IF the country Squinter lived in (Which one’s that? Ed.) had killed 45,000 Arabs, 70 per cent of them women and children, he’s not sure he’d get on a plane to a European capital to highlight that dread statistic.
But that’s exactly what the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv did last week when they wandered around Amsterdam singing about murdering Arabs (inset) and informing anyone who cared to listen that there are no schools in Gaza any more because all the children are dead.
Squinter went to a football match in Holland once. 2010 it was and Utrecht beat Celtic 4-0 to send them crashing out of the Europa League. It was a pasting of such comprehensive proportions that it’s as well the majority of the Celtic fans were on the wacky tabacky, otherwise the pain would have been too much to bear.
Not a pick of trouble at the match, but Dutch riot police were on hand anyway, forming a hostile and aggressive tunnel through which we exited the stadium.
Not only were there no riot cops to greet the famously racist and violent Maccabi fans, what cops there were drove by even as the Israeli Ultras committed crimes right before their eyes.
Despite the assaults on Dutch-Moroccan taxi drivers, the ripping down of flags and the aforementioned vile chanting about the killing of innocents, the Western world somehow managed to make the Maccabi Ultras the victims. But outside the European bubble, Israel’s reputation took a pasting worse than Maccabi’s 5-0 loss to Ajax.
When attraction fades
BELFAST International Airport seems like rather a large advert for the Game of Thrones visitor attraction near Banbridge just at the moment.
As Squinter made his way to the exit at the weekend it occurred to him that this may be as a result of the recent news that the studio tour is continuing to lose money hand over fist.
The attraction lost £17.4 million last year; the year before that it lost £15.5 million.
Squinter’s not gonna lie: He’s not a fan of fantasy fiction; or science fiction, for that matter. But regardless of what genre the Game of Thrones thing is, he wonders what the developers were thinking when they decided that people were going to trip over each other in an attempt to travel half an hour out of Belfast because they like a TV show that fades further into the mists of time with every passing year.
COLD SHOULDER: Kit Harington as Jon Snow
The tour opened in 2021, two years after the final episode of Game of Thrones. And if the venture was burning money in a blast of dragon’s breath that close to the series being aired, who seriously thinks it’s going to go into the black long after the interest of the fantasy fiction crowd has moved on to some new HBO or Netflix Big Thing? Of course you’ve got your cultists, but cruise ships are not known to be replete with geeks and the spending power of twenty-something sword-waving fantasy fans isn’t thought to be huge.
Winter really is coming.
Justin case you missed it
THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury, Justin Welby (below), has handed in his mitre after pressure on him to stand aside over his handling of a church sex abuse scandal became too great to bear.
A friend of Welby’s, John Smyth, avoided jail or even censure for decades in what Welby admitted in his resignation letter was a Church of England “conspiracy of silence” around the prolific abuser, who died in South Africa in 2018.
The case had echoes of the Jimmy Savile scandal, in that Smyth’s sickening crimes – like Savile’s – were an open secret among the great and good of the English establishment.
Squinter never really liked Welby – not that the Archbishop lost any sleep under the satin sheets of his Lambeth Palace bed over it. Organised religion attracts the oleaginous, the pompous and the arrogant, but his sense of entitlement seemed to Squinter to be of a degree unattained by any of his illustrious predecessors.
And then there was the Munther Isaac affair in February past. Pastor Isaac, the shepherd of the Christmas Evangelical Lutheran flock in Bethlehem, visited England in the early spring but was denied a visit with Welby, at which the Pastor was expected to raise the plight of Christians being slaughtered in Gaza.
And why did the Archbishop refuse to meet his Palestinian Christian Brother in Christ? Did he believe the Pastor to be a Hamas operative? A vile anti-semite?
Nope. He refused to meet Pastor Isaac because the Lutheran minister had shared a platform with Jeremy Corbyn. And when Welby was told a meeting could attract criticism from British Jews, he buckled quicker than his crozier under an IDF tank.
So farewell, then, Justin Welby, who stood up for the children of England and the Commonwealth with all the passion and zeal with which he stood up for the children of Gaza.
Now that’s a legacy.
A right royal makeover
KING Charles was 76 on Thursday and to mark the occasion he’s going to open two food banks.
Squinter pines for the time when a senior royal would celebrate a birthday by having a state banquet surrounded by a load of nutcase dictators; or head off to Gstaad for a bit of off-piste skiing and light debauchery. But Charlie’s advisors clearly think that Britain is no longer associated with pomp and pageantry. And nothing is more suggestive of modern times in Blighty than desperate people queuing up for free food.
HIP, HIP: King Charles was 76 on Thursday
While the Mail and the Telegraph generally regard food banks as utter woke nonsense® perpetrated by sandal-knitting tofu-munchers, if there’s a royal involved then they’re in. (Conveniently forgetting the fact that before he ascended the throne, Charlie was himself considered a sandal-knitting tofu-muncher.)
Just one fly in the plague scab ointment here. Food banks are so last year and so horribly redolent of toothless peasants with begging bowls that clearly some kind of makeover is required for the reign of King Charles. And so the palace has decided that he’s not going to open food banks on his birthday after all – he’s going to open two ‘food distribution hubs’.
The disinction is purely semantic, for the places that Charles is opening will still be providing food free of charge for those who can’t afford any. And more importantly, when Charles’ day’s work is done he’ll still be served roast swan for dinner and have his bedtime toothpaste put on his brush.
The Last Post is toast for the TUV
SQUINTER couldn’t care less if Michelle O’Neill went to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday or stayed away. But clearly a lot of people do care. The TUV, for example – they care tremendously.
So much so that Nolan Show Jim Allister double Ron McDowell refused to attend the solemn annual remembrance of the fallen who gave all of their tomorrows for our today because he was upset by Michelle’s presence. Councillor McDowell sits alongside Shinners all the time in the Belfast City Council chamber. Squinter would have thought that Sinn Féin/IRA being the biggest party in the Council of the capital of Our Wee Pravince was more worthy of an oul’ boycott than the First Minister turning up to hear a trumpet being played at the Cenotaph, but if Ron says that’s Loyal Ulster demands, who’s Squinter to disagree?
GESTURE: Michelle O’Neill speaking at the Cenotaph
Meanwhile, Ron’s Stormont TUV colleague, Tim Gaston, was given three minutes and 13 seconds in the chamber on Monday to pay his respects to the war dead. He spent one minute reflecting on the going down of the sun, fighting them on the beaches, setra, setra, and two minutes 13 seconds talking about... Sinn Féin/IRA.
It’s what the Unknown Soldier would have wanted.
