The right-wing patrician UStater William F Buckley (despite the Irish surname) and two dogs, one of them the imminently slappable racist Tory Roger Evans, take Bernadette Devlin (now Devlin-McAlliskey) on and she wipes the floor with them. She was a month short of 25 years of age when she sat this interview in late March 1972, without any notes to hand, keeping up with the arguments, never losing her temper, reeling off historical facts and financial figures. It was a stellar performance.
Even more remarkable, not two months had passed since the Paras had shot 26 unarmed marchers in Derry, murdering 14 men at a march she had herself attended and, though then an MP, she had been refused permission to speak on it in the House of Commons, while lies were being stated by people who had not been there. Also, her interview took place only a month after the travesty of an inquiry into the murder by Lord Widgery who completely exonerated the gunmen and their officers, maintaining they were acting in self-defence against all evidence except the soldiers’ and Widgery even claimed a march of at least 30,000 was at most around 3,000! It seems that there must’ve been an agreement not to mention Bloody Sunday, perhaps as a condition for the interview, otherwise what else can explain its omission?
Bernadette Devlin, Member of Parliament for Mid-Ulster, speaking at a rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on June 1, 1971. (AP Photo) (Note: Trafalgar Square was later banned to Irish solidarity demonstrations for decades).
Bernadette came out against the Good Friday Agreement when it was born, not pushing armed struggle as an alternative but stating that the GFA institutionalised sectarianism and because she accused the Provos of seeking alliances with the Right and capitalism rather than with the Left and the working class. She would have been a powerful voice against the GFA and could not be accused of being in a ‘dissident’ armed group but the British State held her daughter Roisin, who was pregnant, hostage and Bernadette stepped back from that issue. She was marginalised by the Republican movement in the 1970s and 80s, along with being shot 14 times in front of her children (her husband shot too) in 1981 and lost to us as a national leader again in the first decade of the GFA.
Watching this discussion brings back to mind all the economic and political issues that were around at the time, especially as Bernadette reels them off, many of them largely forgotten. All the fudges and lies of British governments avoiding doing anything fundamental to improve things even within an illegitimate colonial context.
Salaam Alikum (we hope that’s right, we had to go to a Pakistani shop and ask the staff and write it down as we heard it – that was after the Indian shop where they said they were Hindu, not Muslim; it’s all very confusing to us Catholics).
We just wanted to drop you a quick note to express our support for your tweets that the Covid19 vaccines from the USA and UK are “completely untrustworthy”. Not only that but we would like you to know ALL Covid 19 vaccines are and when you understand that hopefully you will stop Iran from producing its own.
In the first place, Covid19 is just a kind of ‘flu and the sickness and death figures are just plain made up. We don’t understand how they can get away with claiming nearly 89 million cases of infection from it in the world and two million dead! In the second place, they use the vaccine to pump nano machines in your body so they can check where you are going and control you, get you to believe anything they want, even the craziest of things. That is not what God – sorry, Allah – intended. I mean it’s not in the Bible, is it? Nor, we’d bet, in the Koran either.
Now that our World Leader is being forced to vacate the Presidency of the USA, we wondered whether you would like to be our sponsor. You’d have supporters all over the USA and in many parts of Europe.
Some Antifa, Republican and BLM terrorists may have told you lies about us joining an anti-Muslim protest last year at a celebration of Eid at Croke Park (that’s an Irish kind of football stadium in Dublin), which was accusing Muslims of making Irish butchers go halal and marrying underage girls and things. Which is just liberal-communist propaganda and anyway, anyone can make a mistake, right? And as Dee Wall (that’s the celebrity name of Dolores Webster, one of our leaders) said at the GPO, it’s not Muslims’ fault if the Government lets the GAA lend the stadium to a group of Muslims, is it? The GPO is where have our rallies without masks or “social distancing” but the Irish Guards don’t bother us – you have Islamic Guards in Iran too, don’t you?.
We hope you will consider sponsoring our world-wide movement and in particular our Irish branch. According to a number of prominent Irish people like Niall McConnell, Gemma O’Doherty, Justin Barret and Glen Miller, Ireland is full of Muslims so you’d feel kind of at home with a real Irish fáwltche (that’s Irish for “welcome”). We could even arrange for you to do a live linkup broadcast to be projected on the General Post Office building where we’ve been holding Saturday rallies. That would be just brilliant.
