Michelle O'Neill voices support for Kneecap member and campaigners arrested over pro-Palestine protest
First Minister Michelle O'Neill has expressed 'solidarity' with Kneecap's Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh as well as two people arrested in Belfast over the weekend at a pro-Palestine protest.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News
37 minutes ago
- Sky News
Hamas and Israel respond to former Biden official who said Israel 'without a doubt' committed war crimes in Gaza
Hamas and the Israeli government have responded to an interview on Sky News in which a former official in the Biden White House said Israel had "without a doubt" committed war crimes in Gaza. A statement from Hamas said comments by Matt Miller, who as State Department Spokesman articulated the views of the US government, amounted to a "significant admission that condemns the occupation and exposes its crimes". On the Trump 100 podcast, Mr Miller was asked if he agreed with the view that Israel's actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. "I don't think it's a genocide, but I think, I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes," Mr Miller said. 1:37 In a written statement, Hamas said Mr Miller's words reveal that he was, quote, "not allowed to speak the truth while in office and was forced to adhere to the US government's official narrative regarding the occupation's practices". "This exposes the deep political complicity of US administrations with the occupation and their criminal cover-up of its brutal violations," it added. And the proscribed terror group said his words "reveal attempts by successive US administrations to obscure the truth about this brutal war against innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip". A Hamas spokesperson said: "This admission does not only condemn the occupation but also holds Washington directly responsible as an active partner in the war crimes and genocide committed against our Palestinian people in Gaza, through funding, arming, providing political and diplomatic protection, along with spreading misleading media coverage." 3:42 Sky News challenged Mr Miller on why he didn't speak up while in government, to which he said: "When you're at the podium, you're not expressing your personal opinion. "You're expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government had not concluded that they committed war crimes, still have not concluded [that]." 1:22 Pressed further on why he didn't offer such views while serving as State Department spokesman, Mr Miller told Trump100: "The State Department did release a report in the spring of last year where, look, there was a bunch of bureaucratic legalese language as the government always [uses] where they did say it's reasonable to assess that Israel has at times acted in violation of the laws of war, or something similar." He continued: "So the State department itself had concluded - they didn't phrase it in these terms - but I think I did it at the podium, a few times, conclude that it was likely that Israel had committed war crimes, but I do think it's almost certain that they have." 3:05 Mr Miller offered a qualifying distinction between state-sanctioned war crimes and individual illegal acts by soldiers. "There are two ways to think about the commission of war crimes: One is if the state has pursued a policy to deliberately commit war crimes or is acting reckless in a way that aids and abets war crimes. "Is the [Israeli] state committing war crimes? That, I think, is an open question. I think what is almost certainly not an open question is that there have been individual incidents that have been war crimes where Israeli soldiers, members of the Israeli military, have committed war crimes." Sky News put Mr Miller's accusations to Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. "Of course, when there are claims like that, they need to be fairly investigated, but I can tell you that Israel upholds the highest levels of international law that is key in the strategy of releasing our hostages and destroying this terrorist organisation," he said. But to that, Mr Miller, out of office, now echoes a point repeatedly put to him by journalists while he was in office, at the podium: that Israeli investigations so often go nowhere. At the podium, he repeated phrases like "...we are asking the Israelis to investigate...", "...we are concerned by what we have seen...", "...we are waiting for the results of the Israeli investigation...". Now, Mr Miller says: "We do know that Israel has opened investigations, but look, we are many months into those investigations and we're not seeing Israeli soldiers held accountable. "We have not yet seen them hold sufficient numbers of the military accountable and I think it's an open question whether they are going to."
