Patriot Games and Moral Compass

Emily Wilder, a Jewish, U.S. citizen, one year ago (May 17th), got fired by AP (Associated Press) because show her solidarity to Palestine. She even worked just 15 days for AP, immediately fired by only 1 thing. A lot of international media queued to re-hire her, then she decided on (work for) a small-size media company. She lives in Arizona, quite rare for Jewish US to (decide) to be born and live in Arizona (she’s fans of Phoenix Suns): a state with a political compass very different from (at least) Emily’s moral compass. She actually show her solidarity to Palestine since a years ago, and specific for 2021/last year, in nearly same moment Israel “atrocities” bombing Gaza & Ramallah in same day Eid El Fitr, and same day Israel Independence day last year

Today, 360 days after, she slammed AP like this (tweet). Angry because her ex employer euphemism murdered of senior journo, Palestine-US citizenship named Shireen Abu Aqleh / Shireen Abu Akleh.

After (so far) Shireen killed 14 hours ago, Emily’s tweet is the 2nd most retweets by “non-Moslem” about Shireen (behind actress, activist, US-Welsh descent Susan Sarandon), the most retweets by account of “Jewish”. Why she gets really massive retweets: everyone global journo really never forgets her sacrifice (get fired by AP) just because Emily loves Palestine. You can check her IG, stories IG, and twitter. 

Her moral compass is really pure: Palestine, wholeheartedly love from a Jew.

Amid Eid El Fitr 2021 holiday, because Covid sucks, I spent a holiday writing longform analysis just because of her and just because of brutality by Israel.

A lot Jewish in regular daily basis push brutality on Palestine. And in another side, more and more Jewish like Emily Wilder will be defend Palestine whatever cost.

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I can’t make sure how long or (when) Mary Lou McDonald use avatar/profile picture Palestine flag. Even, I’m not use it. I only use “purple dot”, a symbol (between activists Pro Palestine from Palestine-nationality side and Jewish-nationality) in my name (social media). A dot, which depicts someone imbecile-idiot-evil accused me “I use a fake verified twitter account”, lol.

Maybe someone has been watching “Patriot Games” (Harrison Ford, Sean Benn) like me since childhood, repeated 100-150x times. Ford, Chicago-native like Obama,Irish and German descent. This movie portrays “Ireland - UK, especially Monarch rivalry”. Sinn Fein. IRA militant. and in some scenes, imagining a lot of militant group training in North Africa beside IRA, mentioned Palestine group PLO. This movie aired in same time when across European, UK, US worried with “the mastermind terrorism” Carlos The Jackal. He and his spouse, Magdalena Kopp, cooperate with a lot rebel group like the IRA, PLO, etc to shake the world. 

Ireland War arguably the most pitiful war on European soil (amid the fact Irealnd is an island). Caucasian, White, war each other before and (continued again) after WW2. More pity than Cechnya-Kosovo (Yugoslavia) 1993-1998 or even current war Russia-Ukraine. Imagine again: maybe today 60% of US citizens, indirectly have an Irish descent, like Biden.

Arguably why Ireland finally succeeded in rebuilding again after the war ended was because of “massive funding) from US citizens - with Irish descent, like Ford or Biden. The Cranberries (pray for Dolores, passed away years ago) very clearly show how the Irish (in Ireland and North Ireland) were very painful about nearly a century of war. 

6 days ago, Sinn Féin shocked entirely Britain: wins at North Ireland. The wild scenario, this is a chance to unity Ireland - North Ireland. Mary Lou is the leader of Sinn Féin. 

The (shocking) wins by Sinn Féin really worried the inside of Buckingham, not only Downing street 10. Britain Monarch, once conquered 70% of the land earth, if Ireland united with North Ireland because consequence (Sinn Fein) wins, cornered UK to be smaller again. 

Sinn Féin, in Ireland and North Ireland love EU. Sin Fein just hate Britain. Irish support for remaining in the EU is up by 4% on last year to a whopping 88% (last survey, May 2022). 88% agree that Ireland should remain a member of the EU. The poll findings come almost 50 years to the day when 83% of people in Ireland voted in favor of joining the EEC on 10 May 1972. Partnership between London & Dublin, sadly, has been lacking for some time under this British Government today (Boris). That’s in nobody’s interest.

The DUP (anti Protocol) being too hardline means support seeps to Alliance (not anti Protocol), which means Sinn Féin (not anti Protocol) wins most Assembly seats in North Ireland. So DUP won’t join power sharing until the UK Government (Boris Johnson) tears up the Protocol. The EU is ready to suspend its trade deal with the UK if Boris Johnson's government revokes the Northern Ireland protocol. Merkel's legacy before she resigned, as an ex refugee and under Soviet occupier (Merkel was an East German citizen): she threatened the UK if the UK revokes the Northern Ireland Protocol. Empathy because Merkel is an ex refugee and she shows her love to a lot of victims of the Irish war, Merkel loves and supports Ireland-North Ireland, and so do the Irish respect for Merkel.

Sinn Féin won 27 seats to become the largest party in NI & will now be entitled to nominate a first minister - a first for a nationalist party. We’re witnessing the impending and I think now inevitable collapse of the United Kingdom.

Like “Patriot Games”, Irish were marginalized by Britain/United Kingdom for 8-9 centuries, and not only killed each other. So, Irish, in North Ireland and Ireland, have a wholeheartedly feeling to “another nation who destroyed by Britain”: Palestine

Balfour 1917 (forced a Palestinian to share land with jew), and the treatment of political prisoners, the Irish and Palestinians have had much in common. A shared sense of struggle underpins a bond and struggle because of unfairness by Britain, and after the recent conflict, Irish, especially Sinn Fein like Mary Lou, has made landmark diplomatic moves against Israel and everytime presence to support Palestine, whatever cost.

