Boris Johnson, Jihadis and Pornography

Boris Johnson has mocked would-be jihadis and extreme Islamists claiming that MI5 monitoring of their internet use reveals they access pornography as well as extremist sites. He suggests they are “sexually frustrated” and “are not making it with girls”.

Johnson is wrong. These young men can no more accurately be described as “very badly adjusted in their relations with women” than Amedy Coulibaly, the Paris terrorist, can be described as ‘badly adjusted’ in his relations with Jews.

Young men of this kind watch pornography, not because they can’t get access to women’s bodies (often they can and in the most appalling ways), but because they follow an ideology which holds females in contempt, considering them flawed and subordinate beings.

Sexual exploitation and extreme violence towards girls and women – especially those seeking work, independence or an education – are centrally important to the operation of IS, Boko Haram, Taliban and Al Qaeda. Just as extremist websites promote hatred and violence towards the Shia, Jews, apostates, Yazidis and Christians, secular on-line pornography reinforces sexual contempt and violence towards women.

Any British male who admires, or has fought alongside, organisations such as these – which assassinate educated females, torture, stone and behead women and sell young girls in their thousands into sexual slavery – must pose a real and continuing risk to the females around them – here in the UK, no less than abroad.

Boris Johnson needs to realise that mockery of fascism is only justifiable when one is wholeheartedly engaged in fighting it. I do not believe he is.