Ken O' Keefe.

[American Dream]

..As no Jewish person would ever refer to the "Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945", so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine.

You've got a job ahead of ye then, as that is exactly what every mick i know calls it. I lived in Eire for >3 years, have passport, irish on both sides back at least 6 generations, and I never heard the term 'irish holocaust' until you used it. Sure the Brits were bastards, exported food during famine etc, but thats what empires do. Your holocaust 'thing' is bizarre.

Exactly- it was Searcher who referred to it first as a famine here in this thread. He's Irish too, I do believe.

I want to be accurate here - in usage there is 'The Famine' which for most Irish people is like an equivalent of Shoah in the Jewish context. It certainly doesnt equate to Irish people accepting that it was just people starving to death in a natural occurance and / or the English were just callous wankers. Tim Pat Coogan's recent book on the subject is well worth checking out.

So you agree with slad even though she disagrees with you?

[seemslikeadream]

oh fuck it..... if you're going to keep talking about me ....

and YES AD there was more than THE ONE HOLOCAUST...so sorry to disappoint you ...but others have suffered the same fate and you do not have the copyrights to that story..I know a whole lot about that story and YOU DO NOT....I've been studying it for years....just as you have been studying yours

YOU BROUGHT THIS UP AND AS SUCH IT WAS AN INVITE BY YOU TO ME TO COME BACK TO THIS THREAD

AND I HATE WHEN SOMEONE DENIES MY HOLOCAUST JUST AS YOU DO WHEN SOME ONE DENIES YOURS

WHY DO YOU HATE THE IRISH? WHY ARE YOU AN IRISH HOLOCAUST DENIER?

AMERICAN DREAM IS ANTI-IRISH BECAUSE HE DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THE IRISH HOLOCAUST

Irish Holocaust Denial and the campaign against "Sinn Féin/IRA" national | rights and freedoms | opinion/analysis Dé Luain Lúnasa 28, 2006 16:35 by Donnchadh donn2010 at hotmail dot com
The denial of genocide as a modern political weapon
Irish Holocaust denial, or genocide denial, which refers to itself as revisionism, has evolved over three decades of propagandising as an important "cutting edge" ideological weapon in the ideological war against the IRA after 1969.
"The political commentator, the ballad singer and the unknown maker of folk-tales have all spoken about the Great famine, but is there more to be said? If man, the prisoner of time, acts in conformity with the conventions of society into which he is born, it is difficult to judge him with irrevocable harshness. So it is with the men of the famine era. Human limitations and timidity dominate the story of the Great Famine, but of great and deliberately imposed evil in high positions of responsibility there is little evidence."

Editors R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams writing in "The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52"

"Firstly the Great Irish Famine is not a generalised illustration of the dangers of "unrestrained" capitalism, rather it was a freak natural occurrence that was in many ways exacerbated by flawed government policies. Secondly, the Irish Famine was very different from the tragedies which have recently being witnessed in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thirdly, the fundamental cause of famines in the late twentieth century is not Western "injustice" and "indifference" but are rather the actions of third world governments and their armed political competitors.

On a superficial level the proximate cause of the famine can be readily identified; the fungus phytophthora infestans which destroyed a large portion of Ireland's potato crop over the period 1845-9. Indeed it has been convincingly shown that the pre-famine Irish economy did not contain the seeds of its own destruction and that there was nothing inevitable about the famine had the potato blight not occurred. The famine was an unpredictable ecological freak; in words of the Dutch historian and scientist Peter Solar it was a case of "Ireland as having been profoundly unlucky" rather than being the inevitable product of market forces run wild (or of unrestrained population growth)."

Learning the Wrong Lessons: Governments, Hunger and the Great Irish Famine By Gareth G Davis

Irish Holocaust denial, or genocide denial, which refers to itself as revisionism, has evolved over three decades of propagandising as an important "cutting edge" ideological weapon in the ideological war against the IRA after 1969. While appearing on the surface as a scholarly challenge to the well-established record of English genocide against the Gaelic nation since the Norman invasion, Irish Holocaust denial serves as a powerful theory uniting otherwise disparate groups (e.g., Ulster Unionists, Southern Neo-Unionists, 26 county free staters, the British establishment, British public opinion, etc.).

On the surface, Irish Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth." Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimise their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

These so-called revisionists assert that the premise that the British Empire engaged in a premeditated campaign of genocide against the Gaelic people of Ireland is one that does not stand honest scholarly scrutiny.

They do not deny that the British government engaged in persecution of and discrimination against the Gaelic population. They even admit the frequency of famine and prevalence of discrimination in occupied Ireland. They assert, however, that the anti-Irish actions of the British government were in large part a legitimate response to Irish misdeeds and disloyalty. As such, the measures taken were not qualitatively different from similar actions of European powers of the time.

Irish Holocaust deniers seek to plant seeds of questioning and doubt about the Irish Holocaust in their mass audiences. While Holocaust denial has become an article of faith among many in the 26 county establishment, its success does not depend upon conversion to that faith among the general public. The spread of scepticism about the scope and historicity of the Irish Holocaust among a critical mass of public opinion would be considered to be a significant ideological triumph in and of itself.

Genocide denial has been widely embraced within the otherwise disparate contemporary Neo-Unionist movement because it serves as an ideological cement that meets a very contemporary political need. In particular, it provides a sanitized envelope for the latter-day occupation of the six counties of north eastern Ireland by seeking to show that the heinous crimes ascribed to British rule in Ireland never took place. As such, much of the barrier preventing the legitimisation of contemporary British rule in Ireland from making a strategic breakthrough by appealing to a more mainstream audience would be removed. Accordingly, Holocaust denial provides contemporary legitimisation through posthumous rehabilitation. It is no accident that some Southern establishment parties are avid propagators of genocide denial ideology. The core message of the Irish Holocaust deniers is even more insidious.

They recognize the fact that most people believe that the Irish Holocaust / Artificial Famines were man made. (There were nine "famines" between 1740 and 1880. And incredible amount of pure incompetance, timidity, or profound bad luck?) How can it be, they ask, that the great majority have come to accept as truth an historical assertion which is in actuality a total falsehood?

They answer that most people have come to accept uncritically the story of the Irish Holocaust because they have been systematically propagandised with deliberate lies for over one hundred and fifty years. These lies include materials inserted by De Valera into the educational curriculum; the content of Holocaust-related folk lore and song; a vast Irish Holocaust literature; public rituals of genocide remembrance etc.. They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy, led by Sinn Féin/IRA and Fianna Fáil dupes that manipulate the institutions of culture in order to disseminate a false mythology.

The purpose of this genocide mythology, they assert, is the delegitimisation of the British state in Ireland and a legitimisation of the IRA campaign. This legitimisation is used to advance the IRA agenda of Irish Unity and total independence from England.

An interesting article
by Donnchadh Tue Aug 29, 2006 17:30
Here is an interesting article by James Mullin with makes the point more clearly:

Ireland's Revisionist Historians: A Generation of Vipers

James Mullin
May 11, 2006

The traditional view of Irish history is based on the premise that the Irish people had a moral right to fight for their political, economic, social and cultural independence from Imperialist Britain.

According to Dr. Christine Kinealy,(A New History of Ireland, This Great Calamity, etc.) an opposing view began to emerge in Ireland in the 1930s, when a number of leading Irish Academics, following the lead of earlier British historians, set an agenda for the systematic revision of traditional Irish History, which they claimed was rife with "nationalist myths". Their declared mission was to replace this so-called mythology with objective, "value-free history".

In her essay, "Beyond Revisionism", Dr. Kinealy says that the revisionist movement gained a new prominence in the battle for Irish hearts and minds during the 1960?s when the IRA campaign intensified: "Challenging nationalist mythology became an important ideological preoccupation of a new generation of historians".