The best-selling and award-winning Irish author, Sally Rooney, declined an offer to translate her novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, into Hebrew, citing support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The BDS movement, which calls for global civil society to engage in a comprehensive campaign of boycott against Israel until it allows Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, ends its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, dismantles settlements and the separation wall and treats Palestinians with Israeli passports on an equal footing with Israeli Jews, is particularly popular in Ireland. But, again, this should come as no surprise – for the very term “to boycott” originated there.

Irish sympathy ran dry when the Zionists accepted the 1937 British plan to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state.

Not long after the 1916 Easter Rising – when, from April 24 to April 29, Irish nationalists rebelled against British rule until the British military brutally quashed the rebellion and executed its leaders – Palestinians experienced their own calamity at the hands of the British. The Balfour Declaration would have terrible consequences for the Palestinians, but the Irish were already familiar with Balfour’s work.

From 1887 to 1891, Balfour had been chief secretary for Ireland, where he had immediately set about trying to repress the work of the Land League. The Perpetual Crimes Act of 1887 went after agrarian activists and aimed to prevent, among other things, boycotts.

Hundreds of people, including more than 20 MPs, were imprisoned as a result of the Act, which allowed cases to be tried by a magistrate without a jury. But when members of the Royal Irish Constabulary fired at a crowd demonstrating against the conviction of two people in Mitchelstown, County Cork, on September 9, 1887, killing three men, Balfour was given the moniker “Bloody Balfour”.

But, in 1976, Special Category Status was ended. (A century earlier, Arthur Balfour had advocated treating political prisoners in Ireland like common criminals.) Israel, likewise, refuses to recognise the political status of Palestinian political prisoners, even though many of them – like Ahmad Sadat and Marwan Barghouti – are leaders of political groups.

On March 1, 1981, five years after the Special Category Status was ended, an Irish republican prisoner, Bobby Sands, began a hunger strike to demand the restoration of political status. Other republican prisoners joined him in the hunger strike at staggered intervals. Ten of them, including Sands, died.

After Sands’s death on May 5, the 66th day of his strike, Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s Nafha prison smuggled out a letter in support of the Irish hunger strikers. It read: “We salute the heroic struggle of Bobby Sands and his comrades, for they have sacrificed the most valuable possession of any human being. They gave their lives for freedom.”

There had been several hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners before this and many more since. Five Palestinians have passed away while on hunger strike and dozens have come close to death. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners have participated in what Palestinians call “the battle of empty stomachs”, either alone or en mass, over the years.

Laurence McKeown, an Irish Republican who was jailed for 16 years from 1976 to 1992 took part in the 1981 hunger strike, joining after Sands and three others had died. His strike ended on its 70th day when his family authorised medical intervention to save his life. In the book, he described how prison guards would bring him food three times a day in an attempt to convince him to abandon his hunger strike. 

The similarity between the inhumane practices suffered by Irish political prisoners in the past and the inhumane treatment of Palestinian prisoners today serves as a reminder of this long history of solidarity between two countries plagued by settler-colonialism. On the cover of A Shared Struggle is a photograph of Palestinian women carrying signs that read Nafha, H-Block, Armagh, One Struggle; it is an image that speaks volumes about Irish-Palestinian solidarity.

At the League of Nations, Prime Minister Eamonn De Valera denounced the carve-up as cruel and unjust, a bitter repetition of Ireland’s own division by the British 15 years earlier. Irish political opinion saw the evolution of its attitude towards Zionism very much through the prism of the British. If the Zionists and the British are on the same side of partition then.

There was still considerable support for Israel in Ireland by the time of the 1967 war, but growing awareness of the fate of Palestinian refugees, alongside the work of Irish charities, and civil rights groups in Palestine, began to shift public opinion. Organised, mobilised activism on behalf of the Palestinians is absolutely – relative in per capita terms – higher in Ireland than it is in Britain or Germany, or many, many EU countries.

Israel’s conduct during the Lebanese Civil War, where 30,000 Irish soldiers served as peacekeepers, soured attitudes even more. The deaths of a number of Irish soldiers at the hands of Israel and its proxy forces were among the reasons Dublin did not open an Israeli embassy until 1993. Coincidentally, even “Patriot Games” was actually based on a Novel, but this movie aired 1992. Ireland was the first member of the European community to recognise the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1980, with others following a few months later, and became a stalwart advocate for the two-state solution, hosting and meeting with Yasser Arafat on several occasions, sometimes to the ire of the Israeli government.

Though Ireland has never broken with EU foreign policy and still officially supports the two-state solution set out in the Oslo Accords, leaders from across the Irish political spectrum have sharply criticised Israel’s settlement policy, breaches of human rights and undermining of the peace process.

Their criticism has only grown as the two-state solution appears increasingly doomed and as the EU has become preoccupied with other foreign policy issues.

The result has been an often fractious diplomatic relationship with Israel. Its foreign ministry described last week’s motion as “one-sided”, and in 2018 blasted the Occupied Territories Bill as “the most extreme anti-Israel piece of legislation in Europe”.

Ireland is unlikely to be an important player on the international stage, but Sinn Fein’s Boyne believes that the Irish government can use its influence within the EU and the United Nations, where it currently sits on the Security Council, to convince other states that annexation is a reality and that Israel must face consequences for violating the rights of Palestinians.

With a spectacular winning by Sinn Fein in North Ireland, and (again) brutality murdering journalist “US-Palestine citizen”, just refresh again solidarity amid everyone who loved Palestine. Not only between Jewish itself like Emily Wilder. Or not only Mary Lou McDonald and 99% Irish in North Ireland - Ireland. But (love from) everyone who feels atrocities by Israel to Palestine is never ever accountable.