Faye Hallam Plays Dave Allan Theme at Jazz Club – Nice!

Here’s a bit of fun for a Wednesday morning. I’m a great fan of the late Irish comedian Dave Allan. He is, to me, one of the very greatest of the television funny men. His style was that of a bar room philosopher, sat on a bar stool taking the occasional sip of whisky, cigarette smoking quietly away in an ashtray, while he made his wry observations on the absurdities of human nature and the world. Mixed with this on his series on the Beeb were sketches, some of which were just jokes, such as the tourist who brings down Stonehenge like a string of dominoes simply by leaning on one of the trilithons. Others were a kind of morality play, like the one about a man who spots a tenner trapped under a car wheel. He goes into a cafe to wait until the car moves off and he can grab the money, only to find that everyone else in the cafe was had the same idea. Religion was a frequent target of his humour. He hated the Roman Catholic church in particular because of the brutal discipline at his old Catholic school, a situation which I know has resulted in many Catholics lapsing. He was also no admirer of Ian Paisley at the time, for keeping the murderous sectarian bigotry in Ulster alive from the Protestant side. This was decades before the Good Friday agreement and the warm friendship between Paisley and Gerry Adams, which resulted in the two getting the nickname, the Chuckle Brothers. Some of his jokes and sketches were based around sex, and got very ‘near the knuckle’, as the saying goes. But mostly it was good humoured and simply fun. Allan died a few years ago, but there are a selection of his sketches and monologues on DVD, and, of course, on YouTube. He’s much missed by his legions of fans. The show’s theme was written by Alan Hawkshaw, who also wrote, among other TV themes, that for Grandstand. There are videos of him playing this and his other compositions also on YouTube.

Cartoon Against the Chief Rabbis’ Participation in the March of the Flags

I’ve been drawing cartoons recently to express my views and anger over certain events, like Keir Starmer’s destruction of the Labour party in order to make it another Tory party. In this cartoon below I attack former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the current Chief Rabbi, Efraim Mirvis, for leading parties of British Jews in the annual ‘March of the Flags’. This is the occasion where flag-waving ultra-patriotic Israeli boot boys goose step through the Muslim quarter of east Jerusalem. It’s all done to intimidate the Muslim, Palestinian population. Tony Greenstein has put up on his blog film of the vandalism and deliberate intimidation the marchers commit, as well as descriptions of the marches from the other side, the Palestinians. They state that as children they are told by their parents to get off the streets in case the marchers pick on them. Liberal Jews in this country implored the rabbis not to go, but they ignored them.

Jonathan Sacks is the face on the left, though I’m afraid the way I’ve drawn him he looks more like the late Gerry Adams. Adams, however, in my opinion is the much better man, as with Ian Paisley he was instrumental in brokering the peace deal in Northern Ireland. Sacks also caused outrage a few years ago when he declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. It’s the genocidal language used by religious bigots to justify the massacre of their enemies, from medieval Christians murdering Jews and heretics to the wars and sectarian violence between Roman Catholics and Protestants. The face to Sacks’ right is Efraim Mirvis. It was after I drew this that it struck me he looks a bit like one of the Hairy Bikers. Again, I’ve got more respect for them. Unlike Mirvis they have never justified anyone’s persecution or ethnic cleansing. Far from it. They travel around talking to everyone in the quest to show people how to cook great food. Sacks and Mirvis participated in the March of the Flags on separate occasions, but for the purposes of the cartoon I’ve put them together. The face at the top of the page is of the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley. The figures in black at the top right are him and the other fascists in their uniform as they appeared when they marched through Cable Street. It’s based on a contemporary photograph. It’s because Mosley and his thugs marched through the Jewish areas of the East End in order to intimidate Jews, just as the people on the March of the Flags do so through Muslim Jerusalem in order to intimidate the people there. The same reason the Loyal Orange Order marches through Roman Catholic, nationalist areas in Northern Ireland. And the graffiti reading ‘Gas the Arabs’ is based on a real piece of graffiti, which shows how close some Israeli bigots are to real Nazism.

The march is the action of Fascist thugs, and no man of God, of whatever religion, should take part in such marches.

May’s Grubby Deal with the DUP Has Undone Decades of Work in Ulster

Yesterday, Mike also put up a piece reporting that talks between Sinn Fein and the DUP about a new power-sharing agreement for Northern Ireland have broken down, resulting in acrimonious recriminations being hurled between the two parties. To illustrate it, there’s a photo of Michelle O’Neill, the leader of Sinn Fein, and Arlene Foster, the DUP’s leader together. The two are pointedly looking away from each other and it looks like they can’t stand even being in the same room.

The immediate cause of the breakdown in talks is failure to reach an agreement regarding protection for Gaelic-speaker in Northern Ireland, as well as the DUP’s intransigent opposition to gay marriage.

