JULY: The Hasbara Award for Services to the Truth
THE paper-thin pretence of Israel being a beacon of democracy amidst the burning terrrorist sands of the Middle Eastis gone and it’s not coming back. Those jawdropping unfavourability ratings may rally a little after the last loop of baby intestine has been picked from the Gaza telegraph wires, but they’re not returning anywhere near the level of goodwill – or even tolerance – required to keep a country in business. Why? Because there’s a reckoning coming when Gaza is finally opened not to the world, because it never will be while Israel exists, but to the world’s media, to human rights groups and to lawyers. Israel may spend eyewatering sums of its Western handouts on propaganda and PR, but all the promo films in the world, another thousand years of free trips to the beach and the Wailing Wall for politicians, journalists and influencers, will never erase the images that have been seared into people’s eyeballs.
But they’re having a go. Israel angrily invited us to join them in throwing their hands up in horror at Bob Vylan and Kneecap at the same time as they launched a missile into a busy seafront cafe in Gaza, with carnage of such an extent that the number of dead still hasn’t been counted. The BBC, the Times and the Mail invited us to share their disgust at anti-IDF chanting while they continued to display zero journalistic curiosity about the nature and extent of UK involvement in the Gaza slaughter. But the Bob Vylan/Kneecap charade has a shrinking audience. Three days in and it was running out of steam because it was missing the driving force of that large and growing chunk of the UK and US commentariat which has turned suddenly and ferociously against the Tel Aviv regime. On Tuesday the Times letters page was replete with scathing critiques of the preposterous Glastonbury outrage; across television and radio, the narrative began to shift from ‘Ban these antisemites’ to an almost apologetic ‘Is this really worse than the beach café massacre?’
If Israel is running out of road in Europe, its hitherto smooth and free ride on the vast US freeway may be approaching a toll booth. Behemoths of the unhinged American far right have turned against Tel Aviv with a suddenness and an anger that has perplexed seasoned observers. Joe Rogan, Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green have all in recent months begun shrilly questioning their country’s hitherto unquestioning acceptance of Israel’s plucky little brother status. Today, more Americans disapprove of Israel than approve.
Donald Trump famously glazes over in the middle of briefings, but he sits bolt upright and pins his ears back when a Joe Rogan clip comes on his phone.
Hasbara that.
AUGUST: The Ormeau Avenue My Sources Tell Me Award
9am on Friday morning and I’m gathering my stuff from the passenger seat of the car (three mandarins, two sandwiches, one laptop, if you're interested). On comes that vulgar, you-looking-at-me? Nolan intro which as usual I endure ahead of the news containing that 25-second France/Palestine report I mentioned earlier.
And what a quarter of a minute it is…
The first five seconds is an outline of the story: the French decision to recognise Palestine when the UN next convenes. Then we have four seconds of a quote from French President Emmanuel Macron, who said there’s “an urgent need for the war in Gaza to end.”
That left, let’s see now… 16 seconds remaining for the Israel position to be laid out. Oh, and that of the United States.
First up, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who we're told considers the French decision wrong because it “rewards terrorism”.
Next we hear from ‘Washington’. Not a Washington source. Not a Washington spokesperson. Just ‘Washington’. It believes the French decision to recognise Palestine is “reckless”.
Finally comes US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who made it a Washington double. He said the French decision is “a slap in the face to victims of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.”
And that was it. 25 seconds. Five seconds of news. 20 seconds of quotes. 75 per cent of the 20 seconds of quotes coming from Tel Aviv, Washington and... Washington. And while the 25-second piece achieved the not-inconsiderable feat of failing to mention the starvation of the Gazan people that has led the French to act, it did mention October 7.
Who wrote the 25-second piece? I have no idea. Was it somebody in Belfast? Perhaps, but if it was, the BBC is more wasteful with our money than I had supposed, because what’s the point in every regional radio station from Norwich to Northampton doing the same job? Was it, then, a piece sitting in a central repository for use by the regions as and when required? That would make more sense, but, again, I haven’t got a clue.
