Category: Murder

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Murder

Anders Breivik human rights violated in prison

anders breivik

 

Anders Breivik has won his case. The mass murderer persuaded a Norwegian court that his conditions in prison are inhuman and I’m bound to say that I agree with him. His conditions of incarceration are inhuman. The guards wake him at hourly intervals, sometimes strip-searching him. He’s allowed no contact with anyone except prison staff. He spends at least 22 hours a day alone in his cell.

On the other hand, do I think he deserves that sort of treatment? Of course I do. He set off a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people, and then he murdered 69 kids in cold blood on the island of Utøya. If the decision had been left to me, I’d have fed him slowly into the gearbox of a tractor feet first, but luckily the judicial systems of western democracies are not based on the atavistic rage of people like me.

If we’re going to treat convicted criminals worse than a rabid dog, then we need to be honest and just kill them.

Shoot them and get it over with.

We can’t have it both ways. If we claim to have abolished the death penalty but just replaced it with a system of torture then we are hypocrites, and from what we know of Breivik’s confinement, it certainly amounts to torture.

It has often been said, falsely, that hard cases make bad law when the opposite is in fact true: hard cases test good law and cases don’t come any harder than Breivik’s.

He’s vile. He’s an extremist, a terrorist, a heartless killer. His own father rejected him.

In other words, Anders Breivik is a perfect test of democracy. Do we send people to prison as punishment or for punishment? Admittedly, the jury is out on that one since we have developed a class of people for whom prison is a second home but in the absence of an alternative, what is to be done with the likes of Anders Breivik? Should there be some sort of extrajudicial punishment to be administered at the whim of a prison governor? Should that same governor have the right to punish you or me a little bit more if he disapproves, for instance of our not paying a TV licence?

It can’t happen. You’re either in jail or you’re not and no matter how repellent we might find Anders Breivik, he has been found guilty and sentenced but he was not sentenced to torture, much though we all might have wished for that. He was not sentenced to solitary confinement, without the possibility that he might meet a civilised individual in prison, a person who might perhaps help him to understand the enormity of his actions.

Can it be beyond the wit of man to have Anders Breivik mixing with prisoners who are not Nazis, not white supremacists, not adherents to an ideology that will reinforce his beliefs? Would it not make sense to expose Breivik to intellectual challenge from people who do not fear him, mentally or physically?

After all, if he isn’t in prison for rehabilitation, why not just kill him now? None of us would lose a wink of sleep over it.

________________

Elsewhere

Utøya survivors too often clam up

We survived the Breivik massacre

Categories
Crime Murder

ISIS – why killing your soul is worse than killing your body

ISIS is destroying Palmyra. It’s systematically taking the ancient city to pieces, with no regard for history or tradition, and what it’s doing is vile, but yet there’s a line of thinking that seeks to shut down such thinking because after all, what’s an old temple when people are being murdered?

Go away.

You can kill me with a bullet. You can kill me with an axe. If I’ve created a special place for you in my heart, you can even kill me with a word, but that’s all right.  Who’ll be dead except me?

Who’ll be heartbroken?

My children.

My friends.

Who’ll celebrate? Perhaps one or two religious fanatics I’ve argued with, but that will be it. I’ll be gone and in time, my memory will fade. You could even argue, as some do, that there is no such thing as me or you. That when you lie down to sleep you might as well die, since you have no certainty when you wake up that you are the same person.

Whatever. The reality is that we’re all transient, we all spring up, live a little life and die, sometimes horribly, sometimes with regret and sometimes in a glorious high-speed fireball.

But of course, some of us die in the most miserable way possible, by losing our souls to ignorance, and we do it standing up. Some of us are nothing more than the walking dead, animated by hatred and stupidity, controlled by cynics and directed by witch-doctors.

That’s ISIS, an army of zombie apostates, thousands of young men rendered stupid by religious certainty and the goldfish attention span of a Facebook junkie.

Palmyra Baal Shamin

Make no mistake. ISIS could only have been possible in the 21st century, for it is only now that we have managed to separate our young people from all sense of tradition, and it is only now that we could have supplied them with the professional military control systems bequeathed to them by Paul Bremer’s insane decision to fire all the Iraqi high command.

The problem is that when apostate zombies like ISIS go on a murderous rampage, they choose to kill everything. They try to eradicate not only the people they hate, but also their memories. They try to kill the very soul of a people, its culture, its heritage and its memory.

It’s not new though.  The fine Christian Crusaders ran riot in Constantinople in 1204, destroying its magnificent library, as did the Serbs of Sarajevo eight centuries later when a professor of literature led the burning mob that sought to eradicate the memory of Bosnian Muslims.

Certain ignorant tribesmen destroyed the Hindu Bhamiyyan monuments in Afghanistan, as did the ignorant hicks who rode tanks though the mythological Garden of Eden during the second American invasion of Iraq, the military intrusion that soon gave rise to the ISIS bacillus now spreading across the planet like an antibiotic-resistant hospital infection.