But Mike also points out that the ultimate cause is that May has unfairly favoured one side – the DUP – over the other in order to shore up her crumbling position in Westminster. And in so doing, she has undone the decades of work that has produced peace in the Six Counties.

In upsetting this delicate balance of power, Mike states that she has shown herself to be pathetic amateur rather than the serious professional she posed as. And he asks how long it will take to put her mistake right again.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/04/theresa-may-has-set-back-decades-of-work-for-peace-in-northern-ireland/

Some idea of the sheer irrational hatred the Unionists have for the Gaelic language can be gauged by a bizarre story that appeared in Private Eye a decade or more ago. One of their politicos had made a complaint to one of the local bus companies after a tour bus went past with what he thought was a message in Erse on the side.

Except it wasn’t. It was French.

As for homosexuality, Paisley himself led a campaign against its legalisation in Ulster under the slogan ‘SUS’ – ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’, as if he feared that as soon as the legalisation of same-sex attraction between consenting adults would result in Ulster being flooded by gays from across the world.

Some of the practical benefits peace has brought to the province were also on display on television last night. Bus Wars followed a group of tour guides in Northern Ireland as they fought with their rivals to get the tourists on to their tour buses. These guys spoke glowingly about their love of telling foreign visitors about their country. Among the passengers on one of the buses, which included Americans, were a pair of Scots girls, who raved about Ulster and its people. The tour guides commented on artistic points of interest on paramilitary murals painted on the sides of houses, and the notorious peace wall in the Shankill Road, set up to proven the Nationalists and Loyalists from attacking each other.

While those signs of the Troubles are obvious, they also pointed out with pride the hidden signs of peace. The exterior of Queen’s University in Belfast is covered with a multi-coloured glass façade. The guide asked his passengers what that meant. They replied that it was because Ulster was enjoying peace. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘No more bombs.’

And The One Show the other day also interviewed Colm Meaney about his latest flick, in which he plays Martin McGuinness in a play about a fictitious car journey he made with Ian Paisley, played by Ralph Spall, in which the two were forced to work out their differences to bring about peace in Ulster. Meaney is a veteran actor, who’s been in any number of TV shows and movies, from Dixon of Dock Green onwards. But to Science Fiction he’s probably best known as Chief O’Brien from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9. Meaney said that what attracted him to the film was that it was also very funny, and that McGuinness and Paisley became so close they were known as ‘the Chuckle Brothers’. Some of the comedy in the movie was shown by a clip from the film, where the chauffeur asks the two politicos who they are. McGuinness introduces Paisley as the leader of the Free Presbyterian Church. Paisley in his introduction states that McGuinness is an officer in the IRA. To which McGuinness leans over and says, ‘Allegedly’.

The fact that this movie has been made shows how important the peace agreement has been in ending much of the paramilitary violence in Ulster, while the episode of Bus Wars also showed the reverse of the political situation there. That due to the peace agreement, this is a place which welcomes visitors from abroad, and is a place where workers in the tour industry can speak with pride about their country from a broad, inclusive perspective free of sectarianism.

Ulster still is a very divided community, and the political situation is very tense. These two shows together show how much is at stake, how much will be lost if May’s partisan deal with the DUP shatters the strained peace agreement. It’s a deal May should never have made. But she could correct it easily – by stepping down and leaving the way open for a Labour government.

Hope Not Hate on the Links between the DUP and Loyalist Paramilitaries in Ulster

Last Sunday, Nick Lowles and Matthew Collins published a long piece in the anti-racist/ anti-religious extremism site, Hope Not Hate, on the links between the Democratic Unionist Party, led by Arlene Foster, and Loyalist terrorist groups the UDA, Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commandoes, for example, in Ulster. The DUP are the Unionist party with whom Theresa May is trying to negotiate a confidence and supply pact, in order to prop her increasingly wobbly Tory government.

The article notes that various commenters have decried the DUP’s opposition to abortion, gay marriage and disbelief in climate change, before going on to state that what should really alarm people is the party’s links to the UDA, a link which may imperil the Northern Irish peace agreement.

For example, on the last day of May, a week before polling, Arlene Foster just happened to pay a visit to the UDA ‘Brigadier’, Jackie McDonald at a community office in the Taughmonagh area of South Belfast. Foster claimed that the visit was not pre-arranged, and she was just in the area canvassing for votes. She also said that she had not asked McDonald to disarm the UDA, because he knew her views that there should be no terror groups in Northern Ireland already.

The article also reports how the Irish newspaper, the Sunday World, had run an expose on the terrorist group, which began:

“In an unprecedented glimpse inside the UDA, terror group members reveal the fascist-like regime that forces them to hand over membership fees, dish out beatings of their own and force families from their homes.

“UDA veterans, shackled to an organised crime gang, tell of a paramilitary leadership that has no intention of going away.

“And they reveal how foot soldiers are begging terror boss Jackie McDonald to let them walk away – without a beating.”