And while I haven’t got a clue either about the editorial process that brought the item to air, I am fully cognisant of the fact that it takes an extraordinary commitment to the righteousness of the Israeli cause to write a piece like that. Here’s a BBC story about a world power defying the United States in protest at Israel’s starvation tactics in Gaza, and that story comprises four quotes: One from Macron, one from Netanyahu, one from Rubio, one from ‘Washington’.
It must have been quite the editorial meeting.
– Right, France’s Palestine recognition. What’ve we got?
– Opening line, then a quote from Macron and a quote from Netanyahu.
– Is that it?
– Yep, one each, nice and tidy.
– Nothing from Washington?
– Who?
– Washington DC.
– No.
– Nothing from Marco?
– Polo?
– Rubio.
– No.
– Let’s fix that.
– You want to put Washington in as well?
– Yep.
– Um, okay.
– And Rubio.
– That’s three quotes from people who are very angry with France and one quote from France.
– That seems about right, right?
– If you say so, boss...
The preponderance of Tories in top positions at the BBC is, of course, a key driver of the BBC’s pro-Israel coverage, but when you throw in the extraordinary effectiveness of the UK's pro-Israel lobby, then the prospect of anything approaching even-handed BBC reporting on Gaza becomes vanishingly small. The raucous and aggressive Labour Friends of Israel group combined forces with a range of pro-Israel groups to put massive pressure on states, talent agencies and music venues amidst the Kneecap/Bob Vylan hysteria. That axis scored significant success, damaging the careers and earning potential of those who came on their radar. How much easier was their job when it came to pushing at the door to a Tory-heavy BBC management team that wasn’t just ajar, but lying wide open?
Viewed in the bright light of the CMM report, that 3-1 BBCNI report on France/Palestine could well turn out to be one of the Corporation’s more restrained and balanced pieces on Gaza.
In which case... thanks, Ormeau Avenue.
SEPTEMBER: The Sign of the Times Award
WE’RE back to Gordon Lyons. Again.
This time, though, Gormless Gord doesn’t find himself in the headlines for accidentally walking into a lamppost, but for deliberately walking into one.
The Minister for Communities took a proactive executive decision last week, which was nice. He changed the letterhead on the department notepaper.
The trilingual letterhead featuring English, Irish and Ulster-Scots has gone, replaced by the same template only with the Irish and the Ulster-Scots removed. Why? Well, the Minister said last week, or rather his department said last week (which is the same thing, really) that the new logo is “a single language logo, an abbreviated single language logo and a refreshed trilingual language logo which is used when correspondence relates to Irish or Ulster-Scots language, identity or culture”.
Which isn’t really telling us why, but, as ever, we can use our vivid imaginations.
There was zero pressure on Gord to do what he did. Stephen Nolan wasn’t on the case; the Donaghadee Dynamo hadn’t threatened to go the mattresses over it; even the TUV had somehow managed to miss it. The world turned, no-one fell off, and all was quiet and calm in relation to Gord’s headed notepaper. Until the East Antrim MLA decided it wasn’t.
If the DUP has learned anything in recent years it is that while some rows are purchased at great expense, others can be had for a song. Paul Givan thought the £50,000 being spent on the Irish language bursary scheme Líofa was so paltry that he could scrub it at Christmas 2016 and earn multiple brownie points with his constituents and colleagues with little or no blowback. That disastrous decision and subsequent arse-clenchingly embarrassing u-turn now looms large in the story of his career, as it always will.
A few months earlier, DUP Agriculture Minister Michelle McIlveen similarly reckoned that changing the name of a fisheries protection vessel from Banríon Uladh to Queen of Ulster would earn her endless delighted pats on the back at the annual conference with very little downside. The subsequent days and weeks were anything but plain sailing.
Now Gord has decided not only to poke a sleeping bear, but to boot it in the snout and hose it with cold water. He did so without an angry mob outside his constituency office demanding that he do so. He did so without a News Letter editorial telling him Carson’s ghost is angry and unquiet. He did so without the TUV warning that this is worse than the Trans desserts in the Stormont canteen. In short, he invented a problem.
