The Passionate Attachment

By Maidhc Ó Cathail

The Passionate Attachment

July 30, 2015

In a July 25 Irish Independent analysis piece entitled “Ibrahim’s two-year detention says much about Egypt today,” Mary Fitzgerald chastises the Irish government for not doing more to secure the release of Ibrahim Halawa, an Irish citizen arrested by the Egyptian authorities on August 17, 2013 for his alleged part in the violent protests against the army’s ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi.

Fitzgerald’s sympathies are clear.

“The military coup of 2013 has ushered in a regime that is dramatically more repressive than that of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator forced to step down in the face of mass protests in the heady days of 2011,” she opines. “Hundreds of people have been swept up and detained for being in the wrong place at the wrong time as the regime of president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi appears determined to snuff out the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and oldest opposition movement in Egypt.”

Back in those “heady days,” the then Irish Times foreign affairs correspondent was ebullient about the revolutionary wave roiling the region. In a 2011 interview she gave to her current employer entitled “Listening to Libya’s stories of freedom,” Fitzgerald related her first hand experiences in the North African country that has subsequently imploded into chaos and violence from which nobody—not even the prime minister—is safe.

“The story of Libya’s uprising is hard to beat, especially for those of us who were there right from the beginning – I arrived in Libya ten days after the first protests began on February 15. Several friends who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that followed in 1989 say Libya – or the Arab Spring more generally – is the only story that has grabbed them in the same way,” she told the Irish Independent.

“The Libyan uprising was a genuine people’s revolution involving Libyans from all walks of life – young, old, male, female, rich and poor – and their strength and courage in the face of Gaddafi’s brutality was hugely inspiring and very moving.”

Revolutionary chickens come home to roost

Four years on, three Irish citizens were among the 38 holidaymakers brutally murdered on a beach in neighbouring Tunisia last month by a gunman believed to have been trained in the now anarchic Libya—quite possibly by some of those same strong and courageous revolutionaries promoted by Fitzgerald.

“The murder of three Irish citizens at a tourist resort in north Africa has brought Islamic terrorism much closer to home,” Cormac O’Keeffe observed in the Irish Examiner.

“Until now we have looked on in shock, and revulsion, at terror attacks targeting other Europeans, either across the Middle East and North Africa, or on European soil. However, with the slaughter on the beaches of Tunisia of Lorna Carty, and Laurence and Martina Hayes, this is a landmark moment for this country.”

O’Keeffe quoted Martina’s brother Billy Kelly, who told the media, “We feel bitter. Irish people have nothing to do with these terrorists. The people who did this are evil rats.”

The Irish Examiner report appears to be merely stating the obvious. However, the Tunisia beach massacre was by no means Ireland’s first brush with Islamist terrorism. And while the bereaved Mr. Kelly sincerely believes that the Irish have nothing to do with these evildoers, there are some in the country who have quite a lot to do with this scourge.

Irish jihadis

A CNN study published in September 2014 surprisingly found that Ireland is second only to Finland among countries with the greatest percentage of Muslims who have gone to fight in Syria. Although the number of fighters is still small—25 to 30 as of last September—the 0.07 percent of Ireland’s 43,000 Muslim population that have joined the global jihad against President Bashar al-Assad means that “there are four times as many Irish Muslims as British Muslims fighting in Syria, proportionately speaking.”

While most people in Ireland remain blissfully unaware of these disturbing developments, a keen observer of Western-backed terrorism against Libya and Syria has sought to raise awareness of the little-known Irish role in global jihadism. In a Facebook post, connected the dots obscured by Ireland’s “paper of record” and other mainstream media.

“The following image provides information regarding an Irish citizen’s connection to an alleged leader of ISIS in North Africa and a terror funder in Syria,” the Irish activist noted. “However it is unlikely that the Irish media will want to mention this fact as they promoted this guy as a ‘freedom fighter’ while he was serving the NATO agenda in destroying Libya and Syria, but the chickens are coming home to roost.”