McDonald was jailed during the Troubles for blackmail and extortion. In 1994 he became a leading figure organising the paramilitary ceasefire in Ulster. But he is still widely believed to be responsible for violence, racketeering and assassinations.

The Northern Irish government has given funds to community and sports associations run by UDA members and supporters, in return for which the UDA has called on its supporters to vote for the DUP. The article notes the various DUP politicos, who have been members of terrorist groups or imprisoned for terrorist offences, such as Sam ‘Chalky’ White, and John Smyth. The father of Emma Little Pengelly, the DUP candidate for South Belfast, was Noel Little, a gunrunner for Ian Paisley’s Ulster Resistance. Foster was also photographed last October with North Down UDA commander, Dee Stitt, a convicted armed robber, who runs Charter NI, an organisation dedicated to tackling unemployment in East Belfast, which has also received funding from the Ulster government. Foster has also been photographed with Adrian Bird, the UDA brigadier for Lisburn, who has been given funding for his work tackling racism and calling on Loyalists to support integration.

The article also describes how one DUP member of the Northern Irish assembly, Christopher Stalford, opened an office in a building owned by Belfast South Community Resources. The company is managed by Garnet Busby, who has been convicted of multiple murders. Jackie McDonald was also one of its officers. The top floor of the building is apparently still used by the UDA as a kangaroo court, in which punishment beatings are dished out. And Paul Givan, the current MP for South Antrim, visited a building in the Shankill Road, which the BBC had claimed was the UDA’s headquarters.

The article concludes

Publicly, the DUP is strongly opposed to the UDA and recently put out a statement claiming that: “There is no place for the UDA, or any other paramilitary group in our society.”

The DUP went on: “Their existence never was justified and is not justified now. We will work with those who wish to leave their past behind, but anyone involved in any kind of illegal activity must face the full weight of the law.”

The evidence linking the DUP – and more specifically Arlene Foster – to several current UDA commanders seems to suggest otherwise.

It is ironic that in a General Election dominated by claims of links between the Labour Party leadership and Sinn Fein and the IRA, the Conservative Party are attempting to negotiate an agreement with a political party that itself has disturbing links with a paramilitary organisation.

We totally understand the need to involve former paramilitaries in the peace process, but surely it cannot be right to give away millions of pounds of public money to people and organisations still involved in paramilitary and criminal activity.

See: http://hopenothate.org.uk/2017/06/11/arlene-foster-takes-tea-uda/

I’m not sure how much of this is any surprise to anyone, who has any knowledge of Northern Irish sectarian politics. Back in the 1990s the Mail on Sunday, if I recall correctly, ran an article on Ulster terrorism which stated very clearly that both Loyalist and Nationalist paramilitaries were involved in crime and racketeering. I also remember reports on the 6 O’clock news in the ’70s about various Ulster terrorists, who had been convicted for these crimes. The Daily Mail itself has been very long opposed to the Northern Irish peace agreement on the grounds that, despite both sides officially abandoning violence, killings and punishment beatings were still being carried out. The Mail’s coverage, however, was biased. It said little about Loyalist terrorism, and almost exclusively concentrated on Sinn Fein and the IRA. This was partly due to a real threat from dissident Republicans, like the Continuity IRA. On the other hand, Private Eye also ran a series of articles sending up David English, the-then editor of the Mail, as he was a member of Orange Order, who used to go on their marches, complete with bowler hat and sash.

Corbyn Storms It, While ‘Strong and Stable’ May Collapses

Okay, it wasn’t an outright victory for Jeremy Corbyn. But it wasn’t a defeat either.

Like many people, I was surprised and delighted by last week’s election result. I’d gone to bed early Thursday night, as I couldn’t bear to watch the election coverage. I was afraid that, despite the polls showing that Labour had cut the Tory lead down to only one per cent, there would still be a Tory landslide, or at least a workable majority.

I was, therefore, highly delighted to wake up to find that May had lost her overall majority, and was therefore looking around for anyone or anything that would shore up her government by going into coalition with her.

Unfortunately, she has found one in the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley in 1986 to oppose the 1986 Anglo-Irish agreement. The DUP is socially Conservative and deeply sectarian. They back teaching Creationism in schools, denying climate change, keeping abortion banned in Ulster and violently denounce gay rights. This goes back to when Ian Paisley in the 1970s founded S.U.S. to oppose the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. The organisation’s name stood for ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’. This always struck me as an hysterical reaction. It’s as if he was afraid that Northern Irish people’s heterosexuality was so fragile, that the moment homosexuality was legalised every man and woman in the province would immediately turn gay. Or else he had some kind of nightmare that gays from across the world were massing at the Irish border or just across the Irish Sea, ready to charge in like an invading army.

