Coulter plumbs the depths with race war garbage

I have mentioned before the preposterous, gratuitously controversial nonsense propounded by ‘revolutionary unionist’ Dr (!?) John Coulter. This supposed political commentator writes outrageous enough articles for the Blanket, nominally a political journal, but his most florid output is disseminated through that organ of intellectual discourse, the Irish Daily Star.

Normally I would not get too exercised about journalism in such a newspaper, but Coulter’s latest column was on Newshound today and I believe it is an outrageously sensationalist and indeed inflammatory treatment of a serious subject. The article purports to deal with racism in Northern Ireland, an issue which has arisen after xenophobic attacks on Lithuanian immigrants in Cookstown.

Instead of analysing seriously the causes and effects of these attacks and deducing what might be done to prevent them, we have a febrile evocation of the BNP winning the forthcoming London Assembly election, boatloads of jackbooted fascists streaming into Ulster, Islamic terrorists rampant throughout Ireland, bloody race war replacing sectarian conflict and even the malevolent ghost of Enoch Powell cackling delightedly at the unfolding mayhem.

All of which would be merely laughable, were it not presented as a knowledgeable academic’s assessment of a truly insidious phenomenon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more