Not only has the “soft-spoken” Libyan-born Irish citizen Mahdi al-Harati served the NATO agenda in Libya and Syria, “the gentle Irishman” was inadvertently outed by an Irish tabloid in 2011 as an asset of American intelligence.

“A gang of rogue Irish travellers is in the frame for the bizarre robbery of €200,000 in cash donated by US spies to Libyan freedom fighters,” began the Sunday World report. “In an astonishing tale worthy of the John le Carre [sic] novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the cash that was destined for rebels fighting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces was stolen from a hot press in a Dublin house. Gardai [sic] are now investigating the extraordinary robbery which is being blamed on a traveller gang from the Limerick town of Rathkeale. An Irish freedom fighter who helped bring down Gaddafi’s hated regime in Libya has claimed that €200,000 cash stolen from his Dublin home was given to him by an American intelligence agency.”

There was no mention of Harati’s ties to U.S. intelligence, however, in Mary Fitzgerald’s August 2011 piece for the “democracy-promoting” Foreign Policy magazine. In “The Syrian Rebels’ Libyan Weapon,” the jihadists’ leading publicist in Irish media wrote:

“The Tripoli Brigade was one of the first rebel units into the Libyan capital in August 2011. Its fighters, who included many Libyan expatriates, had received training from Qatari special forces in Nalut, a town in Libya’s western mountains. After the fall of Tripoli, during which he participated in the battle for Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound, Harati was appointed deputy head of the Tripoli Military Council (TMC), serving under Abdel Hakim Belhaj, former leader of the now-defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Last autumn Harati stepped down as commander of the brigade and as TMC deputy. He made his first trip to Syria shortly afterward for what he says was initially humanitarian work in the country’s northern borderlands.”

The fact that Libyan-born Irish jihadis were trained by Qatari special forces is far from the only link that connects Doha to Dublin. As Fitzgerald observes in her Irish Independent piece, Ibrahim Halawa at one point shared a cell with Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste; and just before his arrest, Halawa’s sisters were interviewed by the Qatari-owned TV channel infamous for its cheerleading for the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Moreover, as Fitzgerald delicately puts it, “Ibrahim’s case is perhaps complicated by the fact his father is the secretary of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), a group of scholars that issues religious opinions on practical matters specific to Muslims in Europe. It is an offshoot of the Brussels-based Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE), an umbrella group of various branches and affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.”

Perhaps, indeed!

In 2011, Sheikh Hussein Halawa hosted the controversial ECFR head, the Qatar-based Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is also from Egypt and a close friend, for a five-day conference in one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s main European centres at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland in Clonskeagh, Dublin. In that same “heady” year, Qaradawi used his Al Jazeera platform to issue fatwas against Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria. (Following the 2013 ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government, he also issued a call for jihad in Egypt.) Although he is banned from the U.S. and the U.K. for his extremist views, the Brotherhood’s influential spiritual leader perhaps not surprisingly expressed his support for the NATO-imposed “no fly zone” over Libya.

Transit hub for “gentle” jihadis

In January, the Sunday Independent reported that Ireland is now being used as a “transit hub for Jihadis heading for Iraq and Syria.”

“A small number of Irish-based Muslim extremists have been playing a key role in providing logistical and financial support to international terror groups, especially Islamic State (IS),” the well-known Irish crime reporter Paul Williams revealed. “The central group, consisting of about 12 radicals, are suspected of harbouring jihadi fighters from Britain and mainland Europe and supplying them with fake documentation, including false passports.”

On the face of it, the Irish government seems duly concerned about the growing Islamist threat and appears to be taking steps to counter it. In the past year, a Counter Terrorism International (CTI) unit has been established in the Garda Crime and Security section to specifically target the Islamic terror support groups here; while Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald told a parliamentary committee that the Gardaí were aware that about 30 suspected jihadis had travelled from Ireland to take part in various conflicts since the start of the “Arab Spring.”

One suspects, however, that Minister Fitzgerald’s globetrotting namesake in the Irish media has yet to be questioned by the state’s brand new counter-terrorism unit about her work as advocate for the “gentle” Irish “freedom fighters” in the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihad against secular Arab regimes.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer and political analyst.