A strong opponent of the revisionist school is Peter Berresford Ellis, author of Eyewitness to Irish History, and A History of the Irish Working Class, and many other historical works. In his essay, "Revisionism in Irish Historical Writing", Ellis argues that a more correct term to describe revisionists is "neo-colonial" or "anti-nationalist".

"In its mildest form, this school of thought apologizes for English imperialism, and in its strongest form it supports that imperialism," he wrote. These anti-nationalist historians accept the thesis that Englands invasion and conquest of Ireland is not a matter for moral judgment. It is simply a fait accompli.

One of the most popular arguments of the revisionist school is that there was no Irish national consciousness when the invaders arrived. Ireland was a land of divided, warring factions, '"and the arrival of one more such faction is not a matter of importance nor of moral speculation."

They argue further, that English colonial rule in Ireland was beneficial to the Irish people, although their imparting of civilization was at times, a bit too brutal.

Finally, these revisionists use their interpretation of history to justify the status quo in Ireland today: "The Six Counties of North-East Ulster are depicted as a democratically formed unit in which the political majority is represented by Unionists. Partition, imposed by bloodshed and violence, and threats of bloodshed and violence by Britain against the democratic wish of the Irish nation is not considered in such histories." (Ellis)

Two books emboldened the revisionist movement in the early 1970's: States of Ireland by Conor Cruise O'Brien, and Towards a New Ireland by Garrett Fitzgerald. Both books made peace with British imperialism, maintaining that the real Irish independence tradition was a '"home rule" philosophy.

"The lesson they attempted to hammer home", according to Ellis, "was that separation from England was never a popular concept in Irish historical development - that the republican tradition was a minority view." These revisionist authors would have us believe that the Irish People simply "wanted a greater say in their domestic affairs within English colonial structures." (Ellis)

O'Brien wrote that the 1916 rebellion was despotic: "a putsch with no pretense of popular support." His words are echoed by a contemporary revisionist, Ruth Dudley Edwards. In her book, Patrick Pearse, The Triumph of Failure, she portrays Pearse as a deluded romantic obsessed with a desire for revolutionary "blood sacrifice" and heroic martyrdom.

Pearse "glorified war", she says, and "sanctioned the sacrifice of self and others." He was "part of a despotic tradition" and "acted and died for a people that did not exist."

Dr. Marianne Elliot's book, Wolfe Tone, Prophet of Irish Independence, continues in the same revisionist vein. One reviewer, Dr. Anthony Coughlan, called her work, '"a fundamentally hostile interpretation of Tone", saying, "the author evidently has little sympathy for the ideal of an All Ireland Republic which Tone and his fellow Protestants came to adopt in the 1790s."

The work of these anti-nationalist historians has been accurately described as, "the historiography of the Irish counter-revolution", yet they want the public to believe that they hold the moral high ground above all nationalists and unionist factions. "They disguise their partisanship under the cloak of academic objectivity," says Ellis.

Today, the unchallenged demigod of the anti-nationalist school is Roy Foster, head of the Irish History Department at Oxford University. Born in Waterford in 1949, he burst on the academic scene in 1989, with the publication of the 600-page revisionist tome, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972.

The book was hailed as "a work of gigantic importance" by the Irish Times, "a revisionist milestone" by the Irish Literary Supplement, and a "masterwork" by many historians who reviewed it. Foster has read these press clippings, and now believes he has been given a divine gift of historical interpretation.

Desmond Fennell, an Irish critic, said the underlying message of Modern Ireland was Foster's revisionism, which he called, "A retelling of Irish history which seeks to show that British rule of Ireland was not, as we have believed, a bad thing, but a mixture of necessity, good intentions and bungling; and that Irish resistance to it was not, as we have believed, a good thing, but a mixture of wrong-headed idealism and unnecessary, often cruel violence."

Discussing the aftermath of the Easter Rising, for example, Foster wrote: "The draconian reaction of the (British) authorities to the rebellion should be understood in terms of international war and national security."

Maybe the execution of 16 Irish Republican leaders had nothing at all to do with the history of Britain in Ireland!

Foster is the author of The Oxford History of Ireland, and the Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, and other quasi-historical works. His fluid writing style and talent for omitting entire periods of Irish history because they do not conform to his revisionist thesis, have made him an author much in demand.

In his strangely titled work, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland, he adopts the patronizing position that the Irish have "misused" their own history. It seems that the mischievous Irish have taken the great events of their history - the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles - and dropped them into a fanciful narrative that includes elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance.

The result, according to Foster, is nationalist fiction - the "Story of Ireland" - complete with the novelistic elements of plot, drama, suspense, and a heroic victim. One review of the Foster book concluded that traditional Irish history is "manipulated for political ends, and Irish poverty and oppression are sentimentalized and packaged."

In The Irish Story, Foster claims that "the new modernized and liberated Irish consciousness feels a sneaking nostalgia for the verities of the old victim-culture, which was also, in its way, a culture of superiority. The concept of a perennial victim produces a very emotionally powerful and emotionally coherent story, but it also leads to a kind of denial that any other elements in the Irish Story have any part to play."

Christopher Shea of the Boston Globe obviously bought into Foster's attack on the simple, myth-filled narrative about Ireland. In his review, Shea wrote: "That story stars a holy island nation. It suffered under English rule for centuries, nearly died, and then rose, liberated and reborn, in 1922, with partial independence. The story, in its basic shape, mirrors the life of Christ. And the story, in Foster's view, has bred boatloads of sloppy thinking and historical myopia - and a whole lot of wallowing."

One of Foster's acolytes is Irish author Colm Toibin. In a 1993 piece for the London Review of Books he recalled the heady days of his youth when he first read Foster:

"I became a revisionist, I remember feeling a huge sense of liberation. I was in my late teens and I already knew that what they had told me about God and sexuality wasn't true, but being an atheist or being gay in Ireland at that time seemed easier to deal with as transgressions than the idea that you could cease believing in the Great Events of Irish nationalist history. No Cromwell as cruel monster, say; the executions after 1916 as understandable in the circumstances; 1798 as a small outbreak of rural tribalism; partition as inevitable. Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction, how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self".

Then he gets to the real heart of historical darkness: "This revisionism is precisely what our state needed once the North blew up and we joined the EC, in order to isolate Northern Ireland from us and our history, in order to improve relations with Britain, in order to make us concentrate on a European future. Foster and his fellow historians' work became useful, not for its purity, or its truth, but its politics."

Here is a revisionist historian who puts politics on a higher plane than the truth. Foster's disciple makes it clear:"value-free history" is nothing more than a euphemism for partisan political propaganda.

The Great Irish Famine Was Genocide

By Francis Boyle
Global Research, March 16, 2010
17 March 2010
Region: Europe
Theme: Crimes against Humanity
Some controversy has surrounded the use of the word “genocide” with regard to the Great Irish Famine of 160 years ago. But this controversy has its source in an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of genocide. No, the British government did not inflict on the Irish the abject horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. But the definition of “genocide” reaches beyond such ghastly behavior to encompass other reprehensible acts designed to destroy a people.

As demonstrated by the following legal analysis, the Famine was genocide within the meaning of both United States and International law.

The United States Government is party to the 1948 Convention On The Prevention And Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“Genocide Convention”). As a Treaty of the United States , the Genocide Convention is therefore “the Supreme Law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Government has also passed implementing legislation which substantially adopts the Genocide Convention and makes any violation of the Convention punishable under federal law. 18 U.S.C. § 1901.

Article II of the Genocide Convention provides:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

(emphasis supplied)

From 1845-50, The British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical and racial group known as the Irish People. This British policy caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Irish People within the meaning of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This British policy also deliberately inflicted on the Irish People conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction within the meaning of Article II(c) of the Convention. Therefore, from 1845-50 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland which constituted acts of Genocide against the Irish People within the meaning of Article II(b) and (c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

While there are many legitimate subjects of debate surrounding the Famine, there is no doubt that the British Government committed genocide against the Irish People. This particular “debate” should therefore come to an end.