Just as worrying is the party’s hatred of the Irish Republic and Roman Catholicism, and its links to a series of Loyalist paramilitary terrorist groups, most notably the UDA. It’s leaders have posed with Kalashnikovs in their mitts, and wearing the uniform of Loyalist terror groups. These links remain strong, despite the DUP’s official rhetoric condemning terrorism in Ulster.

In short, they’re the type of organisation, which several Protestant Ulster people I know came to Britain to get away from. Just as I know Irish Roman Catholics, who don’t want to go back to Ulster because of the same violent prejudice in their communities.

May hasn’t exactly gone into coalition with these clowns. She’s trying to hammer out a ‘supply and confidence’ agreement, in which the DUP will support the government on a bill-by-bill basis. And even that’s looking rocky, and she made the mistake of annoying her new partners in government by announcing the alliance before it was to be formally arrange on Tuesday.

May’s formation of government with these bigots is also something of a problem for many Conservative MPs. About 19, according to Mike, are openly gay, and so put in a very awkward position through this alliance with a rabidly homophobic party. Ruth Davidson, the gay head of the Conservative party, and who is going to marry an Irish Roman Catholic, has already Tweeted her displeasure. Not that this may make any difference. Despite Cameron’s attempts to make the Tories look nice and friendly to minorities – pro-gay, anti-racist, more women MPs – this alliance shows the real nature of much of the Tory party. They’re reverting to type. As for the 19 gay Tory MPs, given the entrenched hypocrisy of the Tories, where the say one thing and do another, it’s likely that they’ll swallow their principles and troop through the ‘Yes’ doors to support the government anyway.

Even with the DUP on board, the Tories only have a bare majority of two. That means that they’ll have to do as Labour did when they only had a majority of five in the mid-70s: cram every single one of their members into the chamber to support them. To the point where they sent the whips round to check no-one was in the toilets.

Far from being ‘strong and stable’, May’s position looks very, very precarious. The Bow group, a Tory think tank, are considering holding leadership elections and there are murmurings from the backbench 1922 Committee. Unfortunately for the Tories – but good for us – all the other contenders for the leadership are actually more unpopular than May. The leading figure is Boris Johnson, but while 23 per cent of people said that he was more likely to make them vote Tory, 33 per cent stated that he’d put them off.

People have started discussing the possibility that there might be another election in October. Mike has put this forward, and suggested that it could be as early as August. And May herself may not last the week.

As for Corbyn, he’s increasingly looking like a prime minister in waiting. This has been the biggest movement towards Labour for the past forty-five years. And it has roundly refuted the claims of his critics that he was ‘unelectable’. Instead, it has confirmed the worst nightmares of the neoliberal establishment – that he is only too electable. The Blairites now have absolutely no grounds for their intrigues against him. Indeed, if Corbyn can do so well despite their attempts to unseat him, it’s probably fair to say that if the Blairites had done the decent thing and supported their leader and the broad mass of the party’s members and supporters, he’d probably be in Number 10.

His success shows that a very large section of the British people are sick of austerity, sick of Thatcherism, sick of the privatisation of the NHS and private ownership of utilities, sick of exorbitant rents, the threat of homelessness, stagnant wagges and a harsh and callous attitude to the poor, the sick, disabled and the unemployed, which has seen them thrown off benefit, to die in misery and despair.

Tony Greenstein, one of the great people, who comments on Mike’s blog, has written on his own that the one thing that Corbyn should not do is water down his policies to make them more acceptable to those inclined to vote Tory. And he’s right. Not only would this leave some of the causes of Britain’s misery in place, it would weaken his own position electorally. People are heartily sick of a Labour party which does its best to emulate the Tories. This was the reason why New Labour lost five million of its supporters from 1997 to its fall, and why Ed Miliband lost the 2015 election.

Corbyn now needs to keep the pressure up – to continue his attack on the Tories. According to Survation, he’s now several points above them in the polls. Let’s hope and do what we can to maintain and increase this lead, until the government falls and we can have a real, Socialist, Labour leader in Downing Street.

For further informed comment, see the following blogs and posts:

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/09/may-spoke-of-the-coalition-of-chaos-now-shes-going-to-form-one/

https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/oh-what-a-night/

https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/the-tory-dup-pact/

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/general-election-2017-7-weeks-ago-this.html

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/11/downing-street-mistaken-over-dup-deal-this-inspires-no-confidence-over-brexit/

And male feminist vlogger and general scourge of the far right, Kevin Logan, has produced this video showing precisely how deeply unpleasant the DUP are:

Vox Political: May Is a Hypocrite and Playground Bully over Terrorist Accusations and Brexit

I gather that the Tories are today trying to resurrect the tired old canard that Corbyn supports terrorism, because he, like many other MPs, met and supported talks with members of Sinn Fein in the 1980s. In fact, the Labour leader, like very many of his parliamentary fellows at the time, urged talking to the Irish republicans as a way of finding a peaceful resolution to the Troubles. I also have no doubt that he was, like many other Labour MPs such as Clare Short, also acutely aware of how badly Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholics were discriminated against.

