An added dimension will be grafted onto today's event as the group hosting the vigil, Drogheda Stands With Palestine, has just released an informative eight page zine. Full praise to all those who put their time and energy into such a worthwhile project.
Last week in a searing column in the Guardian Arwa Mahdawi posed the following series of questions:
As it seems, in the words of Arwa Mahdawi, the tide is slowly starting to turn. Our solitary teardrop is fusing with other teardrops in circumstances where the direction of travel is towards the emergence of a tsunami that could hopefully drown Israeli cruelty and savagery. This can be seen in the actions of our own government which earlier this week unpardonably voted down a Sinn Fein motion to prevent the Central Bank facilitating the sale of Israeli “war bonds” across the European Union. Small wonder Omar Barghouti last week, addressing an audience in Liberty Hall, accused the Irish government of being complicit in genocide. The excuse offered in defence of facilitating war bonds was the tenuous one of legal grounds. It sounded as plausible as the excuse offered by this crooks' cabal when its craving for office sought to defend its capitulation to Michael Lowry. And yet government ministers - even if a damage limitation exercise to cover and cushion their backsides - felt compelled to introduce the term genocide. That is more the result of pressure from below than it is ethics from above.
More to the point, they were arrested by criminals: the PSNI is pulling out every stop in its criminal complicity in the cover up of the murder of Bellaghy GAA chairman Sean Browne. It cares not one jot about human rights in its defence of state sponsored murder. Yet it has the audacity to assert that the arrests of those opposed to state mass murder were "lawful and proportionate". It sounded so Israeli it could have been issued in Hebrew.
And what will you say? When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how the western world, with all its moral superiority, its rule-based order and its focus on international human rights law, allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say? When future generations learn that, for 19 months, we woke up every morning to videos of children being burned alive – bombed with weapons that the US taxpayer helped pay for and the western world helped justify – will you be able to say that you spoke up? A lot of ordinary people will be able to hold their head up high and say they were not silent; that they use whatever platforms or privilege they had.
The ordinary people of Drogheda Stands With Palestine will be able to count themselves in that number referred to at the end of the quotation from the Guardian columnist; that they stood up, that they used whatever platforms they had and were not silent like those Christless Christians who preach peace but ignore war; that without fail from October 2023 in the immediate wake of the genocide they gathered to say that never again must mean never again.
We who gather in West Street each Saturday might be tempted to despair, feeling that that our solidarity is a teardrop in the ocean of death, destruction and devastation, that all our appeals fall on death ears, that our own government ignores not just us but all the citizens of this society who protest the atrocity. In those dark moments we might find a sliver of inspiration from the words of the Albert Edgar Guest poem, Don't Quit:
Success is failure turned inside out
the silver tint of the clouds of doubt
so stick to the fight when you're hardest hit
it's when things seem worst, you must not quit.
It is the type of pressure that Western governments seek to neutralise. On Thursday evening I gave a talk in Limerick. It was not about Gaza but each time I mentioned Gaza I could sense the audience palpably bristle. And when I facetiously said that those powerful bodies who are trying to muzzle Kneecap for speaking out against Israeli atrocity should themselves be kneecapped, it met with the loudest applause of the evening. The pot of anger in this country is simmering. It bothers the government. A raging electorate is not what it can afford. Drogheda Stands With Palestine is part of the flame that keeps that pot of justified anger going. Drogheda Stands With Palestine and groups like it matter.
If it or vigils like this do not matter, have no consequence, can be safely ignored, then why are they not being ignored? Why have our Belfast colleagues against genocide, Sue Pentel and Martine McCullough, been arrested by the PSNI for placing stickers on an ATM machine at Barclay's Bank? Compare and contrast a sticker on a wall to a 2000 pound bomb crashing through a school, a home or hospital. As Sue Pentel said after her release:
When people are being bombed and burnt alive... an actual peaceful protest, we feel we are being criminalised, we're not the criminals.
Sue Pentel, Martine McCullough, Kneecap - they are the voices the Western states want suffocated in their bid to protect the murderous Israeli regime. And when we gather later today at West Street, I have no doubt that we shall loudly proclaim our solemn intent to stand by all of those activists facing prosecution for standing up for Palestine and against genocide.
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I think you do Sue Pental, and Martine McCullough an injustice. Including them in the same sentence with Kneecap is an unwarranted drift into point-scoring. Neither Sue nor Martine have called on people to kill their democratically elected representatives!
ReplyDeleteI don't agree. Nor do I think that the two women will see it as an injustice.
DeleteI included Kneecap because one of them faces prosecution for “displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah, a proscribed organisation”. He has not been charged with his rhetoric about Tory MPs.
Had he waved an Israeli flag he would not have been prosecuted.
I see the three being targeted because of their opposition to genocide.