Extract From The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Lisdoonvarna.

My comrade and fellow Culchie Diaspora traveller Eamonn McDonagh, lately of Buenos Aires, has once again taken the time to debunk yet another eruption of ridiculous comparison-drawing between the prospects for peace and reconciliation in The Holy Land (i.e. Israel, i.e. the Zionist Entity) and The Holy Land (i.e. Ireland, i.e., em, the Hiberinian Entity). Eamonn expresses the exasperated wish that the jackeens who do this would just houl their wheest, and in so doing, he offers the following necessary summary of the distinctions between Irish republicanism and Hamas fanaticism:

"1. The Northern Ireland peace process worked because it allowed the Provisional Republican movement a graceful and painless surrender after it had been militarily and politically defeated by the British state. 2. The political conditions that allowed the Good Friday Agreement to be made consisted, among other things, of the wearing down of the will of Sinn Féin and the IRA to resist British rule in Northern Ireland by force. Among the methods employed to do this were interrogation techniques mounting to torture, mass internment without trial and deniable assassinations. It’s good to remember when we hear woolly talk about the peace process. 3. Provisional Republican ideology - though betrayed a thousand times with bloody sectarian deeds - was based on the Enlightenment, the unity of Catholic, Protestant and dissenter and the defense of the men of no property. . . 4. The IRA never called for the uprooting of Protestant “settlements” in Northern Ireland and never called for Catholics to be given back the land the planters took from them. . . 5. The disjunction between the foul sectarian massacres of Provoism and its (in certain respects) laudable ideals is not a small matter. . . The ideology of Hamas, on the other hand, is based on racial hatred and the supremacy of one religion over all others. . . 6. Hamas isn’t fighting for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, it’s fighting to replace Israel with such a state. So, for the comparison with the Provos to be valid they would have had to have been seeking to conquer the entire UK and make London the capital of Ireland. 7. Hamas isn’t fighting alone; it’s fighting with the explicit and acknowledged aid of a regional power, Iran, whose leaders never tire of repeating that they want to see Israel destroyed. . ."

Eamonn drew a similar lesson from the recent commemoration of the Big Fella's assassination, in that 88 years after Michael Collins was killed and 87 years after the end of the Civil War, the Irish are still dealing with its consequences and attempting to heal the breach it opened among and between them. "Meanwhile, some Irish people would like the Jews to just get over what happened to their parents and grandparents in Europe between 1939 and 1945, accuse them of being the contemporary incarnation of their own worst oppressors, and are prepared to boycott their state until it behaves as they would wish."

We might all remember that we live in the real world, in other words. And this raises the weird unreality that possesses the deluded people of the increasingly Islamist-corporate authoritarian state of Turkey, from which journalist and filmmaker Claire Berlinksi provides this chilling and disturbing account of a hugely important story you will not have read about in your newspapers. As an illustration of how badly the Turks have been systematically and methodically misled by their corporate media, Berlinski cites the case of the hysterical reaction to the fate of the so-called Gaza "relief" ship, the Mavi Marmara: "They believe that the ship was on a humanitarian mission and nothing but a humanitarian mission. They are bewildered that anyone would have interfered with such a noble-minded endeavour. They do not know that there were no humanitarian supplies on the Mavi Marmara. They do not know the most rudimentary facts about Hamas."

Then again, not a few geezers in countries with a free press (routinely said to be a Zionist-controlled press, regardless) are similarly encumbered by these same delusions. I guess this should be no surprise, when you have a look at the media they trust, which is just as grotesque as the corporate media currently manipulating public opinion in Turkey. It's enough to make you want to put pins in your eyes. But it's always better just to laugh.