Now in the normal run of things a problem is… well… a problem. But as the DUP continues its headlong rush towards oblivion, and as Gavin Robinson continues to snap upright in bed in the middle of the night with the image of Jim Allister’s coffin-plate smile burned into the back of his sleepy eyeballs, some problems are welcome problems. And the Irish language on the very headed notepaper on their desk is the kind of problem that the DUP dream of. Why? Because they have decided that the best way to battle the creeping threat of the TUV is to outdo the TUV.
Don’t get Squinter wrong, the old cúpla focal has always been kryptonite to the keepers of the Loyal Ulster flame, but inventing Irish language problems is a risky business for a minister in a party still scarred by the Líofa debacle and still walking around with a crocodile tattoo on its forehead.
But needs must when the devil drives, and Gordon’s game but doomed effort to look stauncher than the TUV’s Staunchy McStaunchface was kind of inevitable. Some people were born to exude flinty staunchness: Gregory Campbell, springs to mind. But while Gordon longs to ascend to the Pantheon of the Staunch, he’s doomed to fail, because, as Squinter has previously observed, he has the political gravitas and the suppressed threat of a Tesco branch manager; worse than that, though, is the fact that when he’s under pressure he looks like a Tesco branch manager who suspects he may have left the immersion heater on.
It's hardly a battle worth fighting for Dream Dearg, or for the Shinners, not only because it’s unlikely to be a cross-cutting matter, but also because it would give Gormless Gordon another problem he could well be doing with.
OCTOBER: The Slaughter of the Innocence Award
SINN Féin opposed the recent attempt by unionists in a recent Stormont debate to append the word ‘innocent’ to the word ‘victims’. The SDLP opposed it too. But it was Alliance – and party leader Naomi Long in particular – who incurred the Biblical wrath of Loyal Ulster.
No change there, because since Naomi ticks two very important Lundy boxes – she’s a Prod and she’s from East Belfast – she comes in for a very intense and a very particular kind of unionist enmity. Michelle O’Neill and Claire Hanna may also refuse to subscribe to the unionist orthodoxy on victims, but that’s to be expected because they’re woke leftist feminazis whose hair smells of Mass smoke. Naomi, on the other hand, grew up in a street without rebels and attended a church without statues, yet she refuses to get on board with the idea that the people in her street and the people in her church get to decide who the victims are.
So blindly triggered are they by the defection of ‘one of our own’ that they fail to realise that in arguing with Naomi over the definition of a victim they are arguing with themselves. For they and Naomi are at one on the issue of non-innocent victims, or should we call them guilty victims and just run with that ultimate contradiction in terms? The DUP, the UUP and Alliance are agreed that, should there be any money up for grabs to improve the lot of victims, those who suffered loss or injury by their own hand or by their own actions or behaviour should not get a penny. But in a slightly surprising display of humanity – or wokery, if you will – the two unionist parties agree with Alliance that all victims, without distinction and without judgement, should have access to trauma-linked treatments and therapies.
So where’s the beef? If Loyal Ulster and Naomi are as one on what victims are entitled to, how come Naomi’s in the crosshairs while Michelle and Claire get a by-ball? Well, that already-mentioned ‘Burn the Lundy’ ethos clearly kicks in, but if we set that to the side for a second we see clearly that when it comes to provision for victims – innocent or otherwise – there is no beef.
Medical and psychological support for all victims: Yes.
Financial pay-out to guilty victims: No.
Which means that this current spat has nothing to do with money or support, and that being the case, we are forced to look elsewhere for an explanation for this latest bout of performative indignation. And that explanation is to be found, as so much so often is, in the need of Loyal Ulster to turn a chaotic historical and political mess into a simplistic morality tale.
It's worth reminding ourselves that the unionist origins story of the Troubles is as pure, undiluted and nonsensical 30-plus years on as it was while the conflict raged: What we saw in 1969 was a mass outbreak of psychopathic violence from a huge collection of blood-soaked serial killers who, in some weird, galaxy-bending freak of eugenics, were born at roughly the same time in the north east corner of a smallish island in the north Atlantic. The fightback against this zombie apocalypse was necessarily messy and brutal from both the state and what a former DUP leader famously described as ‘counter-terrorists’; and while counter-terrorists can never be as bad as yer actual terrorists, if this shaky edifice is to be held together then they must be deemed guilty victims too. Written down in a single paragraph, that all comes across as the deluded pile of steaming ordure that it actually is. But it remains the official Loyal Ulster Troubles narrative.
