Aware of foolishly giving He Who Must Not Be Amplified any more airtime, your mole would like to provide a list of things those journalists standing outside the former foreign secretary’s house when he offered them tea should’ve asked him instead of helping themselves to a cuppa:
- How he feels about the rise in Islamophobic incidents against Muslim women, in particular explicitly calling them “letter boxes”, after his column.
- If he knows that, according to the group monitoring anti-Muslim incidents, Tell Mama, there is a “direct link” between his words and the recent attacks on Muslim women. There were no attacks of this nature the week prior to his column.
- If he’ll apologise to the at least four women called “letter boxes” in public since his article was published.
- Whether he considered the context of the existing spike in Islamophobic hate crime in the UK when he wrote his comments, which would of course exacerbate the problem.
- How he feels about adding fuel to the fire of Islamophobic hate crimes, which have increased fivefold last June in the aftermath of the London Bridge attacks, when there was also a terrorist attack on Finsbury Park mosque in north London.
- Why he felt it acceptable to risk putting Muslim women in even more danger, given they are the targets of the majority of Islamophobic attacks in the UK. According to the group monitoring anti-Muslim incidents, Tell Mama, six out of ten victims of Islamophobia in 2017 were women.
- Whether he agrees with the statement of far-right extremist Steve Bannon – the former Donald Trump strategist who is publicly supporting him and has been in regular contact with him – that you should wear the terms “racist” and “xenophobe” as a “medal”.
- Whether he agrees with the statement of far-right extremist Steve Bannon – the former Donald Trump strategist who is publicly supporting him and has been in regular contact with him – from 2015 that “most people in the Middle East, at least 50 per cent, believe in being sharia-compliant. If you’re sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you.”
- Whether he agrees with the statement of far-right extremist Steve Bannon – the former Donald Trump strategist who is publicly supporting him and has been in regular contact with him – that Islam is “the most radical religion in the world” and that Muslims had created “a fifth column here in the United States”.
- Whether he agrees with the worldview of far-right extremist Steve Bannon – the former Donald Trump strategist who is publicly supporting him and has been in regular contact with him – of a clash of civilisations: that the United States and the western world are in a “global existential war”.
- Whether he backs the move of far-right extremist Steve Bannon – the former Donald Trump strategist who is publicly supporting him and has been in regular contact with him – to set up The Movement, which will export US extremism to Europe by uniting and supporting far-right parties and groups.
- If he still stands by his poem of May 2016 insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggesting he had sex with a goat.
- If he still stands by his dismissal of former US president Barack Obama’s views on the UK because of the “part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
- If he still stands by his 2002 Telegraph column including racist insults against black people, citing “regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” in the Commonwealth, describing “the tribal warriors… [who] all break out in watermelon smiles”.
- If he will finally retract his 2006 description of Papua New Guinea as a place of “orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing”.
- If he will apologise for talking about alcohol in a Sikh temple – telling Nirman Sewak Jatha Sikh Temple in Bristol about ending trade tariffs on whisky between the UK and India. One worshipper pointed out: “That is against our religion.”
- If he will apologise for belittling victims of the civil war in Libya at Conservative party conference last year. “The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies away and then we’ll be there,” he “joked” when talking about its potential to be the “next Dubai”.
- If he can explain why British duel citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still in Iranian prison when he promised her family to do everything he could to have her released, after she was subject to a second court case triggered by his own mistaken comments about her at a select committee saying she had been “teaching journalism” in Iran when she was actually on holiday visiting relatives.
- If he will clarify how many countries there are in Africa, having called the continent “that country” while speaking at Conservative party conference two years ago.
- If he regrets reciting a colonial-era Rudyard Kipling poem – which voices the nostalgia of a British serviceman for his time in the country that was colonised by Britain – at a sacred Buddhist site in front of dignitaries during an official visit to Myanmar last year. The British ambassador stopped him in his tracks: “No. Not appropriate.”
- If he will take back his comparison of the EU to Hitler during the EU referendum campaign.
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