Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1168

December 30, 2017

Thank Bob

Last Month Mick Hall felt that:
Bob Geldof by giving his honour back has done the people of Dublin a favour.


War criminal, tax dodger, and Bob saving the world so all three can live in luxury.




Bob Geldof has some chutzpah - it's how he has sustained his long career. But his latest publicity stunt takes the biscuit, when he renounced his Freedom of Dublin award rather than share it with Aung San Suu Kyi the Myanmar leader in protest over her alleged treatment of Rohingya Muslims.

Geldof, who hovers up these trinkets whereever he goes, had no problem accepting a knighthood on the recommendation of Mrs Thatcher, who at the time was busy crashing the UK's industrial core, closing factories and mines which left millions of people without work or hope.

The saintly Geldof excepted Betsy Windsor's gong while her army was engaged in a brutal war in the North of Ireland against what were British citizens. Geldof understood all this perfectly and knew by accepting this gong he would provide Thatcher and the English monarchy with window dressing.

Delivering his scroll to Dublin city council offices Geldof said:

Dublin should not have any truck with this war. She has let us Dubliners down, she has let Ireland down, because we thought she was one thing and we have been duped.*

It's Geldof who has let Ireland down by accepting a knighthood from a foreign monarch, whose military occupied Ireland for centuries against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its peoples and in the north east of the island still does today.

Bob Geldof also had no problem receiving in 2011 an honorary doctorate of philosophy from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This was at a time when Israel was blockading Gaza, and building settlements across the west bank, including adjoining east Jerusalem, which have been deemed illegal by the United Nations.

When returning his award Geldof also said this:

I would be a hypocrite now were I to share honours with one who has become at best an accomplice to murder.

Yet he is quite happy to share his knighthood with Henry Kissinger who attempted to bomb the northern half of Vietnam and parts of Cambodia back into the stone age in a war which left two million Vietnamese dead; who orchestrated the Pinochet coup and gave U.S. support for Pakistan, despite the genocide during the Bangladesh War.

Or Bill Gates, the tax dodger in chief, but then again he is a friend of Geldof, they say you can tell the character of a man by the company he keeps. I could go on as the list of unsavory individuals who have an honorary knighthood is almost endless.

We do not yet know whether Aung San Suu Kyi is complicit in the brutal treatment of the Rohingya Muslims who have fled in fear of their lives to Bangladesh. She may well be, however Geldof's grandstanding while staying quiet about the war crimes committed in Ireland and those of Bush and Blair, etcetera, makes him in my eyes a hypocrite and charlatan.

* It is worth noting Geldof is not a Dubliner these days, and hasn't been for decades. He has lived in England for almost all of his adult life.



Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage

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Published on December 30, 2017 07:44

December 29, 2017

Seamus Ruddy

Anthony McIntyre obituarises a friend he met in prison over forty years ago.




Seamy Ruddy did not die this year but his body was discovered in a forest in Paris after a long and arduous effort by the Irish Republican Socialist Party to locate his unmarked grave. Many people had given up hope but the Ruddy family persisted and the IRSP responded in kind with a determination of its own to locate the remains. It also is impossible to feel with any confidence that those who killed him did not help in the retrieval of his remains. There seems no other way it could have been achieved.

Seamy had been killed during one of the seemingly incessant bouts of bloodletting that would often grip the INLA. The grapevine was awash with whispers that he had been tied to a tree and tortured for information about weaponry before being killed and buried. How reliable any of that is we may never know. The organisation’s former chief of staff, himself eventually killed by former comrades, was rumoured to have been centrally involved in the fate of Seamy Ruddy. Again, certainty is beyond me.

Like all disappearances it was a gratuitous act that is next to impossible to justify, even mitigate. This is what we have come to identify with right wing military dictatorships, not liberation movements. Some time before his death Seamy had been arrested in Greece, transporting weaponry that he had acquired for the INLA. His success in the arms procurement ultimately may have led to his death at the hands of rivals eager to acquire his arsenal.

When he came into prison during the UWC strike in 1974, I was immediately interested in him because he had been arrested in South Belfast close to where I had lived: somebody to talk local shop with perhaps. He ended up in the cell next to me on A3, doubled up with a fellow Newry man, John Hollywood. Both of them were rambunctious and sociable. I was enthralled by the seemingly encyclopedia knowledge of Seamy. He didn’t belong to any of the republican groupings and I have a vague feeling that he might have beeen associated with one of the city’s left wing groups that mobilised in defence of vulnerable nationalist communities during the UWC strike.

He was later sentenced to three years for possession of a pistol and we met up again in the middle hut of Magilligan's Cage F. His cubicle was the last one closest to the wire at the front of the cage. We would walk the windswept yard and talk politics. But he had some witty advice for me on the subject of shirts. He told me to keep no more than three, never wash them, just wear the first one for a day, the second for two days and the third for three. Then put on the one that had been worn for a day and repeat the cyclce, That way the latest one would always look cleaner. He never lacked in wit.