Scotsman
an hour ago
- Scotsman
Why today's culture warriors are marching to same beat as 1930s fascists
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... I'm probably the world's worst Aberdeen FC fan. When I lived in the city for five years, I didn't go to see them once and have been to perhaps half a dozen games in my lifetime, an average of one for every decade. When I belatedly remembered it was the Scottish Cup final on Saturday afternoon, I checked to see the score and watched the last 10 minutes of normal time. I was mildly pleased that the Dons won in the end. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad However the thing that struck me most was something I didn't quite like: the 'togetherness' of the crowd, the sea of red in the Aberdeen end and of green and white in the Celtic one. It felt like they were surrendering their individuality a little too enthusiastically. Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, inspects a parade of supporters before calling off a march through London's East End in 1936 (Picture: Becker/Fox Photos) | Getty Images A loss of confidence Now, I realise that social togetherness is often a good thing, but there's a nasty side to it too. And in politics and society in general, it feels like 'identitarian' ideas are on the rise, as if people have lost confidence in themselves as individuals and increasingly see life through a clannish, tribal lens. There's safety in numbers, or so they say. It can be seen in an appalling remark by a member of Northern Irish rap band Kneecap at a 2023 gig – 'The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP' – and in the social media call by Lucy Connolly, a Conservative councillor's wife, for 'mass deportations' and for people to 'set fire' to 'all the hotels' containing those she wanted to deport, following the murders of three young girls in Southport last year. Connolly recently lost her appeal against a 31-month prison sentence for inciting racial hatred and police are currently considering the Kneecap rapper's comment. The band later offered their 'heartfelt apologies' to the families of murdered MPs David Ames and Jo Cox, saying they rejected 'any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual' and that 'an extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Nothing to do with Southport murders However, in of themselves, the remarks strip members of a particular group – Conservatives or asylum seekers – of their right to be treated as an individual. In Connolly's mind, when she posted on social media on the day of the murders, the actions of a single person justified the collective punishment of countless others, from a number of different countries, who had nothing at all to do with the Southport murders. Whatever the moronic, metaphorical Kneecapper's intended meaning, the words 'the only good Tory is a dead Tory' paint Conservatives as so irredeemably evil that they deserve the ultimate punishment, rather than people who could be won over by reasoned argument. A cultural tsunami I disagreed with the late, great Scotsman journalist Bill Jamieson on a number of issues, but he was always thoughtful, often entertaining and both interesting and interested in other people's ideas. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In 2018, in an article bemoaning the politicisation of gender, sexuality and identity, he wondered why his 'self-identification as 'Bill' is not sufficient declaration of 'who I am'' and, jokingly, whether LGBT would eventually become 'LGBTTTQQIAA'. 'To draw a line against this is nothing to do with a rejection of male or female homosexuality, but resistance to a politicisation that is deeply divisive and corrosive of individual privacy,' he wrote. '... with the cultural tsunami now breaking around us, who will stand in the way of it? And in this rush to self-identification with public labels and initials, how may we be more certain, or less, of who we really are within?' This 'cultural tsunami' is not just about gender, with concepts of race and nationality – which are not real things but ideas invented by humans – seemingly becoming more important to many people's sense of themselves and of others. The importance of 'I' To me, an excessive focus on shared identity, as opposed to individual identity, is almost bound to lead humanity in a dangerous direction. In Sarah Bakewell's excellent book, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, she writes about how Leonard Woolf, husband of writer Virginia Woolf, was 'much affected' by the 16th-century French philosopher's essay, On Cruelty. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad After reading it, he remembered being asked as a young boy in the late 19th century to drown some day-old puppies. 'I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, a terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life... I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an 'I', that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning...' Bakewell wrote that Woolf 'went on to apply the insight to politics, reflecting especially on his memory of the 1930s, when the world seemed about to sink into a barbarism that made no room for this small individual self... On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these 'I's are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.' Today's culture warriors, on the right and the left, appear to be marching to a similar beat to those 1930s fascists. Their chosen collective identity is something sacred to them and anyone who criticises it or appears to be in opposition to it is considered an enemy.
Belfast Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Belfast Telegraph
‘Unacceptable': Michelle O'Neill hits out after Palestine campaign group denied Stormont entry
A refusal to allow a Palestinian campaign group entry to Stormont was 'absolutely unacceptable', First Minister Michelle O'Neill has said.
