“IF YOU CAN’T SAY NO TO THE WHITE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF A GENOCIDE – THEN YOU’D NEVER BE ABLE TO STAND UP – NOT EVEN FOR IRELAND.” Poster, Belfast Pro-Palestine Demonstration
An interesting political coalition is assembling in Ireland, the USA, and elsewhere calling on public representatives to boycott USA President Joe Biden’s annual White House Patrick’s Day celebration in 2024. As Bernadette McAliskey says :
Colum Eastwood’s decision to absent himself and SDLP from ‘rocking the sham’ in the White House is very welcome.
Bernadette McAliskey, Impartial Reporter, February 9 2024
The Irish government parties and Sinn Féin might want to reconsider their positions.
A Pro-Palestine activist, Art Ó Laoghaire, has sent the following message to several Irish public representatives :
Do you believe that Israel is justified in its military campaign in Gaza, and that the US should continue to supply weapons to them?
The last four months has seen more than 27,000 people killed in Gaza, including 10,000 children, and more than 60,000 wounded.
South Africa believes Israel is guilty of genocide.
Amnesty says today that Israel is committing war crimes.
And António Guterres said that the people of there don’t have enough to eat, while Israel continues to block food supplies.Yet today Joe Biden has asked Congress for billions of dollars to continue to supply arms.
How can you in all honesty go to Washington for St Patrick’s Day to enjoy Biden’s hospitality, while he continues to facilitate this carnage?
Some may claim that face-to-face conversation gives them an opportunity to express Ireland’s views on the situation.
But this is absurd. Biden knows our views. It would say much more to him if his celebrations were boycotted.
It would also be a message to the Irish American voters he is trying to canvas.If you have any moral principles you will stand by the Palestinians and refuse to join in Biden’s re-election party.
Art Ó Laoghaire
Bernadette McAliskey’s Article :
Sharing thoughts on Northern Ireland politics and American policy
Bernadette McAliskey, Impartial Reporter, February 9 2024
Thank You, Mr. Eastwood.
Colum Eastwood’s decision to absent himself and SDLP from ‘rocking the sham’ in the White House is very welcome.
The Irish government parties and Sinn Féin might want to reconsider their positions.
Palestine is more fundamental than party politics. It is the test of conscience, integrity, humanity and courage.
Colum Eastwood made his courageous decision on that basis.
SDLP leaders will, instead, actively give Irish voice to the ethnically diverse and growing campaign within the USA opposing Biden’s genocide policy.
This will not, for now, sit well with the Irish government or the USA but it is morally correct. I trust Palestine supporters will electorally remember that.
Michelle O’Neil is mistaken in thinking her attendance is required within her ‘First Minister for All’ policy.
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the White House are not an occasion in which the President formally represents the ethnic diversity of the USA, and his guests likewise that of their own populations. Not at all!
This is a USA internal ‘knees-up’ primarily for the great and the good of Irish-American politics, economic and cultural life.
Irish-Americans as a self-identified ethnic population within the USA Census, numerically second only to those claiming German ancestry.
The political influence of the ‘Hibernian’ vote is second only to that of the Zionist lobby, and less well organised.
The USA Jewish population – not to be confused with Zionism – has traditionally had a much stronger liberal and radical lobby than the Irish.
The latter is not non-existent, but has become weaker since the mid-1990’s as a direct consequence of Sinn Féin officially throwing their lot in with the ‘People with Clout’, as the late Fr. Denis Faul was wont to call them.
The right-wing of Irish-American politics within both the Democratic and Republican parties will predominate among those invited, and seeking invitation to the President’s Paddy’s Day Bash.
Those participating will be US politicians seeking Irish-American votes; people with money being acknowledged for their investment in various ‘Irish’ interests or projects, or to be hustled for their patronage.
Shamrocks, business cards and promises that may not be kept will be lightly exchanged over cocktails before dinner; good wine and food, music, and after-dinner mingling.
The only lobbying intent of all present is to further their own political and pecuniary interests.
