Internet Commentator

Winnie, that is. Or perhaps there is a more apt comparison. Martin Kettle does an excellent job of skewering Gerry Adams’ self-serving characterisation of Northern Ireland as equivalent to South Africa:

In Northern Ireland, there used to be a system of apartheid, Gerry Adams observed recently. Adams doesn’t do unintended comments. So his remark was crafted not just to flatter Irish republicanism’s own sense of victimhood but to appeal to some of its useful idiots too. Not least because its implication, none too subtle, was that Sinn Féin was Ulster’s ANC and Adams its Nelson Mandela.

Granted, the Northern Ireland in which Adams and his generation of Catholics grew up was a place of grim, persistent and sometimes aggressive discrimination. But apartheid? Under apartheid, black South Africans were denied citizenship and the vote. They weren’t allowed to live in the cities. They had to carry a special pass, and they committed a criminal offence if they had sex with a white. None of this even remotely applied to Catholics in what was nevertheless an unjust and unequal relationship with Ulster Protestants.

Suggesting Adams resembles a different “comrade”:

Meanwhile, the rackets and the robberies, the beatings and the blackmail will continue. Too weak to succeed but too strong to defeat, Sinn Féin may stay locked in its parallel universe well into its second century. Themselves alone.

And, if that is right, then instead of seeing Gerry Adams as Northern Ireland’s Nelson Mandela, it might be more realistic if we drew a less heroic parallel. Unable to complete the transition from violent to peaceful politics, dependent on the networks of dishonesty on which his authority rests, Adams may now be turning into Northern Ireland’s Yasser Arafat.

[via Slugger]

Ciarán has an interesting observation on Belfast’s St Patrick’s day festival in the light of Belfast council’s decision not to fund the parade:

But what I also found was something that I remarked on in my first post to this blog, way back in November. That is, that the celebration just came across as aggressive. At least part of the intention of the event was to mark some absolute ownership on the city centre for the day, in the same way that, like it or not, the 12th is partly about marking absolute ownership of various spaces for a few days in July

It is probably, depressingly, the case that, in Northern Ireland at least, “cultural celebration” is a zero sum game. Each culture defines itself in relation to the other, particularly so as there is little to distinguish ordinary protestants and catholics from one another. They look similar, wear similar clothes, eat similar food, enjoy similar leisure activities, go to the same holiday destinations and support the same English football teams. So, to properly celebrate one’s own culture it is obligatory to deprecate the other guy’s.

By the way: nice to see Ciaran back in action after his suspicious stomach bug. Bad Ulster Fry or The Securocrats? As with the comments section at Slugger, you pays your money, takes your choice.

Why this is a legal principle but not a moral principle and the problems with conflating both, particularly in relation to the recent Belfast robbery. Once again this is another comment to a United Irelander post which has evolved into a blog post. In response to this suggestion by Young Irelander:

Hold on,I’m no defender of the Provos,but since when is it up to suspects to prove that they are not guilty?It is up to Hugh Orde and the PSNI to show evidence proving that the IRA did it!

Do the DUP not believe in the old adage of ‘innocent until proven guilty’?

I offered this thought experiment:

Let’s say the guy next door to you (allegedly) molests his daughter. Let’s say (for now) there is insufficient evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. Your own daughter is invited for a sleepover. If what you suggest is correct you should have no problem, after all how can he prove that he doesn’t molest his daughter?

The point is that once a reasonable suspicion has been raised, common sense dictates that it should be resolved and it usually falls to the person under suspicion to demonstrate that such suspicions aren’t warranted.

Note that a) this presumes that the suspicions are reasonable and in the case of the “IRA” robbery they surely are and b) that such an onus applies only if the person wants to be treated as any ordinary blameless individual and ought not apply in the event of a criminal prosecution.

To which YI replied:

Your analogy could be used to argue that the two governments shouldn’t be dealing with Sinn Fein in the way a father shouldn’t allow his daughter near a suspected child molester.

I already noted that “innocent until proven guilty” is rightfully the principle behind criminal prosecutions but surely anyone can see from my example that it isn’t any kind of moral principle. As it happens I don’t think the analogy follows to the governments dealing with SF (although it is closer to the issue of other parties “getting into bed” with SF) but if you felt it did the proper course is to examine the consequences of that and not just assume a priori that whatever happens the governments must always “be dealing with” SF.

