Jihadists should be stripped of their citizenship

[Dr Koop]

I don't think that we should get into stripping people of their citizenship. If we do it for people committing crimes abroad, why not Gary Glitter style sex tourism, drug traffickers etc? During the conflict in Northern Ireland British citizens devoted themselves to murdering soldiers, policemen and members of the government but we didn't strip anyone of citizenship then.

And curiously British soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers took part in and connived in the killings of citizens. I'm sure some of them are doing very comfortably now after stepping beyond the boundaries.

[Dr Koop]

Nearly 3 times as many IRA men volunteered for Franco as did for the Republicans. Just thought I'd share that.

And the most notable engagement was to be shot at by Falangists. Oh, our zany Irish cousins.

[Tom McB]

And the most notable engagement was to be shot at by Falangists. Oh, our zany Irish cousins.

Or the poor sods who went to fight for the POUM whose leader was tortured to death by Stalin's mob in Spain. Orwell, who fought in a POUM militia, saw through a great deal of the crap

This, then, was what they were saying about us: we were Trotskyists, Fascists, traitors, murderers, cowards, spies, and so forth. I admit it was not pleasant, especially when one thought of some of the people who were responsible for it. It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise. One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy—all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.