(See Irish Echo, Feb.26-March 4, 1997 at page 7 for the list of 125 distinguished signatories)

Welcome to Holocaust Education Trust Ireland
Holocaust Education Trust Ireland aims to teach about the Holocaust and its consequences. HETI designs educational and cultural programmes suitable for all ages and all walks of life.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/posting.php?mode=quote&f=8&p=517521

..As no Jewish person would ever refer to the "Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945", so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine.

You've got a job ahead of ye then, as that is exactly what every mick i know calls it. I lived in Eire for >3 years, have passport, irish on both sides back at least 6 generations, and I never heard the term 'irish holocaust' until you used it. Sure the Brits were bastards, exported food during famine etc, but thats what empires do. Your holocaust 'thing' is bizarre.

yeah that passport makes you an authority?....wow....you indeed need to learn a bit of history and then pass it on....you thinking you know it all is bizarre...and you learned it all in 3 years living in Ireland....my family goes way way back also farther than yours...to Vinegar Hill and before so I know what I'm talking about

check out my alma mater....best in the country

Southern Illinois University IRISH LITERATURE AND HISTORY COLLECTIONS


This guide identifies manuscript collections, university records and VFMs (Vertical File Manuscripts) that are related to Irish literature and culture. The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) of Southern Illinois University Carbondale houses a diverse body of Irish primary sources, from the personal papers of several notable Irish authors to an extensive collection of rare books and other printed material produced during the Irish Literary Renaissance. The collections include an extensive collection of correspondence, literary manuscripts, photographs, and ephemeral material as well as rare books, periodicals, pamphlets, and other printed matter. For additional assistance, visit the SCRC website.

This guide is not intended to be a complete finding aid to the collections. It serves as a preliminary research tool, providing a brief description of holdings with basic information on size, inclusive dates, types of records, and broad subject areas. More detailed descriptions of the sources listed below are available in the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and through SIUCat, Morris Library's online catalog. I-Share contains bibliographic records for the majority of the manuscript collections held in SCRC as well as books and other printed material available at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Finding aids for these sources are also available through SCRC's Web site in the finding aid database ARCHON.

The SCRC's holdings of Irish Literature collections are listed alongside those of other institutions with strong Irish holdings in the Irish Literary Collections Portal, hosted by Emory University.

Please note that not all manuscript collections are housed in SCRC. Some collections are located at an off-site storage facility and must be requested in advance. In addition, some collections have access restrictions. Researchers are encouraged to contact SCRC to insure that materials will be available. We are also happy to pull materials in advance of a research visit.

http://cola.siu.edu/english/literary-st ... lleher.php
Professor John V. Kelleher, emeritus holder of the endowed Chair in Irish Studies at Harvard University, donated the heart of his working library in Irish history, literature, and the social sciences to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The volumes in this collection, many of them heavily annotated by Professor Kelleher, constitute a uniquely valuable resource for students and scholars.

Professor Kelleher held Harvard's Chair in Irish Studies until his retirement in 1986. He was a renowned teacher for forty years at Harvard, and his lectures, seminars, and conference papers encouraged hundreds of students toward the study of Irish history and literature. As a publishing scholar, Professor Kelleher's great achievement has been his extraordinary essays, which have always a gem-like precision of thought and an exceptional conciseness of expression, leavened with wit, humor, and colloquial directness. Over the years, these essays have been the catalyst and inspiration for the work in Irish Studies of numerous younger scholars. Moreover, the most remarkable feature of his scholarship has been Professor Kelleher's magisterial command of the entire range of Irish cultural studies in both Irish and English. He has written seminal essays on the earliest corpus of annals, genealogies, and heroic tales, on ideas of "Celticism" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the Irish Renaissance accomplishments of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, and on the stories of his friends O'Connor and O'Faolain. Moreover, he wrote early, crucial essays that defined terms and set boundaries for the study of the immigrant and ethnic cultures of Irish America. A collection of Professor Kelleher's original poems and translations from the Irish, Too Small for Stovewood, Too Big for Kindling, was published by Ireland's Dolmen Press.

The Kelleher Library will allow new generations of scholars to follow to the roots, and then to build upon, the work of this founding father of Irish Studies in America.

The Famine Plot*

Posted by Tim Pat at 7:51 pm on November 27th, 2012. No comments... »

The last number of weeks have been more than a little creepy. I found myself watching Homeland with an increasingly ominous fascination.

Somebody somewhere it appears did not want me to visit the United States to publicise my book on the Famine. It was suggested to me that some securicrats in the U.S. embassy had decided to do a good turn for their buddies in the British ‘Spookdom’ by blocking my attempts to enter the United States on a Book Tour. I had been applying fruitlessly since September but inexplicably had two separate ESTA Visa waivers turned down and finally after much unhelpful gobbledegook from the U.S. Embassy, had to apply for a Non- Immigrant Visa.

Days and weeks passed and eventually my book tour in the United States, which was scheduled to begin yesterday, was cancelled.

Led by the Irish- American leader, Niall O’Dowd, publisher of The Irish Voice and creator of The Irish Central website, the most important Irish website outside the country, a huge protest movement built up. There had already been a great deal of complaint s from the Irish- American community about the increasingly rough handed approach in the Dublin Embassy towards Visa seekers and my case proved to be the last straw.

Amongst those who were approached on my behalf were Hillary Clinton, Senator Schumer, reckoned to be the second most powerful member of the U.S. Senate and the chairman of the Congressional Committee on Homeland Security, Congressman Peter King. As a result word was conveyed to me from Senator Schumer’s office that I would be getting my Visa.

Today, November 27th, the day after the date on which it was originally proposed that I begin a book tour in the U.S., I received a call from a gentleman in the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, he told me that he could not give me his name ‘for security reasons’ but confirmed for me that I was to be granted a Ten Year Visa, with multiple applications but with a sinister sounding addendum that this would involve stamping my passport with an annotation to the effect that the visa had been granted following scrutiny by security agencies. This sounded a bit Scarlet Letter- esque to me.

However the other part of my anonymous caller’s message I found even more sinister he told me that my two earlier Visa waiver applications had been blocked by Homeland Security. Had it not been for a short but vigorous and extremely well focused campaign mounted on my behalf by Niall O’Dowd with the support of the Irish- American community I would not have received either my phone call or the Visa.

The embassy phone call marks a great advance on the attitude over my ESTA applications and I would once again like to thank very sincerely all those who supported me. The episode again underlines the great strength of the Irish American community when they decide to combine on a particular issue. Daniel O’Connell’s famous message to the Irish was, ‘Organise, Organise.’ That message is as relevant today as ever and Irish-Americans should be vigilant to ensure that the hard won concessions they secured on Visa dispersement are not eroded by the action of any segment of the bureaucracy. Remember Lincoln’s warning about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance.

In today’s recessionary world Lincoln may be taken as speaking not merely to Irish-Americans, but to the Irish Diaspora worldwide.

Proving the Irish Famine was genocide by the British -- Tim Pat Coogan moves Famine history on to a new plane
Posted on Tuesday, December 04, 2012 at 07:11 AM


The most significant section of Tim Pat Coogan’s new book on the Irish Famine is not his own writing, but his printing of the United Nations definition of genocide.

“The Famine Plot”, published by Palgrave MacMillan, was released in America last week and Coogan should have been here to launch it but in a separate but equally confounding plot he was denied a visa to come here by the American Embassy in Dublin.

The conclusion from his book is unmistakable. Ireland’s most prominent historian, who has previously created definitive portraits of both Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera, has now pointed the finger squarely at the British during the Famine and stated it was genocide.

It is a big charge, but Coogan is a big man, physically, intellectually, and in every sense and makes a very effective accusation. Coogan has painted a portrait of devastating neglect, abuse, and mismanagement that certainly fits the genocide concept.

I mean if we go back to that time, Ireland was the equivalent of Puerto Rico or Samoa, massive dependencies on the United States today.