We once discussed communism and I told him I would try being a communist so long as I could still believe in God. He explained that it was a no can do: God had no place in communism and then went on to give me some cosmological explanations for the origins of the universe. I gave up on wanting to become a communist.

I heard no more of him after my release. It was five years into my second spell of imprisonment before he popped up again, this time to visit the prison as an IRSP leader to converse with the INLA prisoners. I was only surprised because I thought he had gone on to do other things with his life, astrophysics or something. But Tit, as we affectionately called him, had not forsaken his revolutionary beliefs for an academic chair or career.

Internecine fighting over the political direction of the INLA claimed so many lives needlessly. I was friendly with many of their prisoners and found myself sending sympathy cards out to their families, after they were killed, once they had been released from prison, wondering at the waste of it all. The death of Seamy Ruddy was no less a waste.

An immensely clearer and talented man, there was no badness in him. Affable and erudite he was completely down to earth. He never struck me as the type of person equipped with the ruthlessness that revolutionary leadership required and it seems he fell foul of others more ruthless and determined to see their politics become hegemonic within the Republican Socialist Movement.



Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre      





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Published on December 29, 2017 14:12

Sleep of Reason

Christopher Owens reviews an updated The Sleep of Reason by James Smith.



True crime books often suffer from adopting a salacious, morally duplicitous angle that can often implicate the reader in the most unsubtle manner, laced with double standards. 
And it's not just books. Take any article by Jim McDowell or Paul Williams. Both present themselves as shining lights in the fight against crime and all that is wrong in society. Yet the two of them revel in sordid details, printing lurid pictures all while pretending to be horrified about what they're reporting. It's the oldest form of hypocrisy. 
First published in 1994, The Sleep of Reason remains the definitive reading of the murder of James Bulger. Covering the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, as well as speaking to various officers, teachers and the families of the victim and murderers, the book is written in a direct, almost monotone, style with little to no room for dialogue. 
There's a reason for this: the bare truth is much more horrifying than any speculation. The description of that day, from Venables and Thompson deciding to "get a child lost", through to taking Bulger through the shopping centre and to the railroad track where he would die places the reader into (what David Ervine used to call) "the hamster wheel from hell", because the reader knows the outcome and each tale of a witness reporting a sighting or speaking to the boys delays the inevitable.
When the inevitable does happen on a train track, it brings a tear to even the most hardened reader. The image of two year old James Bulger, crying because of having paint thrown at him as well as bricks and a railway fishplate, is not one that can be easily forgotten. The indignity of having his trousers removed, foreskin pulled back and his torso being cut in half by an oncoming train was too much for me, and I had to put the book down for two days.
Examining the interrogation notes for both Venables and Thompson, the reader is never certain who to believe. At the time, the general perception was that Thompson was the ringleader, and Venables the gullible accomplice. Smith demolishes this view, by pointing out it was Venables who had suggested "getting a child lost" and he was the visibly pro-active one when dealing with Bulger (the infamous CCTV shot shows Venables holding Bulger's hand) and the public (several witnesses came forward to say they had approached the three of them, but Venables had brushed them off with claims about the three of them being brothers).

It's obvious from the notes that Thompson was a lot more controlled than Venables. He denied everything, but began to crack when under pressure. But even then, he only gave little bits here and there. Despite his footprint being found on Bulger's body, he does not admit taking part in the murder and passes all the blame onto Venables (portrayed as an emotional wreck), who returns the favour with more of the same.
Here, Smith begins to examine the home life of both boys. Although his claim about Venables coming from a broken home doesn't quite wash with the reader (his parents separated when he was young, and his two siblings had learning difficulties), it fits Thompson (a battered alcoholic mother, an absent father, bullying siblings and an unproven allegation of sexual abuse). Both kept back a year in school, both bullied and bullies. It's easy to see how the cycle of abuse and neglect would lead the two of them in front of a judge one day.
But what Smith also argues is that the boys did not set out that day with the intention to kill. Because, after all, why would you walk down a main street and allow yourself to talk to so many? His theory is that they really did just intend for Bulger to be "lost" (a malicious move on it's own) but that, as time went on, they became tired and at a loose end over what to do with him.
Tragically, they had to walk past a police station to reach the spot where James would die. Had they decided, Smith asks, at that point that he would die? If not, why not just walk in and leave him at the front desk? The boys never answered that and, Smith suspects, they never will.
For this revised edition, a new chapter, dealing with Venables' return to prison for possessing child pornography, has been added. Smith has written an excellent article about this aspect, and he incorporate the bulk of this material into the new chapter, as well as focusing on the effect it has had on the parents of the killers (Ann Thompson is depicted as wanting to tell off Denise Bulger, now Fergus, for not having reins on James at the time) and allegations that Venables and Thompson had been sexually abused in the past.
It's to Smith's commendation that he takes this highly emotive event and analyses it with a detached, clinical perspective which furthers his belief that the three children are victims, not just James Bulger. Although he certainly makes a compelling case for this, some readers may not be inclined to take this view, and it's not difficult to understand why.
Highly recommended, but approach with caution.


