DUP MP Backed By Masked Men Attempt To Intimidate Palestine March
The DUP’s Carla Lockhart was spotted actively leading a Zionist counter-demonstration in Scarva last weekend. To counter the rise of class solidarity as a result of the pro-Palestine movement, the northern statelet seeks to instill ethnic siege anxiety.
The DUP’s Carla Lockhart was spotted actively leading a Zionist counter-demonstration in Scarva last weekend. Amongst other loyalist politicians she courted and mingled with masked thugs intent on intimidating the Palestine demonstrators walking across from the town in a Palestine solidarity walk.
This scene is not an isolated event in Protestant areas. The state through its establishment party apparatuses and relaxed policing of violent elements maintains a dual enforcement regime of violence between its official armed policing body and paramilitaries. This is by design to avoid neutralisation of these elements, under the guise of gradual normalisation through a working relationship with these paramilitary figures they serve as a reserve of anti-Republican and Zionist shock troops. This is used to fill in the gaps of political intimidation and repression where the PSNI cannot.
If the spirit of 1798 is to be approached again, it is paramount that this continuous double standard is attacked wherever it presents itself like it has in Scarva. Loyalist paramilitaries which finance themselves through extortion and poisoning their own people must be decoupled from and isolated from the wider community. The northern statelet, like all colonial holdings throughout the world, is challenged by the new energy instilled in class politics through the Palestine solidarity movement. Accordingly on this issue ethnic siege anxiety within the Protestant community which is kept alive by local elites facilitated by the state is captured against the Palestine solidarity movement, and against broader class politics.
Catholic nationalism will not resolve this problem. You cannot reverse chauvinism through counter-chauvinism. When navigating the inflated siege mentality present in Protestant communities it can only be challenged through open demonstration of anti-sectarian sentiment and actions, to insist that we are not to be separate constituent peoples but to substitute Protestant and Catholic for the commonality of Irishmen.