In this Presidential election year, Joe Biden needs to be seen to be universally loved by the Irish, and embraced by Mother Ireland like no other Tammany Hall gangster has ever needed it before.
Not one serious word will be uttered about the USA being complicit in genocide in Gaza.
It will be considered neither the time or place, and viewed as social bad manners to do so.
There will be no tolerance, even in the restroom banter, to the mildest side-bar criticism of USA war-crimes.
Irish politicians are deluded in believing that they can drop a ‘friendly word’ in the right ear of the right people.
They will do well to keep their dinner in their stomachs if the table conversation turns to Gaza when tongues are loosened by the ambience.
Should Sinn Féin politely ‘beg to differ’ with views expressed at the bar, they can expect to be reminded where they came from, and the basis on which they are temporarily tolerated by the big guns in the room.
The Taoiseach and his government team will see to that.
Irish Times Columnist Justine McCarthy offers the following observations :
If Leo Varadkar goes to the White House, it can’t be for a quiet word about Gaza
Taoiseach must convey Ireland’s message about Gaza publicly, unambiguously and for international consumption
Justine McCarthy, Irish Times, February 2 2024
Joe Biden has blamed Iran for the killing of three US soldiers in Jordan last Sunday on the entirely logical and credible premise that “they’re supplying weapons to the people who did it”. Yet, counter to his guilt gauge, the US president sends weapons to Israel for the killing of civilians in Gaza and seems to feel unburdened by blame.
Today is day 119 of Israel’s retaliatory onslaught on the Palestinian enclave, following Hamas’s barbaric incursion on October 7th that left about 1,200 people dead, 3,300 injured and 240 abducted.
In Gaza, 1.9 million people have been driven from their homes, nearly 27,000 are dead and more than 65,000 have been injured. Countless numbers have been orphaned, have undergone amputations without anaesthesia, are starving or buried beneath the rubble of 38,000 buildings which, according to BBC Verify, have been damaged or destroyed by the Israeli Defence Forces.
By Biden’s logic, the US shares the blame because it “is supplying weapons to the people who did it”. Our world does not have only one Axis of Evil, to borrow a phrase coined by a Biden predecessor, George W Bush, before he unleashed his “shock and awe” war on Iraq.
Next month, 35 Cabinet and junior ministers, the Ceann Comhairle, the Seanad Cathaoirleach and the Attorney General will love-bomb planet Earth with St Patrick’s Day visits to 48 countries. About one-third of the delegation will swoop on the US, including Taoiseach Leo Varadkar bearing a bowl of shamrock to the White House. Colum Eastwood, the increasingly impressive leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party – a party that converted its Oval Office access into peace for Northern Ireland – has said he will not be going because he could not bear to “rub shoulders, drink Guinness and have the craic” with US administrators while Gazans are living “in constant fear of eradication”.
Among those administrators is secretary of state Antony Blinken who rubbished as “meritless” South Africa’s claim that Israel is perpetrating genocide. The International Court of Justice implicitly disagreed when it decided to investigate the allegation.
Varadkar is gung-ho for his Washington trip, arguing that the opportunity for a word in the world’s most powerful ear should not be spurned. He has indicated that he will use it to press Gaza’s case. The argument he makes is plausible – until you check the map marking the countries upon which the Ministers will descend.
Israel is not one of them. Neither is the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers, some disguised as doctors, assassinated three militants in a hospital this week. Nor is Lebanon, where Israel killed seven people, including Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri, in a Beirut suburb on January 2nd. Our Ministers are off to Brazil and New Zealand and Japan, but nobody is heading to Yemen or Syria or Iran or Iraq or Qatar, a pivotal peace broker in the region.
Not a single visit to the Middle East features in the list of 86 cities. If a house call to Washington is necessary to intercede for restraint in the region, why not drop into the cockpits of Jerusalem and Tehran? To be “a small island at the centre of the world”, a vision for Ireland the Taoiseach espouses, the Government needs to broaden its horizons.
The Irish Government has been a rare advocate for humane intervention in Gaza, warning against Israeli war crimes and pleading for humanitarian access. Along with Norway, it refuses to join the bandwagon of wealthy countries withdrawing their funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) following Israel’s allegation that 12 of its staff were involved in the Hamas-led October 7th massacre.