If there were a massive food shortage in either of those two countries, we know the US would step up to the plate, literally.

Back in Famine time, the same potato crop disease occurred most heavily in Scotland, outside Ireland, yet there were relatively few casualties as the landowners and government ensured, for their own sakes as much as anything, that there was no mass death.

That was not the case in Ireland, where a very different mentality prevailed. The damned Irish were going to get what they deserved because of their attachment to Catholicism and Irish ways when they were refusing to toe the British line.

Read more: Tim Pat Coogan slams American Embassy as ‘Kafkaesque’ after visa refusal

As Coogan painstakingly recounts, every possible effort by local organizations to feed the starving were thwarted and frustrated by a British government intent on teaching the Irish a lesson and forcing market forces on them.

Charles Trevelyan, the key figure in the British government, had foreshadowed the deadly policy in a letter to the “Morning Post”, after a trip to Ireland, where he heartily agreed with the sentiment that there were at least a million or two people too many in the benighted land and that the eight million could not possibly survive there.

“Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.”

Shortly after, he was in charge of a policy that brought that situation about.

One Trevelyan story and one quote suffice.

“British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, when he saw starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his attempts to feed the starving, Dombrain was publicly rebuked by Trevelyan…”

The Trevelyan quote is “The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

Tim Pat Coogan has done an enormous service with this book.

Read it and weep.

Opening old wounds
Dec 12th 2012, 15:38 by Y.F.


The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People. By John Kelly. Henry Holt; 416 pages; $32. Faber and Faber; £16.99

The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. By Tim Pat Coogan. Palgrave Macmillan; 288 pages; $28 and £17.99

IN 1997 Tony Blair, the British prime minister, made the first formal apology for Britain’s role in the Irish famine. Between 1845 and 1855 Ireland lost a third of its population—1 million people died from starvation and disease and 2 million emigrated. Mr Blair regretted a time when those who governed in London had failed their people. Two new books explore Britain’s role in the famine and rekindle the debate about whether its misdeeds can be considered genocide.

“The Graves are Walking” by John Kelly, a historian and popular science writer, is an engrossing narrative of the famine, vividly detailing Victorian society and the historical phenomena (natural and man-made) that converged to form the disaster. The decimation of the potato crop in the 1840s brought on the danger of mass starvation, but it was the British response that perpetuated the tragedy. The hand of nature, as illustrated in both books, caused only part of the problem.

Both authors describe the folly and cruelty of Victorian British policy towards its near-forsaken neighbour in detail. The British government, led by Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary to the Treasury (dubbed the “Victorian Cromwell”), appeared far more concerned with modernising Ireland’s economy and reforming its people’s “aboriginal” nature than with saving lives. Ireland became the unfortunate test case for a new Victorian zeal for free market principles, self-help, and ideas about nation-building.

Ireland still functioned as a basic barter economy—few hands exchanged money and the peasant population relied on their potato crops, which had failed. But rather than provide aid and establish long-term goals for recovery, Trevelyan and his cohorts saw a chance to introduce radical free-market reforms. As Mr Kelly notes, Trevelyan sent his subordinates to Ireland equipped with Adam Smith’s writings, like missionaries sent to barbarian lands armed with bibles. One absurd project to introduce a money economy was part of the public works scheme. Peasants were hired to build unnecessary roads in order to earn money to buy food. But wages were often not enough to match the high food prices enforced by Trevelyan as a measure to attract imports to Ireland, especially from America.

The belief that the famine was God’s intention also guided much of Britain’s policy. They viewed the crop failures as “a Visitation of Providence, an expression of divine displeasure” with Ireland and its mostly Catholic peasant population, writes Mr Kelly. Poverty was considered a moral failure. Within a few years Irish immigrants flooded the port cities of Liverpool in England, Montreal and Quebec in Canada and New York. The emigrant was considered an object of horror and contempt, as Mr Kelly writes: “pedestrians turned and walked the other way; storekeepers bolted the door or picked up a broom; street urchins mocked his shoeless feet, filthy clothing and Gaelic-accented English.” Throughout the book, Mr Kelly bemoans the tragic effects of human folly, neglect and Victorian ideology in causing the famine and its aftermath. He rejects the charge of genocide. Tim Pat Coogan, however, takes a more radical view in “The Famine Plot”.

Mr Coogan, an Irish historian and journalist, is, to many, the unofficial voice of modern Irish history. In the introduction to his polemical history of the disaster, he labels the famine genocide and criticises other Irish historians as revisionists who are sanitising the famine’s story. His previous books about the IRA and the reputation of Eamon de Valera, Ireland’s president in the 1960s, caused controversy, but his view of the Irish famine is more widely accepted. Like Mr Kelly, Mr Coogan blames the free market economics that Britain tried, and failed, to apply to Ireland’s problem, but believes that their negligent actions were deliberate. He also describes, in painful detail, the indignity and hardship suffered by the peasant population who were stigmatised by anti-Catholic prejudice and the belief that poverty was self-inflicted.

His most compelling argument for British negligence is in the final chapter, in which he recalls the xenophobic images and words commonly used to caricature the Irish in Victorian England. Trevelyan and other architects of the famine response had a direct hand in filling the newspapers with the “oft-repeated theme that the famine was the result of a flaw in the Irish character.” And Punch, a satirical magazine, regularly portrayed “‘Paddy’ as a simian in a tailcoat and a derby, engaged in plotting murder, battening on the labour of the English workingman, and generally living a life of indolent treason,” explains Mr Coogan. The result of such dehumanising propaganda was to make unreasonable policy seem more reasonable and just.

The question remains as to whether misguided ideology of a previous era can be found culpable of a greater evil. Mr Kelly’s engrossing book lays out the evidence but stops short of calling it genocide. Mr Coogan’s opinion that the famine was genocide is clear. But both books make a compelling case for why we should revisit our current understanding of it.

bogtrotter5Dec 13th 2012, 05:24
I have read neither of the reviewed books but have read many others on the subject and lived and worked in Ireland for an American company. I would incline to support the genocide arguments, and not because of any efforts to introduce free market economy on the country. The aruguments I find more persuasive are those that point out that food and livestock were continually shipped to England throughout the famine years. The Irish people had already been taken off their lands and had to work for often absentee landlords in England. The Irish then worked the landlord's holdings and were allowed to "rent" a cottage and a very small plot of land for themselves. Thus, they were largely forced to rely on the potato crop since much could be grown in their small allotment. As the crop failed, and the Irish were unable to pay the rent, they were thrown off the property and became homeless. By the time the government set up the build roads projects or die, the people were in very poor physical condition. At the same time, by the way they were prohibited from speaking their own language and frequently could not afford school for the children. The people sold everything they had, even including their clothes to buy meager amounts of food. Work houses for the poor were set up which largely became death traps as disease spread quickly. Soup kitchen were set up by the Salvation Army but they couldn't feed everyone. Protestants offered free education and food if they would convert from Catholic. Ships were chartered to send the poor to the US and Canada, many ships were in such poor shape that they sank within a day or two. Most victims who died were buried in mass unmarked graves. Many in Ireland still feel the effects, it was not that long ago. Recently a new mass grave was found while preparing to pave a new highway over the top of it. Relatives of those people were alive and objected. Visit a real grave yard in Ireland and you will find many famine victims buried in unmarked graves, since the families were either dead or could not afford a marker. A friend of mine financed a marker a couple years ago in memory of their local famine victims...one hundred years and no one had thought to do this. If you ask the Irish, particularly those most vulnerable in the West, who helped the Irish during the famine they will say the Salvation Army and an American Indian tribe from Oklahoma. The US sent corn which made the people sick. You may not understand that the landowners controlled the fishing rights...violating those right resulted in hanging as did the attempts to storm ships sending food from Ireland to England. In my view this amounted to genocide which has never been acknowleged by England. I'm not sure the Irish care, but they haven't forgotten.