Sir, – As a writer who shares former Irish Times foreign correspondent Mary Fitzgerald’s fascination with “[t]he story of Libya’s uprising, and the ‘Arab Spring’ more generally”, it was with great interest I read the interview she gave the Irish Independent in November 2011. Entitled “Listening to Libya’s stories of freedom”, she then waxed lyrical about her first hand experiences in the North African country that has subsequently imploded into chaos and violence from which nobody is safe:

“The story of Libya’s uprising is hard to beat, especially for those of us who were there right from the beginning – I arrived in Libya ten days after the first protests began on February 15. Several friends who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that followed in 1989 say Libya – or the Arab Spring more generally – is the only story that has grabbed them in the same way.

“The Libyan uprising was a genuine people’s revolution involving Libyans from all walks of life – young, old, male, female, rich and poor – and their strength and courage in the face of Gaddafi’s brutality was hugely inspiring and very moving.”

Speaking of brutality, last week three of our fellow Irish citizens were murdered on a beach in neighbouring Tunisia by a gunman believed to have been trained in the now lawless Libya — presumably by some of those same strong and courageous revolutionaries lauded by Fitzgerald.

At the end of that 2011 interview, she was asked for her advice to aspiring journalists. She said that they should “remember [that] the basic foundations of our craft remain – bearing witness, holding people to account, and listening. Never stop listening.” I couldn’t agree more.

But in light of our country having now become a major exporter of Islamic jihad, does she think that she should also be held to account for having promoted a most favourable image of the likes of Mahdi al-Harati and other Irish-based jihadists as they slaughtered their way through Libya and Syria? Does she feel that she has borne sufficient witness to the suffering of their many victims? And would she say that she has never stopped listening to Libyans and Syrians such as Mother Agnes and others like her who don’t share the sectarian vision for their countries held by the jihadists?

In a piece published June 30 entitled “The Tunisia Massacre and the Irish-ISIS Connection”, I cited some of Fitzgerald’s promotional work for these “gentle” jihadists. If she can spare the time from her hectic globe-trotting, I’d love to know what she thinks of it.

When I told a friend of mine who used to work for U.S. intelligence about her fascinating career path, he suggested that she might even be an NOC officer. Does she or her former employer, the Irish Times, have any comment to make regarding widespread suspicions that she is associated with an intelligence agency?

Yours, etc.

MAIDHC Ó CATHAIL, Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary.

O87-4463742

Maidhc Ó Cathail

The Passionate Attachment

June 30, 2015

“The murder of three Irish citizens at a tourist resort in north Africa has brought Islamic terrorism much closer to home,” Cormac O’Keeffe observes in the Irish Examiner. “Until now we have looked on in shock, and revulsion, at terror attacks targeting other Europeans, either across the Middle East and North Africa, or on European soil. However, with the slaughter on the beaches of Tunisia of Lorna Carty, and Laurence and Martina Hayes, this is a landmark moment for this country.”

The report continues:

Martina’s brother Billy Kelly told the media: “We feel bitter. Irish people have nothing to do with these terrorists. The people who did this are evil rats.”

“Ireland has now been dragged into a terrible reality, one that much of Europe — Spain, Britain, and France among them — has had to live with for more than a decade,” O’Keeffe adds.

Although the Irish Examiner reporter appears to be merely stating the obvious, Ireland had been close to Islamic terrorism long before the Tunisia massacre. And contrary to the bereaved Mr. Kelly’s sincere belief that the Irish have nothing to do with these evil rats, some Irish people have had quite a lot to do with these terrorists.

A CNN study published in September 2014 revealed that Ireland is second only to Finland among countries with the greatest percentage of Muslims who have gone to fight in Syria. With 0.07 percent of its 43,000 Muslim population having joined the global jihad against Assad, there are four times as many Irish Muslims as British Muslims fighting in Syria, proportionately speaking.

