Declan Hayes: Irish media’s role in Libya under the CIA
Though NATO’s co-option of Irish born journalists began in earnest with the illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq, it moved up several notches with NATO’s wars against the secular governments of Libya and Syria, where Mary Fitzgerald and other cut price Irish born journalists really delivered bang for the buck for their NATO aligned paymasters in much the same way that the Irish born William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, delivered for Herr Goebbels.
In these Wars of the Arab Spring, Mary Fitzgerald was unquestionably NATO’s main Irish Tokyo Rose. Though Fitzgerald hails from Cork in the deep south of Ireland, she studied in Belfast in the British controlled north east of Ireland, after which she worked as a journalist for the Belfast Telegraph. After winning an American scholarship to study journalism in a small Catholic university in Florida with strong links to the US military, she returned to Ireland to work for the Irish Times, where she ended up as foreign affairs editor. In this role, she wrote countless stories, praising Irish-Libyan terrorist godfather Harati and other fanatics who joined Libyan and/or Syrian CIA linked terrorist groups, as well as Ali Selim and the other controversial Muslim Brotherhood figures of Dublin’s Clonskeagh mosque. She painted these fanatics out as moderates, rather than the world’s most dangerous terrorists that they clearly are. Fitzgerald’s role as foreign affairs editor of the Irish Times not only allowed her to decide on which stories might be published (award winning Irish journalist Finian Cunningham, for example found it impossible to get stories published on Ireland’s collusion with torture in Bahrain) but to draw a virtuous circle around her to control public discourse in Ireland on the Arab wars in a way that favoured NATO.
Fitzgerald entered Syria illegally and embedded herself with Harati’s cut throats. She was also with Harati’s cut throats in Libya and has spent time studying in Amman, Jordan which is more well known as a regional CIA hub than for a major source of learning. Although she never seems to have visited government held Syria, she can be credited with creating much of the negative picture that exists of it in Ireland and beyond. She claimed, for example, that journalist James Foley was held by Syrian government forces before writing a series of slobbering pieces lamenting the demise of her “friend” at the hands of her rebel buddies.
Although many disturbed women have taken up with ISIS and similar gangs of reprobates over the years, controversial Irish journalist Mary Fitzgerald seems to have made a career out of it since she zeroed in on “Islam” for stories. When the Syrian Arab Army liquidated Irish citizens who had gone there to rape and murder Syrian women and children, Fitzgerald was quick to defend the rapists as moderate boyscout types, rather than the flotsam that they clearly were and that they clearly are. When Dublin-based mass murderers wreaked havoc on Libya and then Syria, there she was again, praising them as the pride of Ireland, rather than some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists that more honest sources like Interpol regard them.
An Irish-based thug, who died committing serious crimes in Syria, was described in the Sun newspaper as a “good-looking lad” and as a “martyr”. The Irish Sun newspaper never described dead IRA gunmen or British squaddies in such glowing terms but a thug who abused Irish hospitality to go and rape Libyan and Syrian children gets crowned with such laurels. Not to be outdone, Fitzgerald white washed two disgusting “martyrs of Louth and Meath”. Her choice of terminology is important as the remains of Oliver Plunkett, Ireland’s most revered (and peaceful) saint, reside in Louth, in the actual town where the father of one of these deceased criminals works and where Pope John Paul made a point of visiting and honouring in his plea for people to pursue peaceful not violent means of conflict resolution. Fitzgerald had a nefarious agenda here by trying to conflate traditional and revered Irish Christian martyr pacifists, who died because of their faith, with low-life mercenary criminals who slaughter people of faith.
Regarding Shamseddin Gaidan, the other deceased criminal, she tells us that this Libyan-born Meath schoolboy “told his school-friends and teachers how much he wanted to be there to witness the revolution that ended Gaddafy’s 42 years in power”. The other thug, 22-year-old Hudhaifa ElSayed, from Donacarney in Drogheda, was well known to the Irish police and, according to Fitzgerald, “knew exactly what he was doing”, an indication perhaps that even she must admit he was a dangerous, demented criminal.