But Mr Corbyn was respected by both sides. He has been praised by both the Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph for his efforts for the people of the Emerald Isle. And the wife of the Reverend Ian Paisley described him as courteous, polite and ‘a gentleman’.

Which is obviously not the way the wife of one of the provinces most fervent Loyalists would describe a genuine terrorist fanatic.

Labour were vilified not because they wanted to talk to the Nationalists, but because they were open about doing so. At the same time Maggie Thatcher was jumping up and down on her soap boxes screaming abuse at the Labour party as supporters of terrorism, she herself was holding talks in secret with the IRA. One high-ranking republican commander has even written about, describing how strange it was to be saluted by a British squaddie when he visited an army base as part of the talks.

Now to compound the Tories’ hypocrisy, there’s a photo of another person of the right meeting Gerry Adams. Yes, it’s that well-known opponent of global terrorism, Donald Trump.

Mike has the incriminating picture of the two together on his article about it, and writes

The image undermines everything Mrs May has been saying about the terror threat. Her hypocrisy is revealed.

Both Mr Corbyn and Mr Trump had talks with Mr Adams, but she vilifies Corbyn and venerates Trump.

It is clear that she has no principles on this issue – none at all – other than kowtowing to power.

She is nothing more than a playground bully – and a failed one at that.

Mike also observes that while she enjoys bullying and intimidating weaker nations, she will do everything she can to please countries that are stronger, like the US, China and doubtless many others.

The countries she believes are weaker won’t be bullied by her, and so she will fail massively at the Brexit negotiations.

He concludes

She is a hypocrite and a liability to the security of the United Kingdom and she has to go.

On Thursday – if you vote Labour – you can make that happen.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/07/revealed-mays-hypocrisy-over-connections-with-terrorists/

Looking at the photo of Adams and Trump, you could be quite justified in wondering who is the real terrorist fanatic there. Parliamentary papers released about the negotiations between the British and Sinn Fein state that Adams always gave ‘reasonable’ and ‘considered’ replies to the questions his British interlocutors put to him.

Furthermore, after the peace deal was negotiated, he and Ian Paisley became staunch supporters of the deal and close friends. So close they became known as ‘the Chuckle Brothers’. Mr Adams also travelled to Spain in an attempt to negotiate a similar peace between the Basque terrorists, ETA, and Spain.

Trump has done the exact opposite. Despite his noise about combatting terrorism, he has just concluded a massive sale of American arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia. A country, whose Wahhabi absolute monarchs and princes have actively sponsored global Islamist terrorism, backing ISIS, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

And those arms will be used by the Saudis to butcher innocents, including children, in Yemen, for no other reason than that their victims of Shi’a, another branch of the Muslim faith, whom the Saudis vehemently despise. It wasn’t that long ago that one of the leading Saudi clerics declared that they were ‘enemies of the faith’ and ‘worthy of death’.

And the Saudis have no qualms about threatening Britain with terrorist atrocities when it suits them. When Blair began investigations into corruption between BAE and the Saudis, Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi National Security Council, flew to Britain to tear him off a strip. During his tirade, Bandar threatened Blair was ‘another 7/7’.

The IRA were killers and murderers, but they emerged from legitimate social and historic grievances in Ulster. Bandar threatened Britain with another atrocity purely from pique at the possibility of having his nation’s greed and venality exposed.

The Americans are also funding Islamist terrorists in Syria, as are the Saudis, against the Assad’s secular, Arab nationalist regime. The Ba’ath party there are no angels, but they’re not the absolute monsters they’ve been painted by American propaganda either. And the Islamist terrorists America and the West have funded, armed and trained – al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front and even ISIS, have committed horrific atrocities themselves.

And if we are talking about western governments with terrorist connections, we can go back once more to Maggie Thatcher. Under her, the British government gave information to Loyalist paramilitaries, using them as death squads against prominent IRA members and republicans.

She also implanted SAS men within regular army units, who were also used as assassins and death squads, just as she and her friend, Ronald Reagan, were staunch supporters of Pinochet and the real Fascist butchers in South and Central America.

May and Trump offer nothing but hypocrisy, violence and more war.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, is a man of peace, who wants to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and who will set up a ministry of peace and disarmament.

He isn’t going to be soft on terrorism. Far from it – he will strengthen our security forces to enable them to combat it. But he will also stop funding and arming the very people behind it.

Don’t be taken in by Tory lies and deceit.

Please, vote for Corbyn tomorrow for a safer, saner, more peaceful world.