While most Irish are blissfully unaware of these disturbing facts, one Irish activist who is a keen observer of Western-backed terrorism against Libya and Syria has tried to raise awareness of Ireland’s role in global jihadism. In a Facebook post, connects the dots absent from mainstream coverage:

The following image provides information regarding an Irish citizen’s connection to an alleged leader of ISIS in North Africa and a terror funder in Syria. However it is unlikely that the Irish media will want to mention this fact as they promoted this guy as a “freedom fighter” while he was serving the NATO agenda in destroying Libya and Syria, but the chickens are coming home to roost.

Moreover, not only did this Irish citizen, Mahdi al-Harati, serve the NATO agenda in Libya and Syria, an Irish tabloid in 2011 had outed “the gentle Irishman” as an asset of American intelligence.

According to a “you couldn’t make this up” Sunday World report,

A gang of Irish traveller thieves are in the middle of a holy war – after liberating €200,000 cash destined for Libyan rebels. In a tale worthy of the John le Carre thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the scam artists from Rathkeale in Co Limerick hit the jackpot when they robbed a home in Dublin’s Firhouse. As well as a haul of family jewels, they stumbled upon €200,000 in €500 bills hidden in the hot press. But the homeowner was well-known Irish Libyan freedom fighter Mahdi al-Harati, who was one of the leaders of the bloody revolt against Gaddafi. He has told cops that the cash was a gift from US secret agents to aid the war effort in Libya. Now the money trail has led to the traveller strongholds in Rathkeale, where €500 notes have been popping up all over the place. A gang of rogue Irish travellers is in the frame for the bizarre robbery of €200,000 in cash donated by US spies to Libyan freedom fighters. In an astonishing tale worthy of the John le Carre novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the cash that was destined for rebels fighting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces was stolen from a hot press in a Dublin house. Gardai are now investigating the extraordinary robbery which is being blamed on a traveller gang from the Limerick town of Rathkeale. An Irish freedom fighter who helped bring down Gaddafi’s hated regime in Libya has claimed that €200,000 cash stolen from his Dublin home was given to him by an American intelligence agency. The Sunday World can reveal that gardai are investigating the robbery of two envelopes containing €200,000 in €500 notes from the home of Mahdi al-Harati in Firhouse, south Dublin, and that the money trail is leading to the Rathkealers. Al-Harati was in Libya following the successful campaign that toppled Gaddafi when the rebel’s house was broken into on October 6.

The incredible curriculum vitae of the “soft-spoken Libyan-born Irish citizen” doesn’t end there either. Four days later, Indymedia Ireland reported:

Mahdi al-Harati has been well-known in antiwar and Palestine solidarity circles in Dublin over the years . He had been a passenger in the Challenger 1 ship last year when it attempted to break the seige of Gaza as part of the Free Gaza Flotilla . He was the last Irish member of the flotilla to arrive home after the Israeli raid and was given a hero’s reception at Dublin Airport by members of the IPSC and the IAWM [Irish Anti-War Movement]. According to an indymedia comment from last year written by Kev from the IPSC : “Freda Hughes of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign welcomed his safe return and saluted his bravery: “Al Mahdi, like all of the Freedom Flotilla participants, is deserving of our praise for his courage in attempting to break the illegal siege of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged people there. We are all relieved that he is safely back in Ireland. We hope that his family, who we know were extremely worried about his health, can rest easy now and celebrate his return..”’

The very conscientious activists of the IPSC would never knowingly endorse someone like Mahdi al-Harati if they knew at the time what we now know about him, a source who knows both Freda and Kev[in] Hughes assured this writer.

Nevertheless, al-Harati’s subsequent involvement in jihadism in Libya and Syria allows Israel to now claim that it was justified in saying that some of those on board the Free Gaza Flotilla had ties to terrorism networks. They did not mention, however, that at least one of them was on the payroll of U.S. intelligence.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely-published writer and political analyst. He is also the creator and editor of the Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the US-Israeli relationship.

Maidhc Ó Cathail

RT Op-Edge

November 26, 2014

There was a strong whiff of hypocrisy in the Washington air on November 13 when the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) hosted a discussion of a report entitled ‘The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money’.