[Searcher08]

Thank you for your reply.

Henry Makow
I 'dont give no mind to' him - when his 'Dr Evil, Illuminati insider' was posting, I did find it hilarious as Makow has a 'Hey it was posted on MY comments section, it MUST be true' thing going on.

Rense
I split into two - (a) his news links and (b) everything else (interviews / youtube).
The news links I find the fastest source of breaking / suppressed stories in one place, for example the ongoing Fukushima reactor leak cover-up.
The (b) I have ignored for years. I think he is suffering from depression (and certainly I find his interviews are often *really* energy draining) - IMO he should have stayed in 90s 'Sightings' land - mysteries / ETI / paranormal that side of things... I miss that program.


About pressing the button -
I think that is really an important thing to have said.
The Jimmy Saville thread is the nearest thing I have seen to a mass 'scales falling from one's eyes' - it is *still* pushing forward even though police investigations are being clamped down when they get near UK politicians, regardless of the evidence level.

I carefully read all the quotes you posted and observed my response to them.
I came away with the reflection that

There was a discussion about 'The Peoples Voice' project (around issues of if it was viable, would take off etc) and
that slimmouse was enthusiastic for it's success
and there was a mixture of curiousity and skepticism about whether it would work.

- I didnt grok what was said as a request for funds.

(FWIW I tend to get very irritated very quickly by unsolicited funding requests and I re-iterate that I dont think RI should be used for any fundraising other than RI, but I dont see what slim did as that)

(edited for brevity)

[Hammer of Los]

...

I think americandream, jackriddler and others have a valid point.

I think slimmouse, seemslikeadream and searcher08 and others have valid points too.

I never read Ken O'Keefe.

But da Jury's still out on Icke.

We shall see.

Maybe I go meet him.

I could, you know.

...

[Searcher08]

I think Hammer of Los have a valid point

Reading not just about books.

Living library all around us.

Pleiadean authors of crowdsourced planet.

Keys to the Kingdom are inside... and outside too.

Go tell Icke to change his patterns.

You could, you know.

...

I think americandream, jackriddler and others have a valid point.

I think slimmouse, seemslikeadream and searcher08 and others have valid points too.

I never read Ken O'Keefe.

But da Jury's still out on Icke.

We shall see.

Maybe I go meet him.

I could, you know.

...

[wintler2]

..As no Jewish person would ever refer to the "Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945", so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine.

You've got a job ahead of ye then, as that is exactly what every mick i know calls it. I lived in Eire for >3 years, have passport, irish on both sides back at least 6 generations, and I never heard the term 'irish holocaust' until you used it. Sure the Brits were bastards, exported food during famine etc, but thats what empires do. Your holocaust 'thing' is bizarre.

Exactly- it was Searcher who referred to it first as a famine here in this thread. He's Irish too, I do believe.

I want to be accurate here - in usage there is 'The Famine' which for most Irish people is like an equivalent of Shoah in the Jewish context. It certainly doesnt equate to Irish people accepting that it was just people starving to death in a natural occurance and / or the English were just callous wankers. Tim Pat Coogan's recent book on the subject is well worth checking out.

Fair enough, it is 15 years since i lived there & attitudes quite possibly have changed.
It is true tho that of the 8 mil population at the time (double current population of ireland), ~ 1/3 were dependant upon potato for most of their diet, and that potato blight across europe in the same period caused (less severe) famine in other countries too.

[seemslikeadream]

‘Accurate and irrefutable’ information essential in countering Holocaust denial


Forthcoming course designed to assist teachers on educating pupils on Holocaust
Lynn Jackson of Holocaust Education Trust Ireland said it was “most encouraging” to see more than 20 Irish teachers giving up their time to attend the course on the Holocaust being organised in conjunction with the Herzog Centre in TCD. Photograph: Holocaust Education Trust Ireland

Lynn Jackson of Holocaust Education Trust Ireland said it was “most encouraging” to see more than 20 Irish teachers giving up their time to attend the course on the Holocaust being organised in conjunction with the Herzog Centre in TCD. Photograph: Holocaust Education Trust Ireland

Pamela Duncan

Sat, Aug 10, 2013, 01:00

First published: Sat, Aug 10, 2013, 01:00

The essential role of teachers in the dissemination of accurate information on the Holocaust has been stressed by the organisers of a special three-day course in Dublin starting August 19th.

“The importance of accurate and irrefutable information about the Holocaust is essential in light of burgeoning anti-Semitism and trends of Holocaust denial in parts of Europe today,” Lynn Jackson of Holocaust Education Trust Ireland said.

Ms Jackson said it was “most encouraging” to see more than 20 Irish teachers giving up their own time to attend the course, which is being organised in conjunction with the Herzog Centre in Trinity College.

As well as giving a number of lectures, Prof Robert Jan Van Pelt of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, the author of several books on the Holocaust, will give a public lecture entitled Auschwitz, the East and the Nazi Imagination at 1pm on August 21st in the Emmet Theatre, Arts Building, TCD.

Experts
The course will feature lectures, seminars and workshops led by Holocaust educators including Prof Anthony McElligott of the University of Limerick; Yiftach Meiri of the International School of Holocaust Studies in Yad Vashem; Paul Salmons of the University of London; and Dr Juliane Wetzel of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin.

Teacher Peter Garry of Coláiste Choilm, Ballincollig, Cork, will give a talk about teaching the Holocaust in the Irish classroom.

The Teaching the Holocaust course costs €295, including lunches and dinners. More information can be found at hetireland.org.

[Hammer of Los]

...

Ha ha ha!

Mr Searcher08!

You very funny man!

...

[wintler2]

Here- at your request- are the first three pages of slim's posts from the thread in question:
...

Thats alot of schlock, nearly 3000 words, more emotive hype than a telethon, zero rigorous analysis.

Searcher, I know that really sketchy material will always be found on the Icke site, from Rense, Makow, Hoffman and others. Such highly dubious material will always be found at places like that. I don't think I would push your imaginary button but I am really, really glad that Rigorous Intuition is an anti-fascist board which repudiates white supremacy, revisionist theories of the Nazi Holocaust, the oppression of women and etc.

Do you think Rigorous Intuition should be used for fundraising for Icke, Searcher?

Now there is a topic worthy of a poll - who is for fundraising on RI for antisemitism & discrediting of conspiracy studies?

IMHO it should be flat banned until Icke cleans up his act in a big way.

[seemslikeadream]

why is Anti-Celtism allowed on RI?

Holocaust denial and minimization or distortion of the facts of the Irish Holocaust is a form of anticeltism. Holocaust deniers ignore the overwhelming evidence of this event and insist that the Irish Holocaust is a myth, invented by the Irish for their own ends. Holocaust deniers assert that if they can discredit one fact about the Irish Holocaust, the whole history of the British in Ireland can be discredited as well. They ignore the evidence of the historical events right up to the present day and continue with lies to deny the reality of the Irish Holocaust in its entirety.

IRISH HOLOCAUST DENIAL QUEEN'S INSULTING VISIT
Drogheda : Ireland | Apr 16, 2011 at 11:30 PM PDT
By BrianClarkenu
Irish Holocaust Queen
An Image depicting the irish Holocaust Queen.
The Irish Holocaust ( An Gorta Mór )

At the start of the Irish Holocaust, which had already resulted in over a million deaths.Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I of the Ottoman Empire wanted to send millions of pounds sterling in todays terms, to save the starving Irish but the Queen of England demanded the Sultan send only a tenth of what he wanted to send, because of the paultry amount she herself was forced to send, for appearances sake. The Sultan to avoid war with England agreed but tried to send food in ships instead with the rest of the money. The English Queen tried to block the ships but the food found its way to the port in Drogheda where it was all left to rot because of the Queen of England demands.