David James Smith, 2017, The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case Faber & Faber ISBN-13: 978-0571340569.

Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.
Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212



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Published on December 29, 2017 04:00

December 28, 2017

Maura McKearney

Anthony McIntyre was struck by the immense fortitude of Maura McKearney who died at the start of this year.



I came to know Maura McKearney shortly after being released from prison. I stayed in her Moy home one weekend with her son Tommy. After that I would visit the house over the years. Many a fine rural meal was served up to me in the family kitchen, and often on my return to Belfast I would have a bag of fresh meat ready for freezing, courtesy of the family butchers. It helped feed us for weeks.

Her husband Kevin was alive at the time and I always wondered how they both coped with the immense loss they had experienced in their lives. It is harsh enough for parents to lose one child but to lose three of them in separate incidents was surely a burden very few are unfortunate enough to bear. The Grahams of Fermanagh and the Reaveys of South Armagh spring to mind as families who lost three of their children to the North's violent political conflict. Grief in its vicelike grip spares no one.

Behind the stoical exterior of both parents there must have lain an incredible sadness. Their children were buried a few hundred yards from the family home. Maybe it was easier that way, having their loved ones in close proximity although I failed to see how. The thought proved daunting.  I would later travel to Moy for the funeral of her husband Kevin. Tyrone in many ways has in my mind become synonymous with funerals and cemeteries.  Other visits to the county over the years were to bury former prisoners.  

I was in Crumlin Road prison when Sean died in May 1974. It was there that I first met Padraig, and got to know him much better in Magilligan where I spent the bulk of 1975. Eight years later he would escape from the H Blocks only  to be gunned down by the SAS during an IRA operation in Loughall in 1987. Along with Tommy I visited his grave and those of the other IRA dead from Tyrone. We also drove past the spot where the IRA active service unit was ambushed. It was an eerie drive. Kevin died just months before Tommy and myself were released from Maghaberry.

I felt then and still do that the joyful anticipation Tommy parent's might have been expected to experience coming up to his release was stolen from them by the death of their son Kevin. The HET concluded that the RUC did little or nothing to prevent the killing of both Kevin and his uncle Jack despite being in possession of information that an attack was likely. Yet there is still the pretence in officialdom that the RUC was holding the thin blue line against lawlessness.

My thoughts of Maura McKearney were captured in the words of Independent Councillor Barry Monteith when he said:

I had the honour and privilege of meeting her, and was always struck by the dignity and bravery with which she met all the challenges and tragedies in her life. She will be greatly missed by the family circle and wider community.


But the esteem in which she was held was not restricted to anti-Treaty republicans. Martin McGuinness, himself quite unwell at the time, tweeted a message of sympathy to the family. Other Sinn Fein members did likewise.

Maura McKearney walked the Via Dolorosa, ‘with sorrows that most mothers will never face’. Reaching the end of it must have come with a sense of relief most of us will never understand: a shedding of terrible burdens that would have crushed most others and which we would have shirked from sharing.




Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre      

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Published on December 28, 2017 12:44

Syria: The Revolution Is Alive, But Buried Under Rubble

Gabriel Levy reports on a recent event in London organised to discuss the situation in Syria. 

The situation facing Syrian civil society was formed in layers, Saleh said.

The first layer was the first two years of the revolution (2011-13), when there was an explosion of collective community action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Protests in Syria on the “day of rage” on 14 October

The second layer was the struggle of regional powers including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey who feared the spread of popular rebellion.

The third layer was the intervention in Syria of American and Russian forces in 2014.

The world had stood by when the Assad regime launched a chemical attack on civilians at Ghouta in 2013: after that, Syrians had felt “isolated and betrayed”, Saleh said.

Those who had participated in the revolution were “exhausted”, he continued. A quarter of the population had been displaced, many of whom were now living outside the country.

The regime was being restored, with the support of the international powers, but none of the economic and social problems that caused the 2011 uprising had been solved. Even Syrians who were not opposed to the regime wanted their lives to change for the better, and no such change is likely.

Outside Syria, Saleh said, groups of activists are working in the field of culture, and on human rights issues.

“We are still in struggle. We are not pessimists”, he said.