Counterpunch: Manchester Terror Attack Blowback from Western Imperialist Recruitment of Salafi Terrorists

I’ve mentioned several times over the past week or so the hypocritical smears the Tory press – the Torygraph, Scum and Heil – have published claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was a supporter of IRA terrorism, and, by implication, of the Manchester terror attack last Monday. Corbyn wasn’t. He did support attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles through negotiation, something Thatcher and the Tories loudly denied they were doing, but did anyway. Both the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times have hailed the Labour leader as a man, who strove for the best for the people of Ireland and Ulster. Ian Paisley’s wife even said that Corbyn was courteous and polite.

So, not quite the fanatical supporter of Irish nationalist terrorism these papers wanted to smear him as.

And the Tories, under Thatcher, did their own supporting of terrorist violence in Ulster. Peter Taylor’s 1999 documentary, Loyalists, featured interviews with leading Ulster Loyalist politicos and terrorists, one of whom admitted that they were getting information from British intelligence in the late 1980s allowing them to kill members of the IRA and other Republicans.

And that hasn’t been the only incident, where terrorists supported by the British state have committed atrocities. The last one was just a week ago. In Manchester.

Jim Kavanagh writing in Counterpunch has a piece pointing out that the family of the suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, were members of a Libyan Islamist terrorist group, who were given sanctuary in Britain as part of NATO’s recruitment of such terrorists in their campaign to overthrow Colonel Qaddafy. He attacks the racist double standards of the western media, for giving massive attention to attacks like this in the West, while paying much less attention to the other victims of Islamist violence in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Such as Mali, where 100 people, mostly Russians, Chinese and Africans, were butchered by two Islamist terrorists at the Bamako hotel a few years ago.

He reminds his readers that, despite Qaddafy’s own political posturing, Libya was a secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa. And Qaddafy himself hated and persecuted the Islamists. The late ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ and his son, Saif, even tried to warn Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that if he was killed, the terrorists would move on to attack Europe and there would be a massive influx of refugees into the continent.

Kavanagh also reproaches American liberals for believing that you can be politically liberal, and still support western imperialism. He states that Barack Obama and Killary, whose gloating over the death of the Libyan dictator was particularly repulsive, have so far presided over more carnage than Donald Trump. American liberals are deluded if they believe that they can unleash and then contain the Islamist terrorists they have recruited, armed and trained at will. He compares terrorist atrocities like that committed in Manchester to the film ‘Groundhog Day’, whose hero is doomed to go through the same day again and again. And this, he feels, will continue until something immeasurably more horrific finally wakes Americans up to the horrific reality.

He states

‘Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked,” to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”

Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.‘

‘The jihadi attackers in Mali and the jihadi bomber in Manchester were direct products—not accidental by-products, but deliberately incubated protégés—of American-British-French-NATO regime change in Libya, a project that was executed by the Obama administration and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton.

Before the glorious revolution, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa, according to the UN Human Development Index. Before the jihadi onslaught backed by NATO bombing campaign, Ghaddafi’s Libya was an anchor of stability in North Africa, as even the U.S. and British governments knew and acknowledged, per a 2008 cable from American foreign service officer Christopher Stevens, published by Wikileaks:

Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent…Muammar al-Qadhafi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia for perceived support of Wahabi extremism, a source of continuing Libya-Saudi tension, reflects broader Libyan concern about the threat of extremism. Worried that fighters returning from Afghanistan and Iraq could destabilize the regime, the [government of Libya] has aggressive pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.

The US-British-French-NATO humanitarian intervention put an end to that by overthrowing the Libyan government under entirely phony pretexts, in contravention of fundamental international law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification. The executioners and beneficiaries of that aggression where the jihadis who have been rampaging from Mali to Manchester. It’s a bright, clear line.

Ghaddafi himself warned Tony Blair that “an organization [the LIFG].has laid down sleeper cells in North Africa called the Al Qaeda organization in North Africa.” Ghaddafi’s son, Saif, warned that overthrowing Libya’s would make the country “the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean” and “You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.”’

‘Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we’ve gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there’s a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn’t. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare—even single-payer healthcare—is imperialism, and it’s reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.‘

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/29/no-laughing-matter-the-manchester-bomber-is-the-spawn-of-hillary-and-baracks-excellent-libyan-adventure/

The recruitment of Islamist terrorists goes back further than Blair, Bush, and Obama and Killary, right back to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher gave sanctuary in this country to Islamist terrorists as part of the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. She and Ronnie celebrated them, because they were anti-Communists fighting against ‘the Evil Empire’. And the Russian ambassador told the Americans that once the Salafists had finished with them, they would come for America.

And this came horribly true on 9/11. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Saudi-backed terrorists believed they could bring down the other superpower, America.

As for Thatcher, one of the terrorists she gave asylum to in Britain was a monster, who blew up a plane-load of schoolchildren flying to Moscow in order to kill the Soviet officers also on board.

And the same Islamists she settled in Britain became part of the wider underground of radicalised Islamist discontent.