Queen Victoria on 2-12 August 1849 went to visit Ireland to see for herself the results of her ethnic cleansing and Holocaust in Ireland. Her government had declared that the Holocaust was over and had ended emergency relief works. It was evident to her that it was still happening. The workhouses were full and deaths from starvation stalked all of the Ireland. Cholera in March of that year 1849 had wiped out a further large part of the Irish population already weakened by prolonged food shortage while 60 - 70 ships of prime Irish food left Ireland under armed escort every day, to feed England.

The Queen's Holocaust or the Famine Queen as she was called then, who aside from being head of state in Britain, is still today the Commander in Chief of all Britains armed armed forces and is still directly responsible for all of Britain's war crimes in occupied Ireland, which have claimed over 6 million Irish lives, even more than the Jewish genocide in the Holocaust of Hitler.

The British planters in Ireland celebrated the arrival of Queen Victoria, because they were given the free land of the dead Irish, as a result of her government's ethnic cleansing policies. Her heir to her throne Queen Elisabeth visits Ireland in May. She does so in the capacity of Commander in Chief of all Britains armed armed forces in occupied Ireland today and an international war criminal, as thinking traditional Irish republicans have clearly demonstrated time after time. Holocaust denial and minimization or distortion of the facts of the Irish Holocaust is a form of anticeltism. Holocaust deniers ignore the overwhelming evidence of this event and insist that the Irish Holocaust is a myth, invented by the Irish for their own ends. Holocaust deniers assert that if they can discredit one fact about the Irish Holocaust, the whole history of the British in Ireland can be discredited as well. They ignore the evidence of the historical events right up to the present day and continue with lies to deny the reality of the Irish Holocaust in its entirety.

[seemslikeadream]

"They are going. They are going with a vengeance. Soon a Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the streets of Manhattan...Law has ridden through, it has been taught with bayonets, and interpreted with ruin. Townships levelled to the ground, straggling columns of exiles, workhouses multiplied, and still crowded, express the determination of the Legislature to rescue Ireland from its slovenly old barbarism, and to plant there the institutions of this more civilized land."

Let's all stop denying the holocaust

The Irish holocaust of the 1840s, that is.

Our gombeen government has decided, a mere 160 or so years on, to finally commemorate the fact that half of the country died of hunger or were forced to leave their homeland due to a deliberate policy of forced starvation.

They've decided to call this commemoration of the dead a 'Famine' memorial day. The commemoration is long overdue.

But it's not a famine we should be commemorating. Because there was no famine. A famine is when there is not sufficient food to feed the population. What happened in Ireland in the 1840s was attempted genocide.

Let's look at the evidence, and I don't mean the mounds of dead, some containing the remains of over 10,000 people, that dot our landscape. Nor do I mean the ghost towns of the West of Ireland. I mean the documentary evidence of genocide.

What is a genocide? In common terms, it is the attempt to murder an entire race of people. But the United Nations has a legal definition. In fact, it has an entire convention on genocide. The relevant part is section 2, which defines acts of genocide.

As a single reading of 2c reveals, what happened in Ireland in the 1840s was a genocide. This has been confirmed by international legal expert F.A. Boyle, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who wrote:

"Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnic and racial group commonly known as the Irish People.... Therefore, during the years 1845 to 1850 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that constituted acts of genocide against the Irish people within the meaning of Article II (c) of the 1948 [Hague] Genocide Convention."

But some people object to the suggestion that there was intent on the part of the British government of the time. They suggest that the famine was an act of God, of nature, a tragic accident caused by a fungus on a tuber which had nothing to do with any human action or intent. To demonstrate the intent of the British colonial administration of the time, it is important to look at their own stated documents on the matter.

Firstly, let's consider what Robert Murray, writing in his 1847 book "Ireland, Its Present Condition and Future Prospects" had to say about the alleged famine:

"The surplus population of Ireland have been trained precisely for those pursuits (unskilled labor or agricultural) which the unoccupied regions of North American require for their colonization. That surplus is an overwhelming incubus (demon) at home, whether to themselves or others. Remove them and you benefit them in a degree that cannot be estimated. Precisely as you do so, you raise the social condition of those who remain."

In other words, a policy of clearing Ireland of its 'surplus' of people and driving many of them to America would be of benefit to the American economy and to the easier administration of Ireland by Britain! Bear in mind this was written at the height of the horror - Black 47. This isn't some sort of 'Modest Proposal' type of joke. This is a genuine policy proposal.

But perhaps Murray did not represent mainstream British opinion? Let's consider instead the London Times, which crowed:

"They are going. They are going with a vengeance. Soon a Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the streets of Manhattan...Law has ridden through, it has been taught with bayonets, and interpreted with ruin. Townships levelled to the ground, straggling columns of exiles, workhouses multiplied, and still crowded, express the determination of the Legislature to rescue Ireland from its slovenly old barbarism, and to plant there the institutions of this more civilized land."

In other words, the newspaper of record in England records with glee the imminent demise of the Irish as a nation in the hope that its land can be cleared for plantation by Britons. But again, perhaps it is unfair to attribute these mainstream British opinions to the government itself? Let's look at what they had to say.

On April 26th, 1849, one hundred years before the Genocide Convention was signed, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote to the then British Prime Minister, John Russell, expressing his feelings about the lack of aid from Parliament:

"I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination."

Bear in mind, this is the voice of Britain in Ireland speaking. And he is speaking of a policy of extermination of the Irish people. I call that genocide. But perhaps I'm wrong. So let's look around for other views. According to holocaust historian and expert Richard L. Rubenstein in his book "Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World":

"A government is as responsible for a genocidal policy when its officials accept mass death as a necessary cost of implementing their policies, as when they pursue genocide as an end in itself."

Rubenstein is the man who invented the term 'genocide', so I think we can defer to his definition of the word. So it seems absolutely indisputable: under the terms of the UN convention on genocide, Britain was guilty of conducting genocide on the Irish people during the period variously and incorrectly referred to today as the great famine or An Gorta Mor.

Now, I'm not interested in a Brit-bashing exercise. I can't imagine that the British of today would in anyway feel guilty (nor should they) for something committed by an elite that ran their country and ours a century and a half ago. Britain is historically responsible for a number of attempted genocides, at least one committed on their own soil (the Highland clearances.)

Indeed, the 'great hunger' was not the only attempt at genocide on the Irish people. Cromwell's exploits two centuries earlier spring to mind. I can't imagine that it would ruin relations with Britain or indeed the British people if we were simply to pay proper tribute to our own dead.

In fact, I think many British people might find it illuminating to know what really happened. Certainly, given how the 'famine' is taught in our schools, I believe it would be illuminating for a lot of Irish people too. I accept the British apology for what Tony Blair's word is worth. Which is little, in fairness, but I accept it anyway. But that's not the point.

The point is that our own government fails to acknowledge that it was a holocaust, not a famine caused by a lack of available food. The Irish holocaust had little in common with famine or hunger. Should the focus of Jewish holocaust commemorations be on preventing gas poisoning?

What would any self-respecting Jewish person say if people expected them to euphemise away the horror their people suffered, or suggested that they get over it and grow up as a people? The Rwandans and Armenians would not accept anyone else trying to diminish the attempted genocides that happened to their peoples. So why do we accept it?

Sure, some Shinners might want to use the designation of any commemoration for some Brit-bashing. But that in no way invalidates the core point, which is nothing to do with the Brits of today. It's to do with our own acknowledgment of our own history in accurate terminology.

When we can do that, then we can really move on as a nation.

[American Dream]

O'Keefe attempts to justify his support for David Duke



http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2012/10/ken- ... stine.html

[seemslikeadream]

Why do you not decry the Anti-Celtism on RI American Dream?

Are you an Anti-Celt?

Are you a Irish Holocaust denier?

Irish Holocaust- Push to Educate the Facts
is on Facebook.

