According to a report by Dominic Kennedy in THE TIMES 6.JULY 2019 the IRA ” killed an estimated1,800 people, including more than 650 civilians, during a 30 year struggle against British rule in Northern Ireland.”
In May 1981 on its front page THE TIMES carried a report by its Northern Ireland Correspondent,Christopher Thomas, that the IRA had killed “More than 2,000 Protestants” in the previous 12 years.When asked politely by myself to correct its report, its then Managing Editor, John Grant assured me that their correspondent had established his figures from several sources. Grant, an alumnus of BaliolCollege, Oxford, and former British Army Officer was a blatant liar, since departed. The Editor at the time was Harold vans, hailed as Editor f the Year for 1981, and since knighted and living in luxury on the south side of New York’s Central Park.
In February 1982 the British Press Council, reluctantly upheld my complaint against THE TMES and censured it for “Distortion”.
A few weeks later the DAILY MAIL published the very same lie under the name of SIR HUMPHREY ATKINS, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the same morning that THE DAILY EXPRESS and DAILY STAR carried it in a coordinated attack on Ken Livingstone.
THE PRESS COUNCIL took another nine months to censure the DAILY EXPRESS and THE DAILY STAR for their “Distortion” but refused to condemn Atkins, although I had reported his lie to it.
Some years later, ex-Editor of THE TIMES, Sir Simon Jenkins boasted how he had briefedWhite House staff on the IRA’s killing of 3,000 Britons. Much good it did him because PresidentClinton overruled to Anglophile State Department so that Gerry Adams got a US Visa and advanced the peace process which he never abandoned.
Dominic Kennedy’s full-page report in THE TIMES for July 6 2019 is headed –
CORBYN’S HARD-LEFT BLUE PRINT REVEALED and echoes the character assassination of Ken Livingstone in 1982.
Corbyn is attacked for contributing a piece to “SOCIALIST ORGANISER” in 1984 ” after it said many British people were sorry that the Brighton bomb had failed to kill Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet.” It does NOT say that Corbyn agreed with those “many British people.”
SO WHAT WAS CORBYN’S OFFENCE? Would THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, DAILY EXPRESS, GUARDIAN OR NEW STATESMAN have hosted an opinion piece by Corbyn? Would the BBC have had him on a panel for ANY QUESTIONS or THE MORAL MAZE.
Did he not have the right to express a view in any forum?
And was any view he did express promoting violence? Did SOCIALIST VOICE actually lament the failure “to kill Thatcher” as Dominic Kennedy claims? Or is Dominic Kennedy a lying weasel like John Grant and Humphrey Atkins.
I heard at the time that many Britishers in 1984, the era of the Coalminers’ Strike and other struggles, were muttering “BLOODY IRISH, MISSED AGAIN”
In these our says when so much has changed to the consternation of my generation there isa crumb of comfort in seeing that, like OL’ MAN RIVER, THE TIMES OF LONDON and its tributaries keep on rollin’ the same ol’ lies and we know who our enemies are and if there is a just God in Heaven, they’ll be shovelling coal when fossil fuels are no longer burned on this planet.
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