The Stalinist Left is alive and well in Ireland

For those of you who aren’t Gaelic speakers, Is Feidir Linn means ‘Yes We can’. It is a Leftwing political movement based in Ireland but, like most Leftist organisations, it takes a global view of its importance. Just as Lambeth Council in the militant 1970s was fond of sending fraternal comradely ecouragement to Moscow in its fight against the doomed decadent bourgeois capitalist West, so too Is Feidir Linn is very into the Arab cause, and delights in egging Islamists on against the Great Satan Israel.

Your natural assumption, given that the name is in Gaelic, would be that the movement is primarily interested in Irish affairs. This is confirmed by its website, which flags in large bold letters across its masthead, ‘Building an Alternative Economic and Political Model for Ireland’. But like many an organisation on Ireland’s Left, it is passionately interested in Israel, which as all geographers know is not far from Ireland at all – a mere three oceans away, in fact.

I had a Twitter exchange with one of their number today. It went like this:

IFL: 20 Palestinian detained children started a hunger strike in Hasharon prison

Slog: Can u xplain how ‘children’ start hunger strike without being told by adults what a hunger strike is?

IFL: Can u xplain how ‘children’ are held in jail w/ out CHARGE !!!

Slog: Ah, right: inability to asnwer qu followed by more slogans. A career in advertising lies ahead of you.

IFL: Do think that these kid are daft!! and don’t no whats go in on I sent you a link not a slogan go read!!

Slog: First answer my question. Yr exclamations give you away, chum. ‘Go read’ is a classic fascist response.

IFL: would u like to help the inocent little kids stand up to the most evil state in the world if not go a way

I gave up at this point, on the old adage of there being no point in trying to teach a pig to sing: you don’t get a song, and it only annoys the pig. So I thought that, being a reasonable soul, I’d do as ordered by the exclamation marks and read the contents at the link. The link was to the neutral and thus entirely objective website of Samidoun, the self-styled Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. I automatically smile at this sort of Tooting Liberation Front syntax, because it always reminds me of the Hard-Left Liberation pisstake in Life of Brian. I thus imagine that somwhere in a dugout near Israel’s border – a makeshift missile-lobbing centre – an innocent young  bomber is asking, “So, are we like the Network for the Solidarity of Imprisoned Palestinians?” and a furious Commissar spits back, “No we f**kin’ well aren’t, you wombat. We spit on the f**kin’ NSIP, they are revisionist lackeys of no f**kin’ polemic purity so wash your f**kin’ mouth out mate”.

Anyway, at the PPSN’s site it’s pretty obvious that hunger striking is the new black. The lead story concerns ‘Palestinian national team member Mahmoud Sarsak, 25, imprisoned under Israel’s “Unlawful Combatants Law” – the only prisoner so held – without charge or trial – for three years.’ I’d be prepared to believe this, but the description chosen for Mahmoud – ‘the world’s best football player’ – did make me blink and rethink. I’m keen on my footie and follow the African Nations championship, but I’ve never heard of Mahmoud Sarsak.

There are articles about joint Irish-Palestinian hunger strike Vigils, Take Action Now for Hunger Strikers, Call for Karameh Hunger Strike, Statement No. 1 of Hunger Strikers Statement No. 2 of Hunger Strikers, Update on Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strike, and Sending Letters demanding Freedom for Hunger Strikers. But not a dicky-bird about child hunger-strikers. So I’d followed a lead that looked convincing on Twitter…but it was nothing to do with what Is Feidir Linn was on about. What I did find was an appeal to the world by the hunger strikers who, despite an agreement having been signed by the prisoners and the Israelis some time ago, are still not eating. It begins:

“This is an urgent and final distress call from captivity, slow and programmed death inside the cells of so-called Ramle Prison hospital, that you know that your sons and brothers are still struggling against death and you pay no attention to them and do not remember their cause.”

Not a tone entirely designed to maximise donations I would’ve thought, and also a tad hazy on the responsibility for ‘slow and programmed death’. I would blame the Israelis for quite a few things one way and another, but a hunger striker is, by definition, the chap in charge of, um, the decision to go on hunger strike. The only programme being followed here is his.

Manwhile – back at the hunger-striking defenceless little kids protesting evil occupation by fascist-dog Israeli imperialists in solidarity with hunger-striking best fooball players in world, there are lots of sites running the kindergarten self-starvation story, but all of them are either called things like Palestine Solidarity Project (No doubt they spit on filthy Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network revisionist lickspittle lapdogs)  or International Worker Resistance.

Nobody in the mainstream of blogging or the MSM – not the Guardian, the New York Times, The Mirror or indeed any of the ‘progressive’ press – has picked up on the story. But this has nothing to do with a conspiracy of censorship. It’s to do with the fact that virtually none of these children are children at all except in the strictly legal sense. The average age of the imprisoned youths (because that’s what they are) is 15 years and 10 months. None of them are pre-pubescent. Over half are aged between 16 and 17 years. The average age of the kids in Derry chucking stones and bottles at the British troops during the 1970s (a survey I was involved in at the time showed) was 12 years and 7 months.

Now, the Left in Europe is fairly united on the question of lowering the voting age to sixteen. So either the Left wants children who should be free from imprisonment based on legal ‘irresponsibility’ to have the vote, or the hunger-strikers it is pounding on about in Palestine are not children. They can’t have it both ways.

What we’re dealing with here is cynical, lachrymose propaganda: twisted truth, altered reality and a near absence of verifiable facts. The collective noun for such disinformation is propaganda. I’m well aware of certain elements in the Irish Hard Left, because I’ve had ‘dealings’ with them before. It was behind the acquisition, fitting and bankrolling of at least one Gaza Peace flotilla vessel, a story researched and exclusively revealed at the Slog two years ago. And yet more of what I described as ‘maudlin use of victim-syntax and high-profile dupes’ is also apparent wherever and whenever the anti-Israel agitprop machine is at work – see another Slogpost here.

Lest we forget, Hamas itself has form when it comes to hiding in schools with the children there, and then accusing the Israelis later of heartlessly shelling schools. In September 1939, the Germans murdered members of the Polish cavalry and then dumped them on the German side of the border as ‘proof’ of an unprovoked attack on the Third Reich. The difference 72 years ago was that nobody outside that Reich believed a word of it. In 2012, you can trump up any old tosh, and the Left will have no shortage of what Lenin termed Useful Idiots to protest against inhumanity and barbarism.

Anyway, over to you Is Feidir Linn. Your answer to my question is bollocks, the link is bollocks, the story is bollocks, and the entire construct is cynically manufactured Brechtian propaganda – ‘the good lie’ being (as ever) justified by the ends….and those ends being clothed in euphemistic drivel about a new political model on an anodyne-looking website. Or am I wrong? C’mon guys, spit it out: what exactly are the ends of Is Feidir Linn?