A brouhaha broke out the other week after Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams used the word n----- in a tweet. The usual suspects poured excreta on Gerry's head, plus some who really should have known better. Anyone who has been in front-line politics as long as he will have accumulated enemies and he has his fair share, but there is one certainty about Mr Adams a racist he is not.
Many of those who claimed he is are little better than reactionary scum using tens of millions of black peoples suffering to advance their neoliberal political cause. We have had it in England recently when the media and their political gophers claimed Ken Livingstone is a racist.
When some of his accusers and those who have now condemned Adams were supporting the Apartheid regime in South Africa,* Livingstone and Adams were in the same trench as the ANC and in the forefront of the anti racist campaigns in the UK and Ireland.
In the late 1970's a senior ANC activist in Ireland, Kader Asmal, who went on the serve in Nelson Mandela's cabinet, asked the Irish republican movement to assist the ANC military wing MK in an operation, Adams and senior colleagues did not hesitate in saying yes.
The former anti apartheid campaigner in Ireland, cabinet minister and Trinity college Dublin law professor, who is now dead, revealed in his memoirs how PIRA volunteers carried out reconnaissance on one of the country’s most strategic installations, the Sasol oil refinery in Sasolburg, near Johannesburg, before it was bombed on June 1st, 1980.
The actual attack was carried out by Umkhonto we Sizwe, better known as MK, the military wing of the ANC, and struck a major blow against the apartheid state at the time. In his book, Politics in my Blood, Asmal, founder of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM), claims Gerry Adams provided the IRA volunteers to carry out the mission after he contacted go-between Michael O’Riordan, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland.
Asmal recounts how he was approached in the late 1970s to help arrange training for MK cadres in Ireland. He writes:
As to the Tweet, local Louth historian Brendan Matthews points out Gerry Adams was making a somewhat delicate and cack-handed, yet historically correct point when he used the word N----- in a recent tweet:
There is no doubt that Irish and the Black people were compared as equally problematic within the US and British media during the 19th and early twentieth centuries, the facts speak for themselves.
Mick Hall
* David Cameron visited SA all expenses paid by Apartheid regime and served as one of Thatcher's advisers at a time when she was a ferocious supporter of that regime and regarded Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
Many of those who claimed he is are little better than reactionary scum using tens of millions of black peoples suffering to advance their neoliberal political cause. We have had it in England recently when the media and their political gophers claimed Ken Livingstone is a racist.
When some of his accusers and those who have now condemned Adams were supporting the Apartheid regime in South Africa,* Livingstone and Adams were in the same trench as the ANC and in the forefront of the anti racist campaigns in the UK and Ireland.
In the late 1970's a senior ANC activist in Ireland, Kader Asmal, who went on the serve in Nelson Mandela's cabinet, asked the Irish republican movement to assist the ANC military wing MK in an operation, Adams and senior colleagues did not hesitate in saying yes.
The former anti apartheid campaigner in Ireland, cabinet minister and Trinity college Dublin law professor, who is now dead, revealed in his memoirs how PIRA volunteers carried out reconnaissance on one of the country’s most strategic installations, the Sasol oil refinery in Sasolburg, near Johannesburg, before it was bombed on June 1st, 1980.
The actual attack was carried out by Umkhonto we Sizwe, better known as MK, the military wing of the ANC, and struck a major blow against the apartheid state at the time. In his book, Politics in my Blood, Asmal, founder of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM), claims Gerry Adams provided the IRA volunteers to carry out the mission after he contacted go-between Michael O’Riordan, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland.
Asmal recounts how he was approached in the late 1970s to help arrange training for MK cadres in Ireland. He writes:
“I was very keen, but it was a delicate task because it would of necessity involve the IRA. None of us wished to place the ANC office in London in jeopardy or fuel the allegations of connivance between the ANC and IRA.”
“I went to see the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael O’Riordan, who was a man of great integrity and whom I trusted to keep a secret. He in turn contacted Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin and it was arranged that two military experts would come to Dublin to meet two MK personnel and take them to a safe place for two weeks of intensive training. I believe the expertise the MK cadres obtained was duly imparted to others in the ANC camps in Angola.”Asmal says he was later approached again by the MK high command who wanted two people to conduct a reconnaissance operation on the feasibility of attacking Sasol, South Africa’s major oil refinery, vital to the maintenance of the apartheid state.
“Once again, I arranged the task with Adams of Sinn Féin, through the mediation of O’Riordan. Though I no longer recall the names of the persons who volunteered, if indeed I ever knew them, they laid the ground for one of the most dramatic operations carried out by MK personnel.”Does this sound like the work of a racist?
As to the Tweet, local Louth historian Brendan Matthews points out Gerry Adams was making a somewhat delicate and cack-handed, yet historically correct point when he used the word N----- in a recent tweet:
“Watching Django Unchained-A Ballymurphy Nigger!”Adams point was that both the Irish and blacks were dehumanised in the past by racists and regarded as less than human.
On the Pensive Quill no fan club of Gerry, Brendan Mathews wrote:
Gerry had a good point, if only he actually had gone on to express it! The enclosed below is taken from a British rag of the 19th century. Notice how both are drawn to look less human.
There is no doubt that Irish and the Black people were compared as equally problematic within the US and British media during the 19th and early twentieth centuries, the facts speak for themselves.
Mick Hall
* David Cameron visited SA all expenses paid by Apartheid regime and served as one of Thatcher's advisers at a time when she was a ferocious supporter of that regime and regarded Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
