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Looking for some informed comment about world-shaking events? Stay clear of the newspapers then.

Eamonn McCann, 10 Oct 2006

I had a new experience on my way back from the eve-of-Labour Conference anti-war march in Manchester. Marooned for hours at Liverpool’s John Lennon airport, I cracked and picked up an abandoned copy of the Irish Daily Mail which some incoming traveller had obviously discarded in fear of being seen in its company in the outside world.

I found a pic of the U2 front-person moving in mysterious ways, on his arm the comely Ashley Judd, five foot seven in her bare feet, which she was, carrying four-inch spike-heels in her hand, while his three-inch crepe soles enabled him to tower by half an inch at least above her. The caption told that Bono is ‘notoriously sensitive about his lack of inches.’

At Manchester, the two guys identified by Little Big Man at the 2004 Labour Conference as the Lennon and McCartney of British politics were circling one another, daggers in hand, each alert for the deft moment to drive the blade into the other’s back, but making plain that if there’s one thing they are agreed on – and maybe there is only one – it’s that you couldn’t kill enough of them A-rabs and Reactionary Muslims.

On another page of the same paper, I discover Tom McGuirk gnawing at the altar rails of respectability, incanting clichés about a ‘Fatwa on Freedom’ and pouring praise on the Pope – a ‘distinguished theologian and philosopher’, apparently.

Muslims are a mindless lot, McGurk reckons: ‘Seemingly like clockwork, large sections of the Muslim population can be switched on to riot or not...The moderate Islamic community...must turn on those in its own communities’ who foment this violence.

This regurgitated the undigested essence of Benedict’s crude rant against Islam at Regensburg on September 12th. It echoed exactly Blair’s comprehensive justification of the War on Terror (WoT) in his speech at Los Angeles on August 1st.  

This seemed to me the most striking aspect of Benedict’s philippic – the way it harmonised perfectly with the propaganda line of Bush and Blair.



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Eamonn McCann

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