To suggest that there was any motivating political or social force behind the collapse of what passed for law and order here in 1969 is to suggest that those who took up the gun were not in fact sectarian psychopaths, and down that road a bit and just over the next hill lies the unconscionable vista of the conflict having been a explosion of justifiable rage at the end of the global Decade of Revolution. And if – perish the thought – we entertain that notion, then while the very concept of innocence and guilt is not swept away completely, then at the very least it is wide open to debate.
And so here we are, watching unionism attempt to distil a roiling cauldron of complex political, historical and social realities into two tiny test tubes of innocence and guilt.
NOVEMBER: The Most Famous Nobody Award
I DON’T think anyone calling anybody an “Orange bastard” is acceptable.
I shouldn’t have to stop at that ethical roadblock and show my bona fides before I continue writing, but speeding past and hoping people understand the obvious is likely to be misinterpreted by those who consider it their life’s work to misinterpret. So I’ll say it again in a different way: I think calling someone an “Orange bastard” is a bigoted, thick, objectionable thing to do and those who do it should stop.
What I don’t think is that Heather Humphreys being called an Orange bastard online means that the new Ireland project is dead in the water, as some of the more sensitive souls in unionist politics are claiming. If it were the case that the spittle-flecked online ranting of nationalist and republican imbeciles was a bar to constitutional change then it should also be the case that those fine gentlemen of the reformed faith who spend their online leisure hours dismissing Sinn Féin, Alliance and the SDLP as “Fenian c**ts” have signed the death warrant of the union. But nobody ever suggests that. The now familiar ‘Welcome to the New Ireland’ posts in the wake of every ‘Ooh, ah, up the Ra’ chant do not have their mirror image in ‘Welcome to the Old Northern Ireland’ every time a loyalist aversion to the smell of Mass and the clack of rosary beads finds its expression.
This latest entertainingly bonkers and surprisingly snowflakey fit of religious and cultural sensitivity only came about because Heather Humphreys made a complete balls of answering a question about her family connections to the Orange Order. The resultant uninhibited language in the permanent 3am pub lock-in that is social media has, now that Catherine Connolly is measuring up the Áras for Che Guevara wallpaper, become emblematic of what the poor Prods can expect when the leasehold of these two-thirds of the fourth green field expires.
Since the weekend I’ve heard, read and watched numerous discussions north and south about how Heather Humphreys getting called an Orange bastard online has given unionists a terrifying glimpse of what lies ahead for them if and when the border disappears. In none of these mentions of sectarian abuse was a name, an organisation or a political party attached. It was stated only that Mrs Humphreys had been the target of bigots and the listener, watcher and reader was left to work out for themselves just who it was that was bandying about this repellent and hateful language.
The truth is that these things were said by nobody that matters. They were said by terminally online wastrels with more interest in upsetting and hurting other humans than in effecting political change. And when these things were said by people with a political agenda, those people were more likely to be spending their offline time picketing a migrant centre than attending a Gaza demonstration.
Here's another thing: I listen to and watch a fair bit of British news, politics and current affairs on the BBC. But I can’t ever remember a London- or Salford-based newsreader or presenter during or after an election remarking on what it means for the future of British democracy when @SpitfireStan or @EnochWasRight call candidates “Commie f***ers” and “Libtard w***ers”. In other words, we appear to be unique on this archipelago in reading the political runes throught the anonymous rantings of ne’er-do-wells on CeX laptops and grease-smeared mobiles. And, what’s more, the Irish media utilises that novel form of political science only in assessing the prospects for constitutional change – never in diagnosing the status quo. The advisability or otherwise of maintaining the Precious Union© is never to be measured by, or discussed in relation to, the amount of Fenian bastard insults floating about on Facebook.