Corbyn never supported terrorism. But Thatcher, and her New Labour protégé, Tony Blair, certainly did. And the results were Loyalist terrorists acting as Thatcher’s death squads in Ulster, and Islamist terrorism in Britain.

And Theresa May made it all easier for the Manchester bomber and those like him by cutting the numbers of the police force, armed forces and border guards. And when members of Her Majesty’s finest tried to warn of her of this danger, she sneered at them.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to reverse all this. Which, despite all the Tory screaming and posturing, trying to portray them as the party of great war leaders since Churchill, Corbyn and the Labour party represent this country’s best hope of peace and security.

Vote Labour on June 8th.

Vox Political and Eoin Clarke Refute Smears of Tory Warmongers Against Corbyn

Mike over at Vox Political has produced another excellent blog post utterly demolishing the lies of the Tory warmongers that Jeremy Corbyn supported IRA terrorism, and that his election would somehow leave Britain more vulnerable to atrocities such as the one on Monday night in Manchester.

His piece contains a graphic by Eoin Clarke showing that far from supporting terrorism, Corbyn consistently condemned paramilitary violence and sincerely looked and worked for peace in Northern Ireland. As such, he was respected not only by the Republicans but also by Loyalists.

Clarke’s graphic states, for example:

* In November 1994 Corbyn signed a parliamentary early day motion condemning the Birmingham Pub Bombings committed by the Provisional IRA.

* The same year, Corbyn held several meetings with four Loyalist leaders to discuss the release of Neil Latimer, a member of the UDR, and to be informed that October at the Labour Party’s conference of the ceasefire the following week.

* In October 2015 Ian Paisley’s wife told the Belfast Telegraph that she found the Labour leader courteous and polite, and thought he was a ‘gentleman’.

* In February 1987 the Times apologised to Jeremy Corbyn. Murdoch’s British ‘paper of record’ had smeared him by claiming that he had not phoned the police to warn them of a suspected Provisional IRA terrorist in London. In fact Corbyn had.

* In August 1988 the Irish Times hailed him as ‘a tireless campaigner for the Irish.’ Corbyn had worked to the quash the wrongful convictions of the Guildford Four, and reopen the inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

* Corbyn in fact only ever met Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams after Adams had been elected to parliament, 14 years after the commencement of the Troubles, in Adams’ capacity as an elected MP. He did, however, oppose Thatcher’s ban on broadcasting the voices of elected Sinn Fein politicians, and was keen that Adams’ constituents in West Belfast should not be silenced.

* When Adams visited Westminster in 1996, Corbyn was only one of a number of Labour MPs, who met him. The meetings were solely concerned with reviving the IRA ceasefire. This was achieved several months later. And Bill Clinton, who was then president of the US, had the previous year invited Adams to the Whitehouse. As Clarke’s graphic points out, this places Corbyn’s meeting with Adams firmly within the context of wider attempts by politicians to secure peace in Ulster.

Clarke does admit that there are two incidents, which are controversial, and do require an explanation.

* Shortly after the Brighton bombing of the Tory conference, Corbyn and other MPs met Republicans in Westminster. Corbyn’s motive for doing so was to end the strip searching of female prisoners on remand. However, Clarke states that the meeting was insensitive and wrong.

* In May 1987 Corbyn stood for a minutes’ silence to show respect for eight people, who had been killed by the British armed forces in Northern Ireland at a meeting of Irish sympathisers in London. Although one was entirely innocent, seven were members of the Provisional IRA. The circumstances of their deaths were unclear, and they may have been the victims of a ‘shoot to kill’ policy. The European Court ordered the payment of £10,000 each to the eight victims’ families.

* As for Adams himself, Clarke states that it was the Tory government, who began talking to him eleven years before Corbyn became an MP. Adams had been released in prison for the secret talks the Conservatives were holding with Irish paramilitaries following the deaths of 476 people in 1972, the worse year of the Troubles. This was revealed in MI5 files released under the 30 year rule. The files also showed that the Tories considered that Adams genuinely wanted a ceasefire and an end to the violence, and that his answers to questions were ‘reasonable and moderate’.

So while Corbyn did meet with Gerry Adams and other Irish Nationalists, he also worked with Ulster Loyalists. It certainly appears from this that Corbyn wanted to find a fair, peaceful solution to the violence and hatred in Northern Ireland.

Mike’s piece also includes a short video, running just under a two minutes, by the Labour MP Chris Williams. Williams points out that 14 years ago in 2003, Corbyn had warned that ‘the Iraq war will set off a spiral of conflict that will fuel the wars, terrorism and misery of future generations.’ He also warned several times that police cuts would leave the country more vulnerable to terrorism. He also warned that intervention in Libya would lead to it becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. He also objected to selling arms to Saudi Arabia for the same reason. Williams states that Labour has a crystal-clear policy to make Britain safer, unlike the Tories. They intend to undo the cuts to the police force, and have the longer term goal of rethinking this country’s foreign policy. This means not sending more of our courageous young men and women to die in wars no-one invited us to take part in, and destabilising countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. And Williams asks his viewers to challenges the Tories, the rich, the media magnates and the cheerleaders for these wars in voting for Labour. New approaches and responses are required following the evil terrorist atrocity in Manchester, and Labour has precisely done that.

