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.
The video of the event uploaded by Sinn Féin omits the interruptions.
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.”
Continue reading @ ESSF.
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