NEWS Letter editor Ben Lowry has had an idea. He thinks it might be instructive, á propos of the Republic’s harbouring of the IRA all these years (look, it’s Ben, just stay with this), that a historical precedent can be profitably invoked.
Ben invites us to imagine what would happen if Mexico decided, Ra-like, to start planting incendiary devices in Albuquerque in order to win New Mexico back from Los Yanquis. Or if it began shooting police officers in Santa Fe in order to persuade Washington to relinquish its grip on the state.
It’s not a spoiler if I share with you that Ben thinks Donald Trump wouldn’t put up with it; that such a scenario would be “impossible in the US”. Let’s set aside for the moment the fact the aforementioned Donald has just thrown the jails open for non-Mexican terrorists who attacked police in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 and let’s just imagine instead the depth of anger that allows a newspaper editor to compare the Troubles with a spaghetti western.
It’s a fairly, ah, radical comparison, of course, but, in Ben’s defence, entertainingly so. The ice-cool, cigarillo-chomping stranger riding into town wearing a woollen poncho is Donald Trump, of course, while the swarthy, sweating outlaw with the Turkey teeth is Pedro O’Neill.
The comparison fades a little, however, when we learn that the indigenous people of Nuevo México aren’t overweight, racist sex offenders and somehow manage to have brown faces without recourse to a tanning mitt.
Angry Ems slams Micky D
DEPUTY First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly is the latest unionist to be cross with President Michael D. Higgins.
Objecting to his speech at the Mansion House on Holocaust Memorial Day, Ems said: “I believe that President Higgins was absolutely wrong to raise these issues [October 7 and Gaza] at that event. President Higgins has many opportunities to talk about these issues, and indeed, he has taken up those opportunities. But Holocaust Memorial Day, which it is today, is a time for a sombre reflection upon the loss of six million Jewish people in the Holocaust.”
Given that the hashtag for the annual Holocaust remembrance day is #NeverAgain it seems odd that our esteemed dFM wants the President to be quiet about the most talked-about conflict on the planet during his contribution – a conflict deemed either genocide, a warm crime, apartheid or all three by most of the world’s main relief agencies and human rights groups.
ANTISEMITIC? President Higgins with Holocaust survivors Suzi Diamond and Tomi Reichenthal (left)
What exactly is it that Ems thinks Mickey D should be talking about? Can the horrors of the Holocaust only be remembered as historical fact and not deployed as a contemporary corrective?
Former UUP boss ‘Submarine’ Steve Aiken chimed in, pointing out that “anyone” witnessing the ejection of Zionist protestors from the Mansion House event will “clearly side with [Ms Little-Pengelly]”.
That’s anyone, of course, except for the President’s guests of honour, Irish Holocaust survivors Tomi Reichental and Suzi Diamond.
Adolf is as Adolf does
SUNDAY Life (apparently there’s no definite article, so stop calling it The Sunday Life) had a big picture on Sunday (when else?) of Elon Musk (below) throwing those now-infamous Nazi salutes on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration last week.
Your starter for ten:
Did the attached headline read...?
• Musk goes full fascist as world gasps.
• Tesla boss’s ketamine rush madness shocks America.
• Today, the Hitler salute, tomorrow, Poland.
In fact, the paper decided to go down none of these routes and instead accompanied the image with
• ‘Belfast is beautiful’: Elon Musk raved about city after family trip.
Which was... interesting. And which got Squinter thinking to other infamous pictures of other infamous people from the past with similarly intriguing headlines.
• Fred West: ‘The best patio I ever laid was at a mate’s house in Portstewart.’
• Enoch Powell: ‘How a trip to the Giant’s Causeway inspired my Rivers of Blood speech.’
• P. Diddy: ‘Ain’t nobody throws a party like Lurgan throws a party.’
Perhaps Squinter’s being unfair about the Nazi thing. Perhaps those who tell him that Musk was only sending his love in his own awkward, geeky way to everybody in the room and all those watching around the world are right. It’s not as if when people claim that Musk’s a latter-day Nazi there’s any supporting evidence. It’s not as if he’s promoted anti-semitic content. It’s not as if he has promoted the theory of eugenics so beloved of dear old Adolf. It’s not as if he’s been accused of racism in Ireland and the UK for posting inflammatory material about court cases involving only brown people. It’s not as if he’s promoted woman-hating material from the ultra-right hate site 4Chan.
Is it?
It’s all gong wrong
THE plan to make a former UVF man officially a Member of the British Empire appears to have hit the buffers. UVF men consider themselves by definition members of the British empire, of course, only without the capital letters. But Buckingham Palace have seen fit to formalise the arrangement by bestowing an MBE on senior Lurgan Orangeman David Martin.
Granted, it’s the lowest award that Chaz can dish out – the MBE is the gong traditionally given to dinner ladies and lollipop men to impose a patina of democracy on the honours system. If you’ve struggled in the past, like Squinter, to sort out your MBEs from your OBEs, think M for Mediocre and O for One-Up.
FRIENDS: David Martin and Carla Lockhart
But there’s many a slip between Buckfast cup and Lurgan lip and it now appears that Davy might not be in line for curly sandwiches and lukewarm tea on the Buckingham Palace lawn after all. It seems no loyalist para-military has ever been given a royal gong – the preferred expression of appreciation up to now from the British state to the UVF and UDA being the donation of weapons, targets, money and personnel.
DUP Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart’s not happy. She thinks her pal Davy’s a changed man. “David Martin is someone I count as a true friend, a gentleman, and a person who, by God’s grace, has undergone a remarkable transformation,” she said.
Good to see the DUP on board with the old saying ‘Every saint has a past, very Shinner has a future.’
When’s a groomer not a groomer?
HERE are the seven members of a Scottish child-abuse gang who have been warned by a judge that they may never see the outside of a jail again.
They were each handed lengthy sentences after being found guilty by a Scottish court of a horrific series of sexual offences against children carried out over a protracted period of time in a Glasgow flat that doubled as a torture, drug and rape chamber.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? The seven Glasgow accused received heavy sentences for a catalogue of child abuse
If you’ve been following the case you’ll have noticed that these seven charmers are under no circumstances to be referred to as a ‘grooming gang’, even though the seven carried out the sickening abuse over a period of seven years – abuse that was enabled by the local knowledge that alcohol and drugs were freely available in what was known locally as the ‘Beastie Flat’.
That would seem to fit the grooming criteria perfectly, but for some reason, and while the British media called them many things, they were not considered groomers. Nor have we learned what their religion is, where they were radicalised or why they hate us and our values. No calls either for a public inquiry and no demands to know what politicians knew about who they were. Interest in the prosecution process was zero, as was curiosity about the seven people’s pasts or their political affiliations.
Needless to say, on Twitter Elon Musk decided the fuhrer stories the better.