ElSayed, Fitzgerald tells us, was one of a number of Irish-based mass murderers who went to Libya and, happy they had heaped chaos on it, moved on to Syria to repeat the process. Fitzgerald recounts how she had met this criminal when she illegally entered Syria as an embedded reporter with his Qatari funded death squad and, as if trying to convince us that all sectarian mass murderers are pitiable and harmless cartoonish freaks, she recounts how “his wire-rimmed glasses seemed incongruous alongside his military-style fatigues and the Kalashnikov slung across his back”. Fitzgerald tells us that Asmaa, the late thug’s mother, “told him it is okay” to effectively go and rape and pillage his way around Syria. Her equally fanatical husband believes their gang member son “died for a great thing.” As Fitzgerald does not bother asking what that “great thing” is, we have to assume it is turning Syria into another Libya rather than another Ireland, from where they network, pontificate and build the myth that their son was nothing other than the cold-blooded sectarian rapist, serial killer and piece of human garbage that he clearly was.
Although we can surmise how come traditionally neutral Ireland is now a major exporter of Islamic jihad, this report recounts how a gang of Irish traveller thieves stole €200,000 in cash from the home of “well-known Irish Libyan freedom fighter Mahdi al-Harati, who was one of the leaders of the bloody revolt against Gaddafi” and that al-Harati admitted to Irish police that the cash came from his American CIA handlers for his Libyan and Syrian subversion campaigns.
In the past we have had the likes of terrorist Madhi Al Harati hiding out in Ireland before leading Irish based jihadist cut throats in Libya and again in Syria. And, to add insult to injury, getting a sickening round of applause on Irish national TV for doing so. Such people and their camp followers have no place in a peaceful secular Irish (or Libyan) democracy.
Yet, the trick now is to depict these Irish-based sociopaths and serial killers as moderates and to even do the same for the leading Irish-based ISIS recruiter who plotted the 2015 Paris and related attacks and who snaked into Ireland as a refugee over a decade ago but cannot be booted out as he took out the insurance of fathering a baby in Ireland, which he uses as a base to be a major player in international terrorism and to raise money through secretive Irish-based Muslims to maim and to murder.
As 2015 wound to an end, the Irish were aghast to learn of the defenses Michael Lynn SC put forward as to why his client, this ISIS mastermind, should be allowed live in freedom in Ireland even as he plotted raping, enslaving, torturing and murdering Libyan men, women and children. Lynn apparently informed the court that deporting the terrorist would be “the greatest injustice…..because of the credible fear the man has of being arrested, and detained in his native country”. Once this “credible fear” exists, the Irish court was told the man could not be deported until all ruses to stop him facing justice were exhausted. To bolster his case, Lynn cited evidence “from groups including Amnesty International” which have plenty of cases for answer themselves regarding inciting Libyans to lynch blacks and promoting and defending the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria. Predictably, the faceless gate keepers of the European Court of Human Rights stepped in to support Lynn’s client, meaning, in effect, that Ireland is still the go to place for those wishing to spread ISIS mayhem.
NATO’s Irish journalists now see themselves conducting a mopping up operation with only MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, along with a few others, left to throw to the wolves. Though I previously reported on how the Irish Times paid Naomi O’Leary to spend eight months to discover that Wallace and Daly are occasionally interviewed by Chinese media, I have spent as long trying to figure out the economics of that non-story. Luckily, the Chinese government came to my assistance. In this incisive criticism of the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy, they explain, in their clear, blunt and pointed English, that the NED fund Yemen’s “Women Journalists Without Chains”, that it fabricates stories about Chinese journalists and that it is, in general, the go to place for ethically challenged journalists or media proprietors needing a dig out. It is only under-the-counter payment payments like those the NED bequeaths that can explain the obsession Norma Costello, Naomi O’Leary and their buddies have to smear, rather than report on Daly and Wallace and anyone else who speaks out against NATO’s Wars of the Arab Spring.
But then maybe the fault there is mine and so, mea culpa, for believing that journalists should be in the business of news reporting and not maligning those, like Daly and Wallace, the NED want discredited. And if, as it seems to be, smearing is the name of the game for O’Leary, Fitzgerald, Costello and Ireland’s other journalists, then, if they cannot argue either the facts or the circumstances, NED should hire better smear artists or, better still, dismiss their Irish charlatans, go out of business altogether and leave the peoples of the Meghreb and the Levant live in the peace their blood has paid for a thousand times over.