Mike also includes a wonderful little video of Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy refuting Michael Fallon, the Tory defence minister. Guru-Murthy quotes Boris Johnson at him. Boris had said that the Iraq invasion didn’t create the problem of Islamist terrorism – the attack on the Twin Towers occurred before that – but it did sharpen their resentment. Fallon then attacks the quote, believing it was said by Jeremy Corbyn. When Guru-Murthy points out it’s by Johnson, he then flails around trying to claim that it shows that Johnson really concurs with him, that this does not explain terrorism. But the Channel 4 newsman goes on, and quotes Boris as saying that you can’t disagree with the nay-sayers, who say that the invasion has increased Islamic resentment. Even after he’s been told, Fallon continues to state that he’d have to see what Boris Johnson really says for himself, and denies that Britain’s foreign policy explains away terrorism.

Mike comments drily if there’s anyone, who doesn’t agree with Jeremy Corbyn? (Apart, obviously, from Michael Fallon).

And at the very top of the piece is a quote from the former director of MI5, Theresa Manningham-Buller, that the Iraq invasion ‘undoubtedly increased the terrorist threat in Britain’.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/27/dont-believe-the-warmongers-on-jeremy-corbyn-get-your-story-straight/

So Jeremy Corbyn was right about the Iraq invasion. He’s been right about the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, and he was right about the cuts to the police force. And he is very right to demand a ban on arms sales to the Saudis.

And while two of his actions in support of the Republicans in Northern Ireland have been insensitive, he is not a supporter of terrorism, as the Scum, Heil and Torygraph would have us all believe.

Go to Mike’s blog and read and watch the full article. Eoin Clarke’s information about Corbyn is in the form of a graphic, so that you can post it elsewhere on line to refute the Tories and their stooges, who still continue with their smears about the Labour leader.

And if you really want to see a just end to the violence in the Middle East, and a sensible policy to eradicate Islamist terror in this country, then vote Labour on June 8th.

If we don’t, if we continue to follow the Thatcherite warmongering of Blair, Cameron and May, it will only lead to worse violence and terror in the Middle East and at home.

Farage: NI Peace Process ‘Loathsome’, ‘Surrender to the Wrong ‘Uns’

There’s a piece in today’s Guardian on a video that has emerged, dating from c. 2007, in which the Kipperfuhrer gives his opinion on the Northern Ireland peace agreement. He is extremely scathing about it, stating

“That is not what I call a peace process. That is what I call surrender to the wrong ’uns. You know both from the Protestant and the Catholic side and so I am sickened by the whole thing. I am very surprised that Paisley has been prepared to go into government with Sinn Féin, IRA. I really am very surprised by that.”

He especially objected to the release of hundreds of terrorists, pointing out that some had only served 18 months in prison for their crimes.

The report also contains a quote rebutting Farage’s views from the Tory MP, Conor Burns. Burns says that the peace process entailed some compromises that were extremely difficult to stomach, but that they were needed to create the much more peaceful and secure situation that Ulster now enjoys. Burns said:

“But the reality is that a child in today’s Northern Ireland grows up in a place incomparably better than the dark, violent and divided society I was born into. For someone who leads a party aspiring to be a truly national party, not to acknowledge that is bewildering.”

Burns is absolutely right. The compromises that had to be made in the 6 counties to break the cycle of violence were and are highly controversial, and included measures that many would consider to be deeply immoral. But they were needed, if any kind of peace was to be established. However objectionable and unpalatable these decisions were, ultimately the led to the creation of much better, more peaceful and hopefully far more optimistic conditions on that side of the Irish Sea.

Now Farage’s views in the video aren’t that different from many Tories, and are arguably less sectarian. You could and can read almost the same views in the Daily Mail, with the exception that they see the ‘surrender’ less to the men of violence in general, regardless of whether they were Roman Catholic and Protestant, and more explicitly in terms of a capitulation to the IRA. Farage’s views are better than that, but not by very much.

Any truly British political has to find support throughout the UK, which means developing a sensitive approach to the intricacies of the situation in Ulster. Farage claims he has branches across the UK, but his comments about the situation there in 2007 show that he has a dangerously inflexible attitude to Ulster and its problems, that could upset decades of delicate negotiations and plunge Northern Ireland, and the rest of the UK, back into violence and sectarian civil war.

The Guardian’s piece is called Nigel Farage called Northern Ireland peace process ‘utterly loathsome’, and it’s at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/16/nigel-farage-called-northern-ireland-peace-process-utterly-loathsome. It also contains the video. Go and read it and judge for yourself.