[American Dream]

We reaffirm that there is no room in this historic and foundational analysis of our struggle for any attacks on our Jewish allies, Jews, or Judaism; nor denying the Holocaust; nor allying in any way shape or form with any conspiracy theories, far-right, orientalist, and racist arguments, associations and entities. Challenging Zionism, including the illegitimate power of institutions that support the oppression of Palestinians, and the illegitimate use of Jewish identities to protect and legitimize oppression, must never become an attack on Jewish identities, nor the demeaning and denial of Jewish histories in all their diversity.

Indeed, we regard any attempt to link and adopt antisemitic or racist language, even if it is within a self-described anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist politics, as reaffirming and legitimizing Zionism. In addition to its immorality, this language obscures the fundamental role of imperialism and colonialism in destroying our homeland, expelling its people, and sustaining the systems and ideologies of oppression, apartheid and occupation. It leaves one squarely outside true solidarity with Palestine and its people.

The goal of the Palestinian people has always been clear: self determination. And we can only exercise that inalienable right through liberation, the return of our refugees (the absolute majority of our people) and achieving equal rights to all through decolonization. As such, we stand with all and any movements that call for justice, human dignity, equality, and social, economic, cultural and political rights. We will never compromise the principles and spirit of our liberation struggle. We will not allow a false sense of expediency to drive us into alliance with those who attack, malign, or otherwise attempt to target our political fraternity with all liberation struggles and movements for justice.

As Palestinians, it is our collective responsibility, whether we are in Palestine or in exile, to assert our guidance of our grassroots liberation struggle. We must protect the integrity of our movement, and to do so we must continue to remain vigilant that those for whom we provide platforms actually speak to its principles.

When the Palestinian people call for self-determination and decolonization of our homeland, we do so in the promise and hope of a community founded on justice, where all are free, all are equal and all are welcome.

Until liberation and return.


Signed:

Ali Abunimah

Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Omar Barghouti, human rights activist

Hatem Bazian, Chair, American Muslims for Palestine

Andrew Dalack, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network

Haidar Eid, Gaza

Nada Elia, US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Toufic Haddad

Kathryn Hamoudah

Adam Hanieh, Lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London

Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon! Canada

Monadel Herzallah, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network

Nadia Hijab, author and human rights advocate

Andrew Kadi

Hanna Kawas, Chair person, Canada Palestine Association and Co-Host Voice of Palestine

Abir Kobty, Palestinian blogger and activist

Joseph Massad, Professor, Columbia University, NY

Danya Mustafa, Israeli Apartheid Week US National Co-Coordinator & Students for Justice in Palestine- University of New Mexico

Dina Omar, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine

Haitham Salawdeh, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network

Sobhi Samour, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London

Khaled Ziada, SOAS Palestine Society, London

Rafeef Ziadah, poet and human rights advocate

[slimmouse]

Searcher, I know that really sketchy material will always be found on the Icke site, from Rense, Makow, Hoffman and others. Such highly dubious material will always be found at places like that. I don't think I would push your imaginary button but I am really, really glad that Rigorous Intuition is an anti-fascist board which repudiates white supremacy, revisionist theories of the Nazi Holocaust, the oppression of women and etc.

Do you think Rigorous Intuition should be used for fundraising for Icke, Searcher?

Here- at your request- are the first three pages of slim's posts from the thread in question:

You can think what you may of David Icke, who is the innovator of this project, but I sure like the sound of it. Its a crowdfunded Online TV and radio station, which looks as if it should comfortably meet its funding minimum.

From the link ;


A free global internet TV & Radio station broadcasting the information, background and opinions the mainstream media won't touch
Please note: If we don't reach our £100,000 goal your contribution will be fully refunded.
What is The People's Voice?

How often is the question asked ‘What can I do?’ in the face of the global descent into Big Brother tyranny and oppression? How often do we hear it said that ‘the people’s voice should be heard’?

Well here is an answer to ‘What can I do?’ – an answer that will also guarantee that the people’s voice will be heard.

I have been communicating secret and suppressed information worldwide for nearly a quarter of a century and I spent nearly 20 years before that working in the mainstream media with newspapers, radio stations and BBC Television. I have vast experience of the corporate and alternative media and I can tell you this:

The mainstream corporate-owned media is NEVER going to tell you the truth or give you information that exposes what is really happening in the world. Corporations and governments are going to expose themselves through a media that they own?

Are you kidding?

This is why the mainstream media does not serve the interests of The People, but those of the corporations and governments that dictate the limits of the content.

The corporate media will never give The People a voice – so we have to give one to ourselves. This is our chance and it’s time to grasp it before the global collapse into economic tyranny and Big Brother oppression slams the door on what remains of human freedom.

We need £100,000 as the very minimum necessary to go to air within months and everything above that will ensure that The People’s Voice will be bigger, better and more effective on day one and the dream can be made a reality on the scale that I envisage.

This is my dream … this is how we go beyond protest and bypass the mainstream media to give people direct access to the microphone and camera while broadcasting and breaking the stories that will give the global population the background to world events that the corporate media censors refuse to investigate.

The People’s Voice would broadcast out of London, but this is a global station. We are all in this together and we must come together, talk together and cooperate together to bring about a global awakening.

We would have programmes every day by presenters in the UK and the United States with other regular programmes featuring presenters and content in Australia/New Zealand, Africa and everywhere else that we can secure quality programming.
What will you broadcast?

I especially want to give a voice to people in the Middle and Near East whose views, on-the-ground knowledge and experiences are ignored by the corporate media. No more silent wars. The potential is endless once we gain access to such a volume of daily airtime.

I want The People’s Voice reporters in media conferences where the rich and powerful will be asked questions about their part in world events that corporate journalists would freak-out at asking. Most of them don’t even know what to ask because they are so unresearched.

Whistleblower insiders and expert researchers in their fields across the world will be given airtime to share their knowledge and there will be on-going phone-ins for people to constantly have the chance to make their comments on what is happening through the day.

Public protests ignored or misrepresented by the corporate media will be given their voice with the most significant of them covered live to allow otherwise silenced people to tell their stories and make their points. We would also be the vehicle to promote these and other events that bring people together in mutual support and dialogue.

We can have an explosive impact if we can raise the funds to launch The People’s Voice on the scale that I want. The mainstream media itself will be challenged by our very existence to start behaving like journalists instead of corporate lapdogs.

The People’s Voice also refers to musicians and other artistic expression and I want to give talented, creative and inventive musicians, comedians and artists a platform they are currently denied to share their talents and insights with a global audience. Regular mass global meditations are another must-do that will bring everyone together on an even deeper level.

The People’s Voice will not do censorship, except within the bounds of libel, and it will not be silenced by intimidation or special interests. We have only two special interests – The People’s Right To Be Heard and The People’s Right To Be Told What They Need To Know.

The People’s Voice will be irreverent to self-appointed authority, impossible to intimidate, and will challenge hour by hour the unfolding tyranny of corporate and government imposition and erosion of freedom.

It is time for The People to speak – here is their microphone.
Why do you need £100,000?

The costs of setting up a studio in London are substantial. In order to make this happen we need to spend money on:

Renting studio and office space.

Buying equipment that enables us to broadcast which includes mixing desks, cameras, lighting, sound, and software.

Building a set.

Paying for the initial and ongoing streaming bandwidth costs.

Hiring a full time production and technical team to help us produce content for the station 24/7.

The £100,000 is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM needed in order to make this happen and keep us running for the first 6 months.

Advertising revenue should see the station become self-sufficient after we launch.

More info at the link

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-people-s-voice

Thanks for the input guys,

from the OP,

The People’s Voice will not do censorship, except within the bounds of libel, and it will not be silenced by intimidation or special interests. We have only two special interests – The People’s Right To Be Heard and The People’s Right To Be Told What They Need To Know.

It sounds like Ben Fellows could use some of this kind of help. He's the guy who accused Bilderberger Kenneth Clarke of abusing him, and the man who recently started speaking the unspeakable regarding the UK authorities complicity in child trafficking. Thanks to Connipton for this link from the Saville thread.

