moderate jihadist”? Is it someone who tweets photographs of severed heads but fights shy of getting his hands bloody? Someone who inclines towards enslaving captured women and children rather than burying them alive? One who only executes Yazidis but not Christians?

Whatever, we can probably agree that UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond made a serious error when applying that unfortunate phrase on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning to members of the organisation – Islamic State – which had just murdered, in cold blood, an American journalist.

Yes it was probably a misspeak. But it’s not the kind of mistake you can ever imagine being made by a more competent, higher-calibre, more quick-witted MP, like, say, the man who would have made an infinitely superior Foreign Secretary but who is currently languishing as Chief Whip – Michael Gove.

How did it happen? Well I’m guessing that David Cameron’s MPs have had it drummed into them till their ears bleed that they are always and forever and at every possible opportunity to stress the vast gulf that exists between “moderate” Islam and “extremist” Islam.

Moderate Islam, as we know, having been repeatedly told so by the likes of the Prince of Wales, the BBC, the Guardian and most MPs, is an adorable heartwarming thing with the most marvellous tradition of hospitality, and a very real sense of the numinous, and an admirable dedication to charity, exquisitely woven carpets, sweet hot tea poured with great dexterity from a high-up tea pot into a tiny glass, and a religion of peace which has always afforded great hospitality to Christians and Jews, why just look at Granada, and you do realise that it was those splendid Muslim scholars, don’t you, who kept the intellectual traditions of classicism alive through the Dark Ages, etc.

Extremist Islam, meanwhile, is horrid, just horrid….

Read the rest at Breitbart London