London Mayor Levies Ultimate Porn Insult on Brits Who Join ISIS

WANKERVILLE—In pornland, wankers are also called customers, but in London it's obviously a down-and-dirty insult to levy against someone, as is the implication that only desperate users of porn become bloodthirsty terrorists out to destroy Western civilization. Or so the thinking seems to go. One would have to follow up with the current mayor of London, England, the lively Boris "Don't Call Me A" Johnson (pictured), who is quoted as telling a local paper that "Porn-obsessed wankers are the main recruits from Britain for radical jihadists." Okay, that's not his actual quote, but the UK media seems to prefer the catchy "porn-obsessed wankers" phrase, which carries the aforementioned zing. What he actually said, according to HuffPo UK, is: "If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally w*****s. Severe onanists. "They are tortured. They will be very badly adjusted in their relations with women, and that is a symptom of their feeling of being failure and that the world is against them. "They are not making it with girls and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort - which of course is no comfort. "They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong - like winners." What is first of note in that HuffPo kept the asterisks in Boris' quote, which was originally reported by The Sun, a fact that underscores the point above about the word's pejorative heft among Brits.   More substantially, however, Johnson's psychological characterization of the motivation of the jihadist bomber was quickly met with criticism, including by The Guardian, in a piece rhetorically titled, "Is Boris Johnson right to dismiss all jihadists as ‘wankers’?" The answer is a decided no. One frustrated source told the paper, “These types of comments are likely to exasperate the work that’s been done with deradicalisation and extremism. 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.” Johnson has already attempted to gingerly explain his statement by layering onto it a more expansive assessment, stating to the BBC that porn and obsessive wanking are part of a "broader problem," while still insisting that no one could possibly "contest a word" of his original mutterings. Colourful, indeed.