The Menace of Unreality is co-authored by Michael Weiss, editor-in-chief of the Interpreter, and Peter Pomerantsev, author of a forthcoming book asserting that Putin’s Russia is a post-modern dictatorship.

Introducing the discussion, NED’s Christopher Walker noted that the US Congress-funded Endowment hadn’t been involved in the production of the report but that it does have “close ties” to Weiss’s online journal and the New York-based think tank that funds it, the Institute of Modern Russia (IMR).

In the course of their report’s self-righteous criticism of the widespread “opaqueness” about who funds think tanks, Weiss and Pomerantsev disclose, in an aside, that their work is “funded by a think tank that receives support from the family of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.” Their critique of the weaponization of money, however, neglects to mention its funder’s conviction for embezzlement and money laundering.

In Washington, Weiss and Pomerantsev were joined in the discussion of their “counter-disinformation” report by an analyst from the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative advocacy group founded by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, whose earlier Project for a New American Century had played a key role in pushing the lies that led to the US invasion of Iraq.

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Maidhc Ó Cathail
Consortium News
November 12, 2014

“The Day Israel Attacked America,” an investigation into Israel’s deadly June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty at the height of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, was aired recently on Al Jazeera America.

Directed by British filmmaker Richard Belfield, the documentary confirms not only that the attack on the U.S. Navy spy ship was deliberate — an undisputed fact long accepted by all but the most shameless Israeli apologists — but reveals, perhaps for the first time, how Tel Aviv was able to induce the U.S. government to cover up an attack that killed 34 and injured 171 of its own seamen by a supposed “ally.”

“It was especially tough for Lyndon Johnson, to date the most pro-Israeli American president in history,” the film’s narrator observed. According to Tom Hughes, the State Department’s director of intelligence and research at the time of the Liberty attack, “Johnson was in a very tough mood.”

As an indication of Johnson’s initial firm stance, Hughes recalled that Johnson briefed Newsweek magazine off the record that the Israelis had attacked the Liberty, suggesting that they may have done so because they believed that the naval intelligence-gathering ship had been intercepting Israeli as well as Egyptian communications.

A post-interview leak revealing that it was the President himself who had briefed the media about the attack on the Liberty alarmed the Israeli embassy in Washington and its friends in the major Jewish organizations, who intimated that Johnson’s Newsweek briefing “practically amounted to blood libel.”

The documentary’s narrator said declassified Israeli documents now show that “they were going to threaten President Johnson with ‘blood libel’ — gross anti-Semitism — and that would end his political career.”

“Blackmail!” retired U.S. Navy admiral Bobby Ray Inman frankly summed up Israel’s strategy to deal with Johnson. “[T]hey know if he is thinking about running again he’s going to need money for his campaign,” said Inman, who from 1977 to 1981 directed the National Security Agency, the U.S. intelligence agency under whose aegis the USS Liberty had been dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean. “So alleging that he’s blood-libeling is going to arouse the Jewish donors.”

The Israeli government hired teams of lawyers, including close friends of Johnson, the narrator added, and began an “all-out offensive” to influence media coverage of the attack, leaning on them “to kill critical stories” and slant others in Israel’s favor.

“There was a campaign mounted to see what could be done about returning Johnson to his normal, predictable pro-Israeli position,” Hughes said. “Efforts were to be made to remind the President of the delicacy of his own position, that he personally might lose support for his run for reelection in 1968.”

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Maidhc Ó Cathail
RT Op-Edge
October 30, 2014

Since its creation after WWII, Israel and friends have been masters at manipulating emotions, endlessly invoking the memory of Hitler’s Germany as a pretext for starting further wars as in the recent Holocaust-themed propaganda against Syria’s government.

“The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression,” Norman Finkelstein tells Yoav Shamir in “Defamation”, the Israeli filmmaker’s award-winning 2009 documentary on how perceptions of anti-Semitism affect Israeli and US politics. “Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust.”

If you’re looking for evidence in support of Finkelstein’s thesis today, you need look no further than the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibit of images of emaciated and mutilated bodies from contemporary Syria.

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