It’s true that we should be horrified by the murder of innocent people, though sadly, it seems we’re not, to judge by the resistance we see in our country when anyone suggests helping the victims of this appalling disease that is ISIS.   Ironically, those who argue against compassion share a great deal in common with the warped message of the torturers, masquerading as Islam, and the killers driving the current wave of refugees out of Syria and Iraq.  People like our own home-grown Identity Ireland, while probably unaware of it, are just as ignorant and just as uninformed as the ISIS fools and therefore just as intolerant. Luckily, these people are still peripheral in our country but we have no guarantee they will always be so marginal and that’s why we must challenge their stupidity at every opportunity.

Germany has undertaken to accept 800,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq this year alone. Sweden has placed no limit on the numbers it will take in, but meanwhile, Christian Ireland continues to operate the vile Direct Provision system, while mobilising the weak against the weak.

This is a country where billions were somehow found to save the fortunes of bankers and investors.  This is a country in which the national debt was doubled in order to accommodate the needs of the wealthy, all paid for by taxpayers. And yet, perplexingly, a narrative was contrived in which one poor person impoverishes another. Somehow, poor refugees coming into our country are the ones depriving our own poor people, instead of the many billionaires we protected at the cost of our children, our futures and our self respect.

How was this achieved? Perhaps it’s not all that different from the ISIS destruction of Palmyra.

Perhaps those who  control the way we think have managed to disassociate us from the places and the traditions we inhabit.

It would be nice to think that all we need is a reawakening of our great Irish egalitarian tradition, but unfortunately, we Irish have no glorious history of defending the oppressed.

In the new great migration, for the first time we find ourselves forced to create a new vision of altruism, as the Swedes do and the Germans, but truthfully it’s hard to see us rising above our narrow, self-interested concerns.

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Related posts

Categories
Murder

Graham Dwyer will soon be sentenced to life

Graham Dwyer, the murderer who killed Elaine O’Hara, is due to be sentenced next Monday.

It’s unlikely that the diminutive egotist will serve less than 20 years and he could even serve 30 years or more.  After all, Malcolm McArthur, who killed two people but didn’t inflict sadistic pain on them, served 30 years.

I mention Dwyer’s diminutive stature only because it seems to be an important thing to him, and yes, it’s true that I would like him to suffer as much as humanly possible, because I personally happen to think he’s a despicable piece of shit.

That’s only my personal opinion admittedly, but I feel confident most people will share my opinion.  A piece of shit is a piece of shit.

When Graham Dwyer was asked his height during the filling-out of a routine Garda  form, he said he was 5-foot 10 inches, when in fact he was 5’5″.

That’s very revealing since it exposes his profound insecurity about his stature.  Dwyer was prepared to challenge the completely obvious reality that he is a very small man, even though it was obvious that nobody would believe him.

Dwyer is an extremely small man.

I’ve been told by professionals that people like Graham Dwyer will obsessively read everything written about them, including obscure websites like this, and that’s why I feel driven to write this.

Graham Dwyer is a deeply-inadequate, diminutive sadist.  If it hurts him to see that pointed out in virtual print, that’s ok, as far as I’m concerned.

If it causes him suffering to be called a ridiculous little man, then my job is done here.

And he won’t be getting out before he’s 70.

Good.

 

Categories
Murder

The short, painful life of Garnett Spears

garnett spearsLacey Spears, an American woman who wrote a blog about motherhood, was convicted last month of murder for killing her five-year-old boy by injecting salt into his hospital drip.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be saying What?  What exactly is that?

And yet, this is not an unusual occurrence, due to a bizarre psychiatric condition that drives people to inflict sickness on the people they care for.

Lacey Spears was addicted to the sympathy she received for the suffering of her child and had been harming him since birth to make sure that he remained unwell.  She even invented the death of the child’s fictional policeman father in a road crash when in reality the father remains alive and well.

Münchhausen Syndrome is a well-established set of behaviours by which people pretend to be unwell in order to attract sympathy.  Some would say we all do it from time to time, and maybe they’re correct, but true Münchhausen Syndrome is a severely debilitating psychological illness in which the sufferer is driven to invent bizarre and improbable stories in order to gain sympathy from health professionals.  It’s named in honour of the fictional Baron Münchhausen, purveyor of ludicrously-exaggerated tales.

A branch of Münchhausen Syndrome is the proxy variant, in which the sufferer inflicts injury on a child or other vulnerable person in their care.  Typically, the perpetrator is a parent, and the sicker the child remains, the more sympathy the parent receives.  Thus it becomes necessary to keep the child permanently sick in order to receive permanent sympathy.

That, it seems, is what was happening with Lacey Spears, though this is