The Montreal Massacre

Bina @ News of the Restless remembers the massacre of  women 20 years ago by a misogynist terrorist in a great post. 14 women were killed, 10 women wounded, 4 men wounded. The date has been made into a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. There are several men who have made a hero of the pathetic murderer who executed those women, it will come as little surprise they are right wing, libertarian, some based in the US. They call the mass murderer a Saint, they use the term ‘feminazi’. Clearly it is incumbent upon men to challenge and change such attitudes in others and themselves and not to tolerate those who proudly harbour such hate filled moronity.

As for the particular men who praise this massacre I don’t know what to say to them other than if ever their fever-dreamed of feminist stormtrooper breaks down their door and levels an assault rifle at them, I’ll be carrying her spare ammo, you dig?

Eamonn McCann On The Irish Church & State Collusion In Child Rape

An excerpt-

…There’s scarcely a bishop in the 26 Irish dioceses who hasn’t issued a statement in the past fortnight explaining how dismayed/distressed/shocked/bewildered he’s been to discover the extent of the depravity perpetrated by priests and the failure of some of his fellow bishops to alert the civil authorities. Some of the more plausible performers have been wheeled out to widen their eyes for the cameras in displays of wonderment….“I cannot begin to understand the mentality…” They still take the people for fools.

Complaints of clerical abuse of children in Ireland have been in the public arena for at least 25 years. Occasionally, flurries of allegations have resulted in spates of publicity. But these tended to be short-lived. The local bishop might even apologise in the local paper. The response of the Northern as well as the Southern Irish State ranged from the inadequate to the inert. But you could bet the Lenten Collection that the Church itself was paying attention throughout, tracking every complaint, monitoring reaction, clucking with satisfaction that the faith of the people remained strong and resistant to any radical conclusion.

Now they ask the people to believe that they didn’t have an inkling of the full extent of the criminality until very recently. They never discreetly enquired of one another during prayer breaks at their conclaves at Maynooth or All Hallows, How’s that business with Fr. So-and-so going? Any more word about that wee girl from such-and-such? Is the mother in that other case still on-side?

Pull the other one, your Lordships, it’s got church-bells on.

The Church’s enmeshment with the State helps explain this confidence. On December 1st, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowan claimed in parliament that the Vatican had “acted in good faith” in refusing to cooperate with Judge Murphy. The authorities in Rome and their representative in Ireland, the Papal Nuncio, had refused even to answer letters from Murphy asking for access to their files on abuse allegations.

A State which had genuine concern for its children would have responded to the report by taking decisive action to remove the Catholic bishops as patrons of primary schools. Three thousand of 3,200 primaries in the Republic have bishops as patrons – with the power to hire and fire and complete control over the school’s “ethos”. No less appropriate category of men could be imagined to have such power over the moral formation of children. But not a single member of parliament – not one! – has urged the Government to take this obvious action.

Control of education is at the heart of the matter. A ferocious determination to secure the right to train the consciousness of the next generation dictated the Catholic hierarchy’s attitude to the emerging Irish State in the early years of the last century. Give us your children and we’ll give you our backing against the British and help shore up your State. The State was born in the embrace of the Church and hasn’t fully recovered from its origins

In the North, the Church did its dirty deal with the anti-Catholic Unionists. Control of the education of the children of Catholic parents in return for a commitment to keep the Catholics as docile as possible. The arrangement lasted at least into the 1980s, when the Northern bishops told the British government that if it proceeded with a plan to integrate teacher training the Church would be unable to restrain the anger of the faithful. That is, Lay a finger on our control of teacher training and we’ll stop condemning the IRA from the pulpit. And it worked.

Not that the IRA – now transmogrified into Sinn Fein – has proven any more useful that the other useless parties to the raped children of Ireland.

Consider a case from the North: A priest is transferred from the South into a Derry parish. The night before he arrives, the priests in the parochial house are visited by an emissary from the bishop who tells them to “keep an eye” on their new colleague, and specifically to ensure that he is not left alone with children. Over the next few months, despite two curates taking turns to follow him around, he rapes two little girls. The family of one of the girls informs the bishop. He ignores them. They then write to the Cardinal, the most senior Churchman on the island, describing the assault on their daughter in heart-rending terms and the shattering effect both on her and the family. The Cardinal acknowledges the letter, expresses sympathy – and assures the family that he will remember them in his prayers. The rapist is moved out of the parish and hidden in a monastery in the South. When he is traced there and exposed, the bishop lies in public that the Church had earlier informed the civil authorities of the allegations. The priest is eventually jailed.