Saleh was speaking over skype to a meeting on Tuesday organised by the Syrian Society of students at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is a long-standing radical political activist, a political prisoner under the Assad regime (1980-1996) and the author of The Impossible Revolution, published this year in English.

Saleh argued that the Syrian revolution faced three “monsters”: the Assad regime (“fascists in neckties”), the Salafist militia (“fascists with beards”) and the “world order” headed by the USA and Russia.

Saleh responded passionately to a question about whether any of the sides could be regarded as a “lesser evil”.

“It’s disgusting and unethical to talk about a ‘lesser evil’. It’s despicable that the great powers now base their Syrian policy on Bashar al-Assad, who has been responsible for 90% of the destruction and responsible for gassing his own people.”

These evil actors on all sides had to be confronted. The Syrian people had resisted both the regime and the Islamists, “and we were betrayed”, he said.

The meeting on Tuesday, addressed by Saleh and researcher Husam Al-Katlaby, was held to highlight the case of four Syrian community activists, victims of forced disappearance: Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hammadeh, Samira Al-Khalil and Nazem Hammadi.

The four were kidnapped in December 2013 from their workplace, the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC), in the city of Douma. There has been no news of their whereabouts since.

The VDC monitors human rights violations committed by all actors in Syria. The four were all active participants in the revolution, and, before that, in struggles against the Assad regime.

Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer, defended political prisoners in Syria since 2001. She helped establish the VDC and co-founded the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), among other organisations.

Samira Al-Khalil is a long-time political activist, and had been detained by the Syrian authorities as a result. She worked to help women in Douma support themselves by starting small income-generating projects.
A mural in Syria supporting the Douma 4

Wa’el Hamada was an active member of the VDC and a co-founder of the LCC network.

Nazem Hammadi is a Syrian human rights lawyer and poet, who played a crucial role in providing humanitarian assistance to besieged civilians.

In his opening talk to Tuesday’s meeting, Yassin al-Haj Saleh – who is the husband of Samira Al-Khalil and a good friend of the other Douma 4 activists – spoke from a personal standpoint about the effect of forced disappearances on the victims’ families.

“Death dies – forced disappearance kills”, he said. While the effect of the loss of a loved one who has died gradually reduces over time, the suffering of the families of people who have been forcibly disappeared grows over time, he said.

Researcher Husam Al-Katlaby, the chief executive of the VDC, also addressed Tuesday’s meeting. He said that, in total, the number of victims of forced disappearance in Syria is estimated at between 75,000 and 85,000.

On Saturday at 6.0pm, London-based Syrian activists will hold a vigil for the Douma 4, and all advocates for freedom, at Trafalgar Square. GL, 7 December 2017.

■ Commemoration on Saturday in Trafalgar Square, London.

■ Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s blog

■ Violations Documentation Centre

Some other recent links on Syria

A letter to Rami Suleiman, a Syrian political prisoner, from Dellair Youssef

Russian soldiers in Homs, reported by Syria Untold

Letter of women of Idlib to the world

On People & Nature

Here are the voices of Syria’s revolution. Let’s listen July 2017.

“Tyrants know now that they can maintain their power through mass slaughter” – interview with Leila al-Shami December 2016.

About the picture. The Day of Rage protest was held on 14 October, in areas of northern Syria outside the government’s control and across the world, to protest at the regime’s violence. A report here.


Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature

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Published on December 28, 2017 04:00

December 27, 2017

John Twomey

Anthony McIntyre recalls his late father in law who died in 2016 in Los Angeles. 

I thought about writing this last year but held off just in case it was still too raw for my wife. It was her first Xmas without her dad and sensitivity trumped the compulsion to write.
He was always known as Poppy John, a name I gave him after the birth of his first grandchild. It was all the children here ever referred to him by. He adored his first grandchild, an adoration replicated for the three to follow, one here and two others in the US. He made his first journey to Ireland shortly after my daughter was born to be with her and his own daughter. I recall my own pride in walking out to the garden and showing my daughter off to him and his wife before they even got a foot through the front door. 
At the time Springhill was an uncomfortable place to live. Few there had any inkling of the de-republicanisation of the Provisional project taking place all around them and were not in any way enamoured to anyone who pointed it out. He arrived there months after the Provisional IRA killing of Joe O'Connor, a period fraught with tension. Still, there was no hostility towards him or his wife.

He travelled to Belfast on a few more occasions. Many evenings saw him and I going on the beer. My friends in Belfast enjoyed his company and would join us in the city’s downtown pubs or the Green Hut in Turf Lodge. With a US military background it was no great shock to learn that his views were right of centre, and he was no shrinking violet when it came to standing over them, although always polite and tolerant.