The way is led by the US, where Biden had restored the funding – $340 million (€313.9 million) in 2020 – previously terminated by Donald Trump. Unrwa’s remit extends to 5.9 million refugees in the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Without funding, it has said, it will be unable to provide aid after this month.
Few would doubt there is truth in Israel’s accusation. Some might even wonder that there are not more conspirators working for Unrwa in the hermetically-sealed, over-crowded enclave where famine and a cholera epidemic now threaten. Rightly, the UN has sacked nine of the agency staff – two others are dead – and is investigating the allegations. But compare Israel’s allies’ fund-freezing in this case to their virtual silence about the blocking of aid trucks destined for Gaza by settler protesters when the World Health Organisation is warning of famine there. Injustice is provocation.
Last Sunday, several Israeli politicians, including government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Amichai Chikli, attended a conference in Jerusalem that called for the resettlement of Gaza by Israelis. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers have been seizing Palestinian homes and land, sometimes violently, for years with apparent impunity. Already this year, at least 59 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank.
Palestinians know these things are happening. They know their lives and their children’s lives are but fodder in a war between global strong men. They know it is they who will suffer, again, when Unrwa’s funds run out.
Biden and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu are facing the possible demise of their political careers in US and Israeli elections this year. To hear some commentators discuss how Gaza’s predicament could rebound on them, one would think their political survival supersedes the survival of the 10,000-plus children who lie dead.
[ With every journalist killed in Gaza, a window closes ]
The slaughter is serving no purpose other than to make everything worse by spreading violence in the region and entrenching enmity that will endure through generations to come.
There is only one good reason why the Taoiseach should accept his invitation to the White House this year and that is, as Varadkar has argued, to urge Biden to demonstrate restraint and fairness in the US attitude to Palestinians.
But a private word in Biden’s ear that, subsequently, can be downplayed or embellished by the men’s spindoctors is a futile exercise. The Taoiseach must convey Ireland’s message publicly, unambiguously and for international consumption in that fleeting moment when this little island takes its place at the centre of the world on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Palestinians in Ireland are publicly protesting. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) is calling on all Irish politicians to boycott Joe Biden’s White House on Patrick’s Day 2024. This leads to Palestinians being thrown out of a public meeting in Belfast, hosted by Sinn Féin : An Electronic Intifada writer reports:
Why is Sinn Féin in love with the Palestinian Authority?
David Cronin Power Suits 12 February 2024
I am old enough to remember a time when Sinn Féin was kept off the airwaves.
A broadcasting ban targeting its representatives was introduced by the Dublin government in 1976 and not lifted until 1994. Britain imposed a similar one in 1988.
The bans encouraged ignorance about the conflict in Ireland and its root cause – the brutality of the British state.
It is disappointing – to put it mildly – that having been subjected to censorship and exclusion, Sinn Féin is now resorting to censorship and exclusion itself.
A new video uploaded to Sinn Féin’s channel on YouTube gives a misleading flavor of a public meeting it organized in Belfast last week.
The main speaker at the event was Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, the Palestinian Authority’s envoy to Ireland.
She was interrupted by several Palestinians, one of whom described the PA as a “corrupt dictatorship.” Before they were removed from the event, the protesters also voiced their disgust at plans by Sinn Féin to attend a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration hosted by Joe Biden, the chief enabler of the Gaza genocide.
Sinn Féin has a better record of speaking out against Israel’s crimes than most other political parties in Ireland. That does not excuse it for silencing ordinary Palestinians as it did in Belfast last week.
“Occasional scraps”
Sinn Féin used to demonstrate a far clearer understanding of the situation than it now does.
Back in 1998, An Phoblacht – Sinn Féin’s newspaper – published a critique of the Oslo accords reached between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization a few years earlier.
The article commented on how “having signed up to the ‘peace deal’,” the PLO’s then leader Yasser Arafat “now finds it empowers Israel in direct proportion to its disempowerment of the Palestinians.”