"At 11:30pm that evening, the phone rang and an anonymous man told Ben to look outside his window to the other side of the street.

"A man in a black ski mask stood there on a mobile phone, the caller said 'What happened to that soldier today is what is going to happen to you'"

Fellows is apparently missing at this point in time

Meanwhlile , The list of such people is endless of course.


Link ; http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2013/06/b ... ssing.html

Any suggestions as to what Fellows should do? Anyone reccomendations at to sources who are going to stand in his corner for him? I suspect The peoples voice might.

With regards to the project itself meanwhile, Im just amazed that 100k will (by the sounds of things ) guarantee six months of broadcasting. ( currently 54.5 k). It will save me my c2c subscription for starters.

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even RI if my memory serves

I personally imagine that if this thing takes off, like it has the potential to do, that genuinely alternative websites, many of which present the news and cold facts the establishment definitely doesnt want you to hear would truly get some fiscal kickback from this. Most riggies probably know who they are, or at least know of their own.

I also love the idea of the station as a platform for independent musicians and comedians.

We must always live in hope.

You can't really separate SchtICKE from his project.

I was hoping you might continue that remark with......"cos if you could, its a decent idea".

Perhaps its just that Ive been around here too long, but you didn't surprise me.

So go ahead and elaborate on my thoughts about the project as a good idea ( assuming in some non Ickean utopia that you and others appear to strive for, he wasnt involved)

Lets take he who should not be spoken out of the equation once and for all. Question to BPH;

The crowdsource funding of a TV and radio station that will broadcast the news that the shepherds and their sheepdogs ( since you appear big on such analogies) dont want us to hear,


Good or bad idea?

As an asiide Ive learned an absolute ton about indiegogo funding and stuff from this. Personally, that was worth looking at the link in and of itself if you ask me.

ON EDIT

American Dream. Ive just read that article that you so graciously crossposted from that thread, and Ive never read such a crock of factual/opinionated hit piece crap in my entire life. It's probably any amount worse than any of the chaff you continuously appear to extract from Icke I guess I was never previously dilligent enough to read the stuff you post. If the article above is anything to go by, I'm not such a bad judge after all.

I understand that you may well be busy, but please check your facts in your articles before you post them. This thread was doing ok in that regard up until this point.


Meanwhile I love the concept of the project. Ive never personally heard of it before. What do you think about ir ?

ON EDIT

American Dream. Ive just read that article that you so graciously crossposted from that thread, and Ive never read such a crock of factual/opinionated hit piece crap in my entire life. It's probably any amount worse than any of the chaff you continuously appear to extract from Icke I guess I was never previously dilligent enough to read the stuff you post. If the article above is anything to go by, I'm not such a bad judge after all.

Please identify specific points made that you do or do not agree with- what you've written is entirely muddy.

Above and beyond that, let's not be distracted from the overall thrust of the critique.

David Icke is very bad news indeed- associating him with real points of crisis and struggle: against organized pedophilia, against settler colonialism in Palestine, etc., is very likely to hurt much more than it helps. And these things do matter a great deal...

AD, Im not turning this thread into a slanging match, or an essay which criiques point by point. But, for example, Icke believes that Bill Clinton is in and of himself, a shape shifting reptilain from the planet Draco?

Where does Icke say that? Have you read it yourself? Or is that the same kind of bland sloppy generalisation that critics of Icke, such as yourself accuse Icke himself of , whenever his name is mentioned?

It's clearly not the idea of a TV station that tells people stuff that the 0.000001% dont want us to hear, its the name huh?

Fucking good idea though, innit?

I think the success of the campaign is probably as much a reflection of the dissillusionment and anger of people with the way the control system is being increasingly exposed as the drain on humanity that it is, as it is about David Icke. OK, his website sometimes posts links to dodgy sources and scoundrels, , but of course that happens here in this very thread. Meanwhile theres some good stuff there too.

Elite Peadophiles, Bankers , along with Warmongerers whoring for the the entire gamut of the MIC, dressed up as Presidents, Prime Ministers, and High Ranking diplomats. These real criminals against humanity , along with the mainstream media, who act as mouthpieces for the former, are being increasingly laid bare for exactly what they are largely thanks to the alternative media, including the Icke website. I really dont want to turn this into a pissing contest, but would add that David Icke is simply the messenger, and Im pretty damn sure he'd be the first to tell you that.

I also seriously feel this project deserves at least the chance to air first, before we all get our knickers in too much of a knot about the innovator.

Having read your last article AD, Im left with the impression that Martin Cannon, a man with years of experience in the field, is still unsure to this day whether or not the accounts of O' brien and Phillips are true.

Given that this is the case, Im wondering if Ickes Decades old exposure to the very existence of mind control programmes is such a bad thing reallly.

What Im trying to say is that if Cannon aint sure, is it reasonable to expect Icke to disbelieve them , given what would have been by that time, Ickes own unravelliings of MKA ultra, Satanic cults and serial abuse and pedophilia that is rampant within the higher echelons of political power, the church, and society in general?

David Icke is where I first heard about it all of this stuff, I wonder how many millions more are in the same boat? In other words how many people who would have formerly scoffed at such nonsense, are now starting to understand how real it was and probably still is ?

In other words, how do you come to the conclusion that this is very destructive?

Meanwhile, How many prosecutions of the said serial psycopaths and satanists who are it seems currently constructing this prison?

Do we deserve a voice AD.?

Are you going to be that voice?

I think you're misinterpreting Martin Cannon. True that he once did "believe" in people of the ilk of Wilder, O'Brien/Phillips, Wheeler et al.

At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited - which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a "Project Monarch" well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario
As mentioned previously, the essential idea behind the Monarch theory seems "do-able." And to be fair, Mark and Cathy never seemed to be "in it for the money" - in fact, they spent a tremendous amount on their mailings, while the potential for libel suits placed them at some financial risk. I doubt that sales of their book (published by a small firm, and undistributed, so far, in the larger stores) will fetch them much monetary benefit.

How, then, do we assess their claims? Some believe that Cathy's testimony is essentially true, while others damn it as a pack of lies. Still others suspect that Mark and Cathy have played out a clever disinformation gambit, mixing fact and fiction in order to discredit any genuine victims who "break program." Worth noting: "Mr. A" has never attempted to sue the couple, even though they have accused him publicly of numerous crimes, and even though he is notorious for having his lawyers write intimidating letters to anyone he perceives as injuring his reputation..

Am I wrong to assume at this point that he still seems unsure about their whole story?

More importantly why is Icke dangerious for buying this ? Do you blame him for buying a story that may or may not be true,given the earlier context I offered?

AD, for the second time, do the people who are being subjected to ongoing crimes by the elite deserve a global voice?

Do we deserve to hear the news the mainstream media isnt telling us, regarding warfare, pedophilia, the entire banking system con, the Big Pharma cartels with their criminal practices, the "War on drugs lie" , to name but a few?

Could we us a few genuine, courageous journalists, who might offer us all a moment of dark pleasure, as we watch dishonorable men in positions of importance cringe, and blabber, and desperately try to deflect the question at hand, exposing those who fit the description of being the sociopathic liars that they are?

I strongly suspect thats what we'll be hearing about. Im sure the stations lawyers will be all to familiar with the libel situation.

Is that a bad thing?

As usual you have repeated your position, and stated your case against Icke. I dont have a problem with that, although the questionable nature of your sources hardly enhances that which even I, as an apparent closet hero worshipper, might otherwise consider duly appropriate criticism or warning.


All of the above examples looks to me like Im defending my decsion to post the link here, which is exactly how it should look. A link to what I have repeatedly considered, and still do, a good idea and a brave, possibly foolhardy venture, given the logistics and financing involved.

. If you can cite one example of my soliciting funds, then youre fooling yourself, and it appears a few people around here, who should in all truth really know better. As for your particular style of response, well see what I wrote earler.


The rest will I hope do what riggies do, and exercise their own judgement.