He was a Trump supporter, not that he had any great faith in Trump. It was just that he felt Hillary Clinton would be a disaster for Americans. He very much subscribed to Trump’s characterisation of her as "crooked Hillary." Ever since Trump was elected, I took the view that he only won because of the sheer implausibility of a totally untrustworthy Hillary as a president. Although I doubt had he lived to experience the Trump presidency he would have stuck with it. He did not suffer fools gladly and any typology of fools would have Trump included.

A well read and informed man, he would often discuss international politics with me, feeling that the big wars of the future would be fought over water. He would send me books as presents and I would do likewise for him.  
He retired from the Army a Command Sergeant Major, and he was a Vietnam veteran. While my political view and his were miles apart, it never came between us in any personal sense. We were firm friends. He loved the banter and would laugh like mad when I would wind his wife up, although played it cute by not overtly taking sides. And she could give as good as she got. 
He had lived with leukaemia for more than a decade and persisted throughout with dogged determination. He and his wife came to stay with us over Christmas in Drogheda one year and he never mentioned his illness. Nevertheless, my wife had always braced herself, and when his condition took a turn for the worse she travelled out to the US to spend three months with him during one of his last turns at chemotherapy. On return, when it became clear that he was not going to make it through she headed back out to spend his final days with him, being there when he passed. She delivered the eulogy at his funeral service in Los Angeles., which was largely a military affair as many of his former comrades had turned out for the occasion. 
If friendships are strong they will survive the strains of political differences. When Poppy John died I lost a friend, a good one. 

Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre      


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Published on December 27, 2017 12:36

Poke With A Very Long Stick

Writing last month Mick Hall suggested that:
It would be wise to poke with a very long stick whatever the British Government say about Iran in the coming weeks.

Public beheading performed in Saudi Arabia.

When Mohammed bin Salman first became the Crown prince of Saudi Arabia the British liberal intelligentsia took him at his word when he claimed he would modernise the Kingdom, women would be allowed to drive cars and corruption would be tackled rigorously.

If he were serious about tackling corruption the first to be arrested would be his father, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud the current king, and the next would be the crown prince himself.

The system is such in Saudi Arabia that as far as the countless members of the Royal family are concerned everything within the kingdom is theirs for the taking.

So what is this young satraps true aims, why has he arrested Saudi businessmen, bureaucrats including friends, and members of his own family? Its about battening down the hatches for a coming war with Iran: his role is to hold the home-front if and when Saudi Arabia goes to war.

The USA, Israel, and Trump's personal caddy the British Tory government are underwriting, orchestrating and setting the guidelines for this war.

Last week the prime minister of Lebanon resigned on key after a phone call from the Saudi crown prince as Martin Chulov reports:
At a lunch in Beirut being hosted by prime minister Saad Hariri. Midway through the meal with the visiting French cultural minister, Françoise Nyssen, Hariri received a call and his demeanour changed. He excused himself and left for the airport, without his aides.
Within hours Hariri, by then in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, had resigned his position, concluding his transition from Lebanese leader to Saudi envoy and Lebanon’s transformation from outpost to ground zero of a stunning regional escalation.
The fall of Kurdish-held Kirkuk in northern Iraq to the Iraqi government, backed by Iran’s most prominent general, in October, starvation among the population of war-torn Yemen, a ballistic missile over Riyadh, and the apparently forced exit of the premier in Lebanon are all part of the same machinations – a great strategic power play between two regional heavyweights that has suddenly shifted from back rooms to potent realisation.

Saddam Hussein was the Sunni bulwark against Iran and the Shia peoples of the region in Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and when he fell it was the USA which stepped into the void, which was always going to end disastrously yet the Saudi's didn't see it coming.

As Martin continues:
While they dithered, Iran took hold,” said a senior Saudi official who has left the kingdom in the past year. “While they thought the US was doing their bidding, it was actually enabling an Iranian takeover. This is now almost complete. So they are right to worry. Things have changed in the Middle East by them doing nothing about it.” ... Iran now all but controls a land corridor that runs from Tehran to Tartous in Syria, on the Mediterranean coast, giving it access to a seaport a long way to its west, and far from the heavily patrolled waters of the Arabian Gulf. The route passes through the centre of Iraq, and Syria, skirting the Lebanese border and what were some of the most active areas of the Syrian civil war, which have been returned to regime control. “They are two months from finishing this,” said a senior regional intelligence official. “This changes things. It gives them an open supply line to move whatever they want. And it gives them strategic depth. It is a big deal.”

Hence the imbecile in the White House's rush to war, with his caddy running behind crying "go Donald go."

Just how grubby this is was also pointed out by Martin:

Saudi leaders had long placed faith in Hariri as their man to defy Hezbollah and assert the authority of state institutions over its parallel political and military structure in Lebanon ...Their patience ran out last year when the Saudi construction sector collapsed, dragging down with it a company that Hariri chaired. Since then, he and Saudi leaders have been at odds over more than $1 billion. Riyadh’s new sense of crisis appears to have put that feud on hold and invited Hariri back into the fold – for a price.

