VICTORIA WHITE, 52, a Dublin Protestant woman, seems to be a very minor and obscure fiction writer [ with only one work, a collection of short stories, published 24 years ago, back in 1990 ], and 20 years later, had her only non-fiction book published, on motherhood.
She is also since 1988 the wife of the Green Party Leader and former Irish Cabinet Minister, Eamon Ryan, who lost his Dail seat in 2011 and who also failed to take any of the 3 Dublin MEP seats this year. He was in the Cabinet which presided over the disastrous Housing Bubble, and then responded to the crash by taking full state responsibility for private [ banking ] borrowing, which as crippled the Irish Economy as well as gravely damaged society.
She portrays herself as a green activist and also as some form of feminist. Did she ever ask how women are treated in Gaza by Hamas ?
White [ for some obscure , if any, reason ] happens to have a weekly column in a daily paper, the Examiner and yesterday - with a prime slot, beside the Page 12 Editorial and taking up the rest [ 75% ] of the top half of that page - she produced a uniquely slanted, vicious and monumentally un-informed, indeed distorted attack on Israel, in which she declared that -
*Israel is not their "homeland". Europe is*.
Hamas or Al-Qaida could not do any worse.
Her grasp of history is laughable - she refers to Russian ethnic cleansing, and then adds - *The idea of the nation-state based on ethnicity was born*. That will certainly be news to every single serious historian on the planet - but then Whites' grasp of History is clearly as flaky as her grasp of the Middle East.
She totally ignores the context behind the flight of palestinians [and in fact not her inflated *800,000 but 711,000 ] in 1947-48, which was the invasion at birth of the newly-proclaimed, UN-mandated State of Israel, by 7 surrounding regular Arab Armies, plus an irregular pan-arab force which they had recruited. An invasion, decided by un-elected Arab tyrants, and explicitly designed to exterminate the new State, not defend local Arabs.
She similarly distorts the June 1967 war, totally ignoring the context which was a renewed Arab attempt to again destroy Israel.
Can such gross distortion be merely monumental ignorance ? Or could it reveal a deeply biased and hostile attitude - against one, but only one, nation and one nation-state on earth ?
This obscure, minor fiction writer who is a Dublin middle-class Protestant, also has a very weird take on Irish History - one owing more to *dissident* or Provo IRA views than to any serious analysis - not a whisper of how Peace was finally negotiated, with negotiations only happening on the basis of the explicit acceptance of the 6 Mitchel Principles, with *Parity of Esteem* and renouncing both the threat and use of force. Instead she trots out tired old *4 Green Fields* nonsense, a mantra she also spews out regarding the Middle East, tired but still toxic, and the kind of guff which still fuels both RIRA/CIRA ideology and violence, as well as the Hamas and other rejectionist gangs in the Arab world. How odd that a Dublin Protestant now aged 52, who therefore lived thru the long bloody decades from 1970 when Provo IRA and similar gangs waged their long campaign of tribal terror, due to defining Nationality in terms only of Land, not People and their Identity, Will and Rights, should have learnt or understood nothing. And odder that she cannot [or maybe simply will not ] see Israel except via such toxic and malign blinkers.
She quotes one, but only one, book - and does so repeatedly - but maybe she never read another on the Region ? Her lone source is no historian or expert of any kind, but an octogenarian travel-writer, and long notorious for her gross bias on the region, who also tried to sail on the pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza, Dervla Murphy.
The Examiner can do much better - even a blank page would be more useful. And less toxic
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment