‘20,000 Bloody Sundays in Gaza!’
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- Created: Thursday, 22 February 2024 13:07
- Written by Scotland Branches
On the weekend of 27-28 January 2024 supporters of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! attended the annual Bloody Sunday March and events marking the 52nd anniversary of the murder of 14 Irish citizens by the Parachute Regiment on the streets of Derry in the British Occupied Six Counties of Ireland. Geraldine Doherty, niece of Gerald Donaghey who was shot dead aged 17 on 30 January 1972 on Bloody Sunday, gave a grim acknowledgment of the ongoing slaughter: ‘20,000 Bloody Sundays in Gaza!’.
Her speech had been preceded by the words of Huda Ammori, a founder of Palestine Action and one of the Elbit 8 who had disrupted the bloody operation of that Israeli multinational’s death factory. Ammori’s own great-grandfather was assassinated by the British in 1936 during the Palestinian Uprising against British colonial rule.
Ammori saluted the Bloody Sunday March Committee who had dedicated this year’s march to the people of Palestine (see Ammori’s speech here: https://fb.watch/pXIRmZeG48/) This appropriate decision was backed up by a call for all participants to join the march with a flag of Palestine. Two weeks before, 10,000 people had marched in Derry in support of Palestine and this year’s Bloody Sunday commemorative march was a mighty flow of colour and noise as Israel’s genocide in Gaza was loudly condemned and denounced.
Tommy McKearney, 1980 Hunger Striker against British criminalisation policy in Occupied Ireland, led a public conversation with Mansoor Adayfi who had been imprisoned for over 14 years without charge by the United States in the Guantanamo Bay torture camp. FRFI Supporters also took an active part in a white line picket at Free Derry Corner for Irish and Palestinian political prisoners called by the Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association.
FRFI joined the Holocaust Memorial Day event organised and led democratically by Jews Against Zionism where an open mic allowed us to extend solidarity from Dundee. An FRFI speaker described the local anger at the continuing failure of the Scottish National Party-led council to raise the flag of Palestine during the genocide while it is twinned civically with Nablus in the West Bank.
A Sinn Fein-organised vigil for Gaza, at the Bloody Sunday Monument on Rossville Street, heard a speaker call pathetically for ‘world leaders to act responsibly’. It is in this sense that Sinn Fein has acted ‘responsibly’ to travel to Washington to shake the bloody hand of US President ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden at the annual St Patrick’s Day event (see https://www.facebook.com/reel/2014629058910776). There is widespread condemnation in Ireland of Sinn Fein’s perfidy as it prepares for leading the new assembly in the North and governance in the South. Sinn Fein has opposed the popular call for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Ireland while tens of thousands have marched in solidarity with Palestine across the country.
This year’s events and march contrasted strongly against Sinn Fein’s shameless opportunism and capitulation to the barbaric imperialist agenda revealed in gory detail by 30,000 dead in Gaza, the majority of the martyrs being women and children. Bloody Sunday and the people of Derry and Ireland shows who really stands by Gaza.
Victory to the People of Palestine!
Victory to the Irish People!
Michael MacGregor