Those senior members of the DUP who were this year at a loyal order parade where ‘No Pope of Rome’ was sung the day after the Pope died may be genuinely concerned about @GPOGeorge1916 hurling anti-Orange invective at Heather Humphreys. They may well think that internet randomers chucking around sectarian insults while full of Buckfast bravado are more of a disincentive to constitutional change than their own parading habits are to the status quo. But I doubt it. I suspect they know full well the limits of their credibility on these matters. Just as I suspect those who fall back on to a fainting couch with the back of a hand to their forehead at the suggestion of northerners voting in a Presidential election know their argument is as thin as Jim Allister’s lips on St Patrick’s day.
Our estimable deputy First Minister, the occasionally electable Emma Little-Pengelly, says allowing me a vote in the next Presidential election would be to “overstep the mark”. She went on: “In relation to presidential voting rights, Northern Ireland has a head of state, and that head of state reflects the political reality. It's the difference between a political reality and a political aspiration.”
Not surprisingly, Emma didn’t elaborate on the nature of our political reality, which is that while anyone with an Irish passport can become the Irish head of state, not everyone can become the British head of state. The first bar excludes half the people in these six counties, as the monarch can’t be a Catholic. Sorry, a Roman Catholic. The second exclusionary requirement is that the monarch must be a blood relative of a fat bloke who 600 years ago liked to have it off with foreign women and then chop their heads off. That’s the political reality which Emma says I’m bound by – and the ticklish fact of the matter is that she’s right. But Catherine Connolly came from a family of 14 and was raised in rural poverty in the west of Ireland. Charles Windsor was delivered with golden forceps by royal surgeons who then walked backwards at a 90-degree crouch out of his mother’s chamber into one of the 500 other rooms in the palace.
NEW PRESIDENT: Catherine Connolly’s not responsible for online loudmouths, although Loyal Ulster thinks she is
DECEMBER: The Parc de Windsor Music Award
IT’S my fault. I know I shouldn’t go on social media and say anything about the IFA or the Northern Ireland team because the only thing that ever comes of it is confrontation and chaos. But I do. And I did.
I’ve fallen into the habit whenever Northern Ireland are playing live on TV of listening out for the sexing up of 'God Save the Queen'. Sorry, 'King'. (It takes a while to transition to the male gender when it’s been GSTQ your whole life.) For those of you not familiar with the psychodrama surrounding the team, let me issue a brief explainer. Those of you familiar with the matter can put the kettle on or go on your phones for a minute or two.
The Northern Ireland team has stubbornly maintained God Save the King (Queen, as was) long after the other Celtic nations kicked it to their unpainted kerbs. The Welsh soccer team first ditched GSTQ and stood to attention to 'Hen Wlad Fy Nhadhau' as far back as March 1977 in a 3-0 win over Czechoslovakia at the Racecourse Ground, Wrexham. It was an act of patriotic dissension that upset the English FA so much that they refused to play the anthem at a Home Nations clash with Wales at Wembley three months later – they insisted to the Welsh FA that GSTQ would be played to represent both teams. But as the English players broke away after the anthem and the band trooped off the pitch, the team stayed where they were and, led by captain Terry Yorath, belted out Hen Wlad Fy Nhadhau at the top of their lungs while a few Englishmen in suits unsuccessfully tried to move them along. And that, as they say in the Valleys, was that.
The Scots football team were rather late to the party thrown by the Welsh. They first used the rousing 'Flower of Scotland' as their anthem in 1993, but it wasn’t used exclusively until 1997. The Scots had long been unhappy with GSTQ, though, having flirted with ‘Scots Wha Hae’ and ‘Scotland the Brave’ before settling on the current tribute to William Wallace/Mel Gibson.
Here in the garden shed of the United Kingdom, not only has the IFA fiercely fended off any attempts to ditch GSTK as the Northern Ireland anthem, they’ve managed to avoid talking about it. It’s not hard to see why. While an international match at Windsor Park no longer has the feel of Sandy Row at teatime on the Twelfth, it remains overwhelmingly populated by those who adhere to the reformed faith and those who treasure the link with Britain; or, rather, given that Wales and Scotland have left the GSTK club, the link with England. That being the case, and while I have no empirical data to give weight to my thesis, I’m pretty sure that 90 per cent of the Windsor faithful would be robustly opposed to ditching GSTK; perhaps a few points under that figure, perhaps a few points over, but whatever the percentage, you can bet your Adidas Predators it’s a huge one.