The bishop concerned has been among those seen on television in the past fortnight explaining that the situation in his diocese regarding the handling of allegations of child sex abuse has always been tickedy-boo.

Bastards.

And then some. I was listening to an Irish radio call in show (we receive some here on the edge of the Irish sea) while waiting to drive my mother back from a hospital appointment and 99% of the calls, emails, texts were disgusted at the church, but what was interesting was the DJ tried to moderate the rage and people were calling for resignations, few made the conceptual leap to demand prosecutions (and given the state collusion this might mean an international court as the domestic legal system is less than open). Most callers were middle aged and older, I think the church is dreading when they have to rely for support on a younger generation, that bigoted old vampires at the top are probably hiding away the money even now. One caller had an idea for direct action for parishioners, simply stop putting money in the collection until the church’s conservative pro-abuse ruling faction is removed, all the way to Rome. So it was interesting that although they were rightly outraged the limits of the reaction were not too radical (was that how the show screened?), although what is radical about demanding a paedophile rapist and the people who covered up for him be tried I don’t know. Unless we define radical as demanding the same standards be applied to the powerful as to the powerless, it’s clever when we are convinced of that definition by the elite, works out just great for them.

This Was Not Suicide It Was Murder

A single mother leapt to her death with her baby because her only means of support was withdrawn, other benefits were denied and the local council then demanded she repay housing benefit. The verdict was suicide and unlawful killing of her baby, but this was murder, cheap cruel bureaucratic neoliberal fucking murder. Capitalist cleansing, the eugenics of the profit driven society. The story is told (sadly and no mention of the father, so see how the destruction of welfare is a gender issue, not many men get left holding the baby after giving birth) in The Daily Mail, so here are the main points without gracing their site with your presence-

A pregnant woman jumped to her death while clutching her baby son after her benefits had been stopped, an inquest heard. Philosophy graduate Christelle Pardo, 32, plunged from the balcony of her sister’s third-floor flat, killing herself and five-month-old Kayjah. Miss Pardo had been claiming Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) since shortly after leaving London Metropolitan University in May 2008 She became pregnant shortly afterwards, but in December her JSA was withdrawn because she was within 11 weeks of giving birth and was considered unable to work.

As a result she also lost her automatic entitlement to housing benefit. The mother, from Hackney, east London, was advised to apply for income support but her application was rejected because the Department of Work and Pensions said she had not proved that she had been in continuous employment in the UK for the previous five years. This was despite having worked or been a student in Britain since 1997.

In April, her application for child benefit was also rejected when officials learned she had been denied income support. Hackney council then demanded she repay £200 in overpaid housing benefit. Two further appeals for income support were rejected and when Miss Pardo tried to take the Department of Works to a tribunal she repeatedly failed to be given a date for a hearing. Her last phone call to the DWP was on Friday June 12 this year, the day before she committed suicide and killed her son.

Ms Pardo’s sister, Olaya, told Poplar Coroner’s Court that she and Christelle had moved to Britain from France and had both been in work ever since.

Describing her sister’s death Ms Pardo said she went out to buy some milk before returning to find her front door open. She said: ‘I called for Christelle and didn’t hear anything. I went out to the balcony and when I looked over I could see my sister and Kayjah. ‘That day she was distant, she didn’t say much. She was upset and wanted a date for her tribunal. She was stressed about her benefits. She didn’t want her son to feel all the stress that she was going through with the paperwork. We talked sister to sister and she told me how she was feeling. She said she was upset because she felt that she didn’t exist. If it had not been for me she would have been out on the street.’

The court heard that Christelle could not return to France because she had no relatives there, as her parents had moved away. Her sister said: ‘Going back to France was like going back to another country. She was living here for so many years – this was her country.’

Christelle died at the scene after her plunge. Paramedics took her son to the nearby Royal London Hospital where he died later that day.

Coroner Dr Andrew Reid said: ‘She was not in a position around the time her son was born to be actively seeking work, and was not in a position to claim Income Support, which eventually stopped her housing benefit.

‘In lay terms it seems a very parlous situation.’

The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide for Christelle Pardo and a verdict of unlawful killing for the death of her son.