“He signed up to a deal supposedly based on the premise of land for peace,” the article adds.
“In a perverse sense, the Israelis have adhered to the central tenets of that deal. They continue to enjoy the peace that military, economic and political superiority confers. Meanwhile, they continue with the process of land confiscation and settlement building. Israel enjoys both land and peace. The Palestinians feed on occasional scraps.”
One of the “scraps” thrown to the Palestinian Authority – set up under the Oslo accords – was that it was given nominal responsibility for administering several cities and towns in the occupied West Bank.
In reality, the PA has always been subservient to Israel. Through arrangements overseen by the US and the European Union, its security forces are required to fully coordinate their activities with the Israeli military.
The results have been predictably ugly. To cosset Israel, the PA represses, locks up and sometimes even kills fellow Palestinians.
Under initiatives sponsored by Britain and then the EU, the PA has been trained in what tactics of repression it should employ by officers who had previously been with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
The RUC was a predominantly Protestant force in the north of Ireland that had a marked anti-Catholic bias and colluded with death squads loyal to the British crown.
As Sinn Féin insisted that the RUC be disbanded, it should not have any difficulty understanding why ordinary Palestinians despise the PA’s repressive conduct and its collusion with Israel’s forces of occupation. Nor should it have any difficulty understanding why ordinary Palestinians are adamant that the PA does not speak for them.
The way Sinn Féin threw out the protesters in Belfast last week indicates that it has no desire to heed what ordinary Palestinians say. It only listens to the Palestinian Authority.
Extreme partition
Sinn Féin’s number one objective is to end the partition of Ireland.
The partition of Ireland was imposed a century ago by the colonial British elite.
It was imposed to ensure that the British-loyal Protestant population, predominantly descended from English and Scottish settlers, would dominate the newly created statelet of Northern Ireland at the expense of the predominantly Catholic indigenous Irish people.
This same British elite also facilitated the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The result of that colonization is that historic Palestine has been chopped up into slivers now lacking any contiguity.
In other words, an extreme form of partition has been inflicted on Palestine.
The partition is so extreme that it is impossible to see how the two-state solution advocated by the EU and US could bring equal rights between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. If anything, it would just entrench the divisions of Palestine orchestrated first by Britain and then by Israel.
An underlying assumption about all talk of a two-state solution is that it would enable Israel to remain a Jewish state. Palestinian citizens of Israel would by definition be accorded a lower status than Jews.
Splitting historic Palestine into two states would, therefore, be a recipe for preserving apartheid.
That idea ought to be anathema to Sinn Féin.
Yet it is unwilling to think outside the two-state box.
The book A Shared Struggle is a fascinating history of how Irish and Palestinian prisoners have undertaken hunger strikes.
Yet it is not without flaws.
Danny Morrison was Sinn Féin’s director of publicity in the 1980s – the time when the party was banned from the airwaves. In his introduction to the book, Morrison expresses only one hope for a Sinn Féin-led government in the south of Ireland: that the party will ensure its commitment to having a Palestinian state recognized is acted upon.
The best argument about why Sinn Féin should boycott this year’s Saint Patrick’s Day ceremony in the White House has been made by Farrah Koutteineh, an Irish Palestinian living in Belfast.
Writing in The New Arab, Koutteineh had previously revealed that she was expelled from Sinn Féin after advocating that it reverse its support for a two-state solution.
When Koutteineh urged – during internal discussions – that Sinn Féin should instead back decolonization in Palestine, she was shouted down by one of the party’s officers.
Why is Sinn Féin treating Palestinians in this way?
Sinn Féin used to find it obnoxious that Palestinians were told to be content with “occasional scraps.” Judging by its recent behavior, Sinn Féin is now being dismissive toward the very many Palestinians who stress that they will never be happy with occasional scraps.
See one of the posters in the fourth picture :
“IF YOU CAN’T SAY NO TO THE WHITE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF A GENOCIDE – THEN YOU’D NEVER BE ABLE TO STAND UP – NOT EVEN FOR IRELAND.”
Tomás Ó Flatharta 
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