Mohammed bin Salman claims he is tackling corruption while handing out backhanders.

“That the Saudi leadership ever could have seriously entertained the notion that Hariri could “rein in” Hezbollah appears fanciful if one takes even a cursory look at the group’s relationship to Lebanese governments since 2005, which it either dominated, defied or toppled at will,” said Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria and Lebanon for the International Crisis Group. Bob Fisk, who has lived in Lebanon for over 30 years explained how people there are taking the kidnaping of there PM by bin Salman and his cronies:

The Saudis may be holding the Lebanese Prime Minister hostage but their apparent plan to topple the Beirut government has gloriously backfired. Far from breaking up the cabinet and throwing Hezbollah’s ministers to the wolves, the Lebanese nation has suddenly woken up to what it’s like to be united – against the Saudis. The Lebanese government has announced that it does not accept the resignation statement which Saad Hariri was obliged to make in Riyadh, and overnight hashtags have appeared on several Beirut streets saying “kul na Saad” – “We are all Saad”. Even the Sunni Muslims of Lebanon are furious at their Sunni counterparts in Saudi Arabia.
Hariri has been detained – or constrained, or kidnapped or held hostage or treated as an honoured guest of Saudi Arabia (take your pick). For the Lebanese government – and for many tens of thousands of Lebanese – the Saudi decision to present Hariri with a resignation letter to read on the Arabia television channel was a national insult. Expect to hear a great deal in the MSM in the coming weeks about Iran's secret WMDs, the wickedness of the regime, and how it poses a threat to the UK.

Rather than Boris Johnson having mistakenly said Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was simply teaching people journalism during her visit to Iran, it may have been a deliberate act to provoke the Iranian government into overreacting, and to hell with the consequences for Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family.

Whatever the truth of this and Priti Patel's alleged holiday in Israel, which had MI6's fingerprints all over it, it would be wise to poke with a very long stick whatever the British Government and its MSM creatures say about Iran in the coming weeks.

➤More on the despicable behavior of Britain's and the USA's close ally in the middle east.

Only God can save us': Yemeni children starve as aid is held at border by Saudi Arabian government.  
Abdulaziz al-Husseinya, nine years old and suffering from acute malnutrition, Al-Thawra hospital, Hodeidah, Yemen. Photograph: Iona Craig

 And to see just how close the UK government is with the Saudi's:
The UK government’s £1.5bn gift to Saudi Arabia is absolutely not dodgy. Honest guv.



Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage



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Published on December 27, 2017 04:00

December 26, 2017

Phonsie McErlean

Anthony McIntyre remembers a fellow blanket man who died a few days before last Christmas. 
Photo: An Phoblacht
Two days short of Christmas last year, Phonsie McErlean died in his sleep. Sorrowful as it happened to be, it was probably a more peaceful sleep and certainly in a more comfortable bed than he was used to throughout the blanket protest, where he was an enduring figure. For years his bed was nothing more than a damp mattress on a concrete floor. Then, he was a young man, able for it. By the time he died he was a grandfather and father of three children. What comforts he had, he deserved them.

We were on the same block, H4, from 1978-1980, although not the same wing, only ever coming across each other in mass. The mass was a crucial communications intersection in the H Blocks as well as being the highlight of what limited social life we managed to eke out in a place purpose built to isolate. Every effort was made to ensure the authorities found no excuse to deny access to it.

They were grueling times in H4. Prison staff violence was an everyday occurrence and Phonsie like the rest of us had to knuckle down and bear it out. The choice was to walk away and for many that was simply a notion never to be entertained. I have no memories of him from after the blanket protest, so my abiding one is of him bare chested wearing only prison trousers, which were obligatory if we were to make it to mass.

Originally a Portglenone man he teamed up with the South Derry men, two of whom would later die on hunger strike, Frank Hughes and Tom McElwee. The consciousness of many South Derry and North Antrim prisoners were steeped in the sacrifices of both men, making it inevitable that they would return in one form or other to republican activism on release. It was no different for Phonsie.

In later life Phonsie moved to Navan. A republican from the area who I travelled with to Dublin every week would often talk about him. It was the first I had heard of him since the H Blocks. Although in no way sympathetic to Sinn Fein my friend had enormous respect for Phonsie who was still with the party. His role in the blanket protest crossed many boundaries.

His funeral was attended by a large gathering of people many of them former blanket men. They walked in the cortege, made up the guard of honour and carried his coffin.

Sinn Fein organised the funeral while Jim Gibney devoted his Irish News column to the late blanket man. Meath West Sinn Féin TD Peadar Tóibín delivered the funeral oration, referring to the energy and efforts that Phonsie put into the republican struggle.

