{"id":97263,"date":"2014-05-12T13:22:19","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T13:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=97263"},"modified":"2014-05-14T08:26:10","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T08:26:10","slug":"the-spread-of-british-hypocrisy-from-gerry-adams-and-northern-ireland-to-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=97263","title":{"rendered":"The spread of British hypocrisy, from Gerry Adams and Northern Ireland to Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal<\/w:View> <w:Zoom>0<\/w:Zoom> <w:DoNotOptimizeForBrowser \/> <\/w:WordDocument> <\/xml><![endif]--><\/p>\n<h1 class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\">Robert Fisk &#8212; The Independent May 11, 2014<\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Gerry-Adams.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-96371\" title=\"Gerry Adams. Click to enlarge\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Gerry-Adams-300x159.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"159\" \/><\/a>The law is the law is the law. So I was taught as a child. But it\u2019s all baloney. Take the case of Gerry Adams, \u201carrested\u201d and then released after chatting to the Northern Ireland police \u2013 I notice the cops did not use the old clich\u00e9 about \u201chelping the police with their inquiries\u201d \u2013 about the torture and murder and \u201cdisappearance\u201d of Jean McConville. It is, to quote Fintan O\u2019Toole, that wise old bird of Irish philosophy, \u201can atrocity that cries out for accountability\u201d \u2013 in which Adams has consistently denied any involvement. Sinn Fein announced that Adams\u2019s \u201carrest\u201d was political, a remark that got the usual tsk-tsk from Unionists and British alike.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">But alas, Theresa Villiers, the latest in the hordes of Northern Ireland secretaries to be visited upon Belfast, also announced, a wee bit before Adams\u2019s \u201carrest\u201d, that there would be no independent inquiry into the killing of 11 unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy in August 1971 by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, the most undisciplined British military unit to be sent to the province, which later killed another 14 civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday. In the Ballymurphy shooting, the Brits managed to kill a Catholic priest carrying an improvised white flag and a mother of eight children who went to help a wounded boy. The deaths of Father Hugh Mullan and Mrs Joan Connolly were also deaths that \u201ccry out for accountability\u201d. But of course, there will be none. Ms Villiers has seen to that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">She also ensured that there would be no inquiry into the fire-bombing of the La Mon hotel in 1978, when the IRA burned 12 people to death. Families of the dead have their suspicions that transcripts of police interviews with IRA suspects to this crime were removed from the archives to protect important people involved in the \u201cpeace process\u201d in Northern Ireland. No complaints about that, needless to say, from the IRA. But you can see the problem: if arresting Adams just before the European elections was not political, then surely the British refusal to inquire into the slaughter in Ballymurphy \u2013 assuming the soldiers involved have not died of old age \u2013 was political. After all, the Brits know who these soldiers were, their names, their ages and ranks. They have much more than the statements of two dead IRA supporters \u2013 the \u201cevidence\u201d against Adams \u2013 to go on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Now you may argue that the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday cost far too many millions of pounds to warrant another investigation into the Ballymurphy deaths. But then you may also ask why the soldiers who gave evidence to the original inquiry were given the cover of anonymity. This was something Gerry Adams was not offered \u2013 nor, given the favourable political fallout, was he likely to have asked for it. But then it would also be pleasant if the Brits who know something about the Dublin and Monaghan bombings during the worst days of the Irish war could pop over to Dublin and give a little evidence about this particular atrocity. No chance of that, of course.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">And you don\u2019t have to stick in Ireland for further proof of legal hypocrisy. Take our beloved Home Secretary\u2019s decision to deprive British immigrants of their British passports if they go to fight Assad\u2019s regime in Syria. Quite apart from the fact that William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and his friends originally supported the armed Syrian opposition, there are problems with the passport story. Many British supporters of Israel, for example, have fought on Israel\u2019s behalf in Israeli uniform in that country\u2019s wars. But what if they served in Israeli units known to have committed war crimes in Lebanon or Gaza? Or in the Israeli air force, which promiscuously kills civilians in war. Are they, too, to be deprived of their passports if they were not born in the UK? Of course not. One law for Muslims, another for non-Muslims \u2013 not unlike Spain\u2019s offer of passports to the descendants of those driven from their homes in the 15th century, a generous act somewhat damaged by the fact that only Jews (not Muslims) may take advantage of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">We will not dwell upon all the other hypocrisies of the Middle East \u2013 the outrage at any Iranian interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, for example, when another country in the region has an awful lot of nuclear weapons; or US fury at Russian annexation of Crimea but no anger at all about the annexation of Golan or the theft of Arab land in the West Bank, which are equally illegal under international law. Upon such foundations is aggression built: the illegal invasion of Iraq, for instance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">I contemplate all this because of a little research I\u2019m undertaking about a Moroccan air force colonel who, in 1972, tried to stage a coup against the brutal King Hassan who was also, by the way, quite an expert on \u201cdisappearances\u201d. Mohamed Amekrane flew to Gibraltar and threw himself upon the dodgy mercy of Her Majesty. He pleaded for asylum (after all, the coup had failed) but we packed him off back to Morocco because, while the European Convention on Human Rights gives anyone the right to leave his or her own country, no international treaty obliges a country to give that person asylum. So back Amekrane went \u2013 and was, of course, put to death. His widow eventually got \u00a337,500 from the British government \u2013 ex gratia, needless to say, out of goodwill not guilt, you understand \u2013 and Colonel Amekrane was then erased from history. Interesting to see what happens to the ex-Brits who lose their passports for going to Syria \u2013 and have to go back to the country of their birth. They might be better off \u2013 and live longer lives \u2013 if they to go off to fight in another jihad.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/voices\/comment\/the-spread-of-british-hypocrisy-from-gerry-adams-and-northern-ireland-to-syria-9350822.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Double-standards and selective accountability at work from Northern Ireland to Syria and the Crimea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97263"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97419,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97263\/revisions\/97419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}