That nobody should be found guilty of this crime without due process doesn’t mean that some sort of suspicions may be aired. At the moment there aren’t really any other viable candidates for perpetrators of the robbery other than the IRA, this means SF have a lot of explaning to do and some sort of political sanction ought to apply.

Their much trumpeted electoral mandate only goes so far - If a political party campaigned on the basis of, say, chopping the legs off everyone with red hair and (by some miracle!) managed to acquire 25% of the vote. This “mandate” wouldn’t confer some sort of obligation on everybody else to seek some sort of compromise (perhaps chop off only one leg off every second redhead), at some stage the principle that chopping-the-legs-off-redheads-is wrong must take precedence over electoral mandates.

One of the most curious recent features of Loyalism is a professed solidarity with Israel. Unkind critics note that the presence of Israeli flags fluttering above the red, white and blue kerbstones represents nothing more than a direct rebuke to Republicans making common cause with the Palestinians. Squander Two Blog exposes the depth of this new-found zionism:

Anyway, the UVF, a Unionist “paramilitary organisation” (terrorists), have been developing quite close ties with the BNP of late. I suppose the BNP are also a Unionist paramilitary organisation, in a way, so you can see why such an alliance might form. But, of course, this raises a problem. So a BNP speaker was coming over to give a speech in a UVF-controlled area, and his hosts went round and took down all the Israeli flags so as not to offend him.

Mark Steyn suggests a more publisher-friendly rendition of the tryst described by Bill Clinton in My Life merely as an “inappropriate encounter”:

“The shaft of light from the dying sun through the Oval Office window caught the swell of her bosom as she slid the extra-large pepperoni across the desk. I knew it was wrong. I’d penciled in that evening for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, but what the hell, the two sides of that troubled island’s sectarian conflict were separated by as deep a divide as the plunging cleavage now beckoning from her low-cut angora sweater. Ulster could wait.”

So Slugger O’Toole wasn’t really hacked at all, it was just a software glitch.

Nice to see that Slugger’s back!

I am deeply saddened to learn of the demise of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao’s finest IRA OC Jimmy Sands. It is hard to see how Antillean Republicanism can ever recover from this cruel blow. His last interview seems now prophetic and poignant:

When confronted with the revelations outside Kelly’s Cellars, where we had agreed to meet, the leading satirical republican accused IRA members of waging a vendettaagainst him and passing the information on to loyalists. “They want the UDA or UVF to do their dirty work for them,” said Sands. “There are those within the IRA who want to murder me. But this will in no way have been sanctioned by the leadership.”

Great post from Carrie about the how Provisional IRA actions against “dissidents”, such as the foiled abduction of Bobby Tohill, are implicitly tolerated.

Now that Tohill has seemingly retracted some of his explanation for what happened to him, the way has been paved to smooth over any bumps on the road to a DUP/SF led Stormont. If the charge of membership is dropped and remains unpursued then this abduction merely becomes a footnote of ‘typical Belfast hard men’ behavior, merely a drunken brawl or some such. Nothing to worry about, nothing to see, move on. And everytime the Provos get away with beating, torturing, disappearing and murdering another dissident, it makes it that much easier for the next one to be maced, beaten, kidnapped and trundled into the back of a van on the way to God knows where. But why worry? They were only dissidents. The Provos are doing us all a favor.

While Gerry Adams is feted in Canada, Colby Cosh has also noted this latest development in the “peace process”.

It’s politics as usual in Northern Ireland, and what’s most interesting is that everyone but the people who live there keeps talking of the “peace process” as though it were something that hadn’t been trampled into the ground a hundred times over

While I write, I hear on the radio that the IRA has issued a statement claiming, as it did immediately after Jerry McCabe’s murder, that Tohill’s abduction was “not authorised”. Needless to say such statements are only credible to the credulous.

It is most disconcerting to find myself in agreement with not only Al -Qaeda VP Ayman Zawahiri - this scumbag doesn’t deserve the “al-” honorific - in opposing France’s headscarf ban but also with the malevolent ignoramus himself, Paul Dunne* in wondering whether someone more prominent than Freddie Scappaticci was the real “Stakeknife”, the British Army’s most influential spy within the provisional republican movement. I had always assumed stakeknife would turn out to be a household name.

* I don’t link to this terrorist cheerleader and Nazi “contextualiser”. If you want to read what he has to say, you can get to his rudimentary web-zine “Shamrockshire Eagle” from Broom of Anger, Irish Eagle or Slugger.