Not a guy I got to know particularly well, I am nevertheless honored to have occupied that historical moment in time with him, when young Irish men and women led by people like Mairead Farrell, Bobby Sands and Brendan Hughes, clung by their finger tips to the rim of the abyss. The boots that stomped on their fingers wore out before they could break the grasp of IRA volunteers like Phonsie McErlean.




Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
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Published on December 26, 2017 12:26

Think South, Move South, Rule South!

Think South, move South, rule South! The DUP can give Messrs Varadkar and Coveney a political bloody nose by unveiling plans to organise and contest elections in the Republic, maintains controversial commentator, Dr John Coulter, in his latest Fearless Flying Column – but does the DUP have the political guts to take such a forward-thinking step?That November 1985 Dublin Diktat gave the South its first effective say in the running of Northern Ireland since partition in the 1920s. It allowed Dublin to set up the notorious Maryfield Secretariat near Belfast and proved that the Republic could finally outwit Unionism when it came to the numbers game and street protests.
London and Dublin had both learned from the Sunningdale fiasco of 1973/74, when the Ulster Workers’ Council strike not only brought hundreds of thousands of Protestants onto the streets in a show of strength not seen the Home Rule crisis of the early 20th century, but also brought power-sharing to a crashing halt. It’s just a pity Unionism did not have a workable alternative to put in place rather than dancing around the streets.
And what was that lesson? Simple, if Unionists don’t like something, they get out their flags, bands and banners and go marching! So when Thatcher betrayed Unionist leader Jim Molyneaux and signed the 1985 Agreement, Unionists reacted with their typical Ulster Says No activities, which soon became the Ulster Still Says No parades.
What Unionism failed to note was that while nationalists were cock-a-hoop Dublin had a say in running Northern Ireland via Maryfield, Unionists were so busy organising parades and setting up groups such as the Ulster Clubs and Ulster Resistance, they failed to notice the Agreement’s crucial Achilles Heel – the accord gave Northern Unionists the right to poke their noses into the running of Southern affairs.
In 1985, Unionists were quite content to argue that they didn’t want to meddle in the internal affairs of a foreign state in the forlorn hope that nationalists would abandon the Maryfield project. Instead, nationalists realised that a say in running Northern Ireland could be dressed up in the language of political ambiguity under the banner of so-called mutual cross-border co-operation.
The essential problems which Unionists faced were a decreasing Protestant population in the Republic, and an existing Southern Protestant population which was quite content to integrate itself into the Republic’s political structures. Unlike Northern nationalists who looked to Dublin for support, Southern Protestants did not look as equally adamantly to Northern Ireland-based Unionist parties for political comfort.
Indeed, if developments in the island’s largest Protestant denomination, the Church of Ireland, over same-sex marriage are taken as a benchmark, Southern Protestant liberalism could well play a major role in undermining the Union.
Countering this view are the statistics that the Southern Protestant population is on the rise again. The key question is, how significant will the Protestant Loyal Orders be – especially in the border counties of Donegal, Monaghan, Cavan and Leitrim – in developing this new Southern Protestant identity?
At one time, particularly in 2013, I had high hopes that the newly formed NI21 party, which was essentially a liberal Unionist movement, could consider forming a Republic-based operation known as SI21 as an all-island movement for Ireland’s pro-Union community. But as we all know now, NI21 crashed and burned politically!
So what could be Unionism’s Plan B to combat Simon Coveney’s sabre rattling over a potential way forward for Northern Ireland in the face of a lack of devolved structures? Coveney’s scheme to use the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference to bring about some form of convoluted joint authority of Northern Ireland by Dublin and London makes sense from a Southern nationalist perspective. It could also be dismissed as Southern politicians wanting to fend off the threat from Sinn Fein in the next Dail general election.
But Southern sabre rattling could well backfire and stab the Republic in the political jugular vein. What happens if the DUP has the nerve to call Coveney’s bluff and demand that Unionists have a say in the running of the Republic?
Don’t forget, the DUP is in a cosy relationship with the Tories. If Direct Rule is restored formally during 2018, what’s to stop Theresa May – or whoever succeeds her as Tory boss – agreeing to staff the Northern Ireland Office with Northern Ireland MPs or Hard Brexit Conservative MPs? We can rule out Sinn Fein as it still refuses to take its Commons seats.
Now let’s apply Coveney’s Intergovernmental Conference scenario. Does the foreign minister of the Irish Republic really want DUP Ministers and Right-wing Tories sitting across from him telling him how he should run his country?
To make matters worse, what if the DUP decides to run candidates in the next Southern General Election in the border counties? If the Loyal Orders in the Republic can mobilise their votes, could we see a handful of DUP TDs returned to Leinster House? Perhaps enough to keep Varadkar retain his post as Taoiseach?
The late Rev Ian Paisley and the late Martin McGuinness once ran the successful power-sharing Executive at Stormont; so why can’t a Fine Gael/DUP coalition also work in Leinster House? In his RTE interview, Minister Coveney warned about the dangers of “a very frosty environment”. Something tells me he was not counting on the DUP calling his bluff.
Just as Northern Unionists relied heavily on the ‘Not An Inch’ mentality of Northern Ireland’s Protestant community in dealing with the Irish Republic, so too have Southern nationalists relied on Unionists saying ‘Bog Off’ to any scheme smacking of joint authority.
But what if Unionists did call the Southern bluff for a change and ended up, post Brexit, with the Occupied Twenty-Six Counties back in a New Union of the British Isles as a result of a new Anglo-Irish Treaty? 
Just as the British outwitted the Irish delegation in 1920, a DUP/Tory delegation could do the same in 2020.