We hope you will give this your best consideration.
Respectfully yours,
QAnon Ireland.
Ayotollah Ali Khamnei, supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Photo source: Internet)
Iran has informed the International Atomic Agency that it is stepping up its uranium enrichment to 20% purity, which significantly exceeds that set by the restrictive 2015 Agreement and which according to media reports places it one step away from achieving weapons grade. This has set off concerns and what might even be interpreted as threats from other states but whether we agree with the existence of nuclear weapons or not, what gives some states the right to have them and to tell others that they can’t?
Iran entered into that Agreement in exchange for ending of the economic blockade on it by the USA. However, recently Trump withdrew the USA from the Agreement, leaving little incentive for Iran to continue restricting its development of nuclear fuel.
Three big European powers signed a public call on Iran to return to the Agreement levels in the hope that Biden will bring the USA back into the Agreement (which he has indicated he will). Meanwhile, some media are reporting that a similar step by Iran prior to the Agreement led Israel to prepare to launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And Israel is in fact believed to have assassinated Iran’s foremost nuclear scientist, Mohseh Fakhrizadeh last year.
Map showing states with estimated numbers of nuclear warheads.
(Source image: Arms Control Association)
NUCLEAR WEAPONS GATEKEEPERS
Whether we agree with any state having a nuclear arsenal (and I don’t), what gives some states the right to dictate to others that they can’t have them? And what is the record of these “nuclear weapon gatekeepers”? The partners in the 2015 Agreement were: USA, UK, Germany, France, Russia and China. These are, if we believe the slant of much of the mass media, the states that are justified in telling others that they cannot be permitted to have nuclear weapons.
The USA is one of the states with most nuclear weapons in the world (according to some estimates, Russia has the most, followed by the USA), a state which has been involved in wars of aggression against other peoples and states almost since its creation (10 directly – not through proxies — in the last 20 years alone). Furthermore, it is the only state to have attacked another with not only one but two weapons of mass destruction, causing at least a million casualties of mostly civilians.
Map showing estimated US troops officially based in the Middle East in January 2020 (Source image: Newsweek)
The European states that made that public call on Iran are Germany, France and Britain, of which only Germany does not have nuclear weapons of its own (though it permits them to be sited there). The reason that Germany does not have them is probably because its European neighbours and in particular world powers France and the UK would not allow them to have them, with memories of two world wars in four decades during the last century.
France and the UK are imperialist states with massive armed forces which, when they have not been at war with the other, have attacked nations and peoples across the globe.
The other owners of nuclear weapons are Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. And Israel, a Zionist occupation-settler state established through ethnic cleansing and which, since its inception, has been at war with its neighbours. And massively supported by the USA, financially, militarily and politically.
IRAN
The Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other hand, has been at war with no-one since it came into existence except Iraq, when the Western powers were supporting Saddam Hussein and all his atrocities because he was attacking Iran. Saddam attacked Iran very soon after the latter’s revolutionary change of regime but within three months its offensive stalled and it began to get pushed back despite the support of the Western powers (including the supply of chemical weapons by the USA and Germany) and the international isolation of the Iranian clerical leadership. Nevertheless the war lasted eight years and was extremely draining for Iran, in particular since it was also facing US-led economic and financial sanctions.
Currently Iran has full diplomatic relations with 97 states and although it has some territorial disputes with the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf and some Caspian sea disputes with Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, along with some outstanding issues from the Iraq-Iran war, these are being dealt with on the whole peacefully.
In the midst of slanted or even hysterical “reporting” — or beating of war drums — we should be aware of these facts.
End.
USA Ally States with Bases Surrounding Iran. (Source image: Internet)
NOTE: NOT “NATIONS”
By the way, the news report headline “European nations urge Iran” etc. (see below) is inaccurate: France and Britain (sic, actually the UK) are not “nations” but states, each one containing a number of nations and for example in a number of sporting bodies the existence of nations within the UK is recognised. That a number of such states are permitted to call themselves “nations” for membership of various bodies does not change that fact and journalists should be more exact in using the term.
rebelbreeze 