Frontlines: Murder Most Foul

At least two investigations are under way into the Tuam babies scandal, examining how hundreds of tiny bodies came to be buried in unmarked graves. Here’s something else from the West which merits inquiry.

“One thing which has never left my mind was the terrible beating Brother E gave to a retarded boy called John B. He wasn’t able to articulate in any way. He just made sounds and gestures.
“There is no possible way John B could have recovered fully from what to me was the most violent assault I have ever witnessed.
“He would have been about 10. I don’t know what he’d done. Maybe he’d done nothing. It happened in the playground as we all stood around watching. A number of the orphans had bowel spasms, dirtied themselves, from the terror. Brother E totally and absolutely destroyed that child. He beat him with his fists and kicked him on the ground in his body and his head. The blood was gushing from him and he was whimpering and screaming for pity.
“Everything came to a halt. Everybody stood rigid, watching in terror. Nobody made a sound. There was only the Brother panting and the screaming of the child. There was nothing anybody could do. I never saw John B after it.”
That was recounted to me more than 20 years ago by a man I afterwards lost touch with – until he came forward to give evidence to the inquiry into abuse at Church “homes” in the North. The incident didn’t figure at the inquiry: it happened in a different jurisdiction. That is, in the Republic of Ireland.
It seems to me to be a description of murder. Any law agency out there fancy following it up?

There’s the old story of a fellow, out on a ramble, who stops a local and asks how to get to such and such a place, and the local tells him, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”
Same with Gaza. Where you start from dictates the conclusion you’ll arrive at.
Virtually every Irish and British media outlet begins with Hamas’s resumption of rocket fire into Israel early last month. The Israeli bombardment and invasion came in response to this barrage, we are told. We might debate whether the response has been appropriate, proportionate. But Hamas started it.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the story begins with the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1947/’48. But you could listen all day to the BBC or RTE without learning that the people being pummelled in Gaza are not native to the particular patch of land they are packed into but came here out of desperate necessity, having been expelled from their homes by the same force which has now hemmed them in without means of escape, the better to bomb them to oblivion.
To trace the slaughter of Gaza to the launch of Hamas missiles a few weeks ago rather than to the launch of the Israeli State 66 years ago is to endorse the Israeli narrative while denying entirely the Palestinian perspective.
The nature and extent of the violence cannot have come as a surprise. Israel has been a serial killer since its inception. It was founded by European settlers who used terror to drive out indigenous people whose lands had been marked for seizure. How else could the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine have been accomplished?
The notion that Israel hasn’t intended civilian deaths in Gaza is naïve and a-historical. Inflicting civilian deaths is the point of the exercise. Zionism cannot be fulfilled until the cleansing of Palestine is complete.

Poetical inscription on a Gaza placard, 2012: “You take my water/ Burn my olive trees/ Destroy my house/ Take my job/ Steal my land/ Imprison my father/ Kill my mother/ Bomb my country/ Starve us all/ Humiliate us all/ But I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”
Check out my young mate Versatyle’s “Free Palestine” on YouTube. A bit not bad at all.

When Menachem Begin arrived in America on a fund-raising tour in December 1948, Albert Einstein’s name headed a list of Jewish signatories to a letter denouncing the future Israeli prime minister as no better than a Nazi.
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties... It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine...
“A shocking example (of the Freedom Party’s ideology) was their behaviour in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. On April 9, terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem... Most of the Jewish community was horrified. But the terrorists were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin...
“It is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country.”
Begin’s party morphed into Likud in 1973 and won a general election in 1977. It is now led by Binyamin Netanyahu.