John Coulter is a unionist political commentator and former Blanket columnist. 
Follow John Coulter on Twitter  @JohnAHCoulterDr Coulter is also author of ‘ An Sais Glas: (The Green Sash): The Road to National Republicanism’, which is available on Amazon Kindle.


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Published on December 26, 2017 01:00

December 25, 2017

Joe Corr

Anthony McIntyre remembers Turf Lodge man, Joe Corr.

Joe Corr, or "Wee Joe" as we knew him, died last year and by mishap missed TPQ’s end of year obituaries, which was unfortunate because if there was anybody whose life deserved a special reflection at the end of the year of their death, it was Joe. It was not for the want of trying. Myself and his son had been in frequent contact after his death, but a change of contact details spiked the planned obit.

Another patron of Turf Lodge’s Green Hut to succumb to cancer he was the friendliest of characters, refreshingly lacking in airs, graces and pretensions. The Green Hut, the property of the Turf Lodge Tenants Association,, was a great social venue. It was probably the place where I consumed more drink than anywhere else in Belfast. Through its doors came the finest from Turf Lodge. Joe was one of them. He would come in regularly with his wife Mary and were great craic. Mary could banter with the best of them while Joe would sit smiling and chatting in that genial way of his. Through the Hut, I also got to know the sons to varying degrees, in particular Michael whose sense of humour never deserted him despite having lost an arm in an accident.

Joe was in the bar trade most of his working days, have earlier cleaned windows around Ballymurphy with his late father before giving the computer installation trade a go. He was to find himself thrust into the role as head of the family after his father was gunned down by Paratroopers during the Ballymurphy massacre. In the era of the interventionist state, the British government often intervened via murder. 

Joe married Mary Bloomer in 1976, around the same time I was going into prison to begin a life sentence. It was not until I was released that I met him and so many others from Turf Lodge who were to become firm friends. Turf was where I had to do what was called the "Work Out Scheme" prior to release. It was the beginning of a long love affair with Turf Lodge. A strong republican estate, I was made welcome immediately. Beneath the dour architectural exterior, there were many colourful people, and I had befriended quite a few of them in those three months before the front gate of Maghaberry banged behind me for the final time, bringing to a close my long spell of imprisonment. 
Life for the working class community there was never easy. Joe's son Michael described what it was like to grow up in the estate during the violent political conflict that gripped the North:


1980s growing up in Turf Lodge was different and difficult for a lot of people but looking back on it now we survived from shootings to bombings, British forces and RUC occupied streets, loyalist paramilitaries stalking Catholic areas, tit-for-tat killings on both sides and with my dad working in the bars in town this made it worse than most especially for mum not knowing what, when, how, if he was going to be fine ... I remember from a personal point in the early 80s being awoken by a banging on the front door in the early hours of the morning by the RUC, to be told that my daddy had been beaten savagely by loyalist paramilitaries when they tried to rob the Alambra bar in North Street which he he managed. He was left in the RVH for quite some time - like a wire mesh - and we often talked about fighting for his life. His injuries were reported to be horrific as I saw for myself ... but as he did, he got better and jumped on the bike and got back to life and people within the community

In the final weeks of his life his family spent a lot of time by his bedside, where he had come home to die. Once after I had sent him a card his son told me he had made the thumbs up sign: by that stage he was unable to speak.

The family was advised to place him in a care home on the grounds that it would be unable to give him the 24 hour care needed. They were having none of it, taking the view that if family can’t pull together to aid their father and husband in the place he loved most, in the last weeks of his life, what meaning has family? “There was no way we would let our father/brother spend his last few weeks in a home.” It was tough going for sure but they coped and when external help was needed the McMillan nurses were on hand. The family was generous in its praise of those carers. 

Wee Joe was a big man whose passing left an even bigger gap.





Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
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Published on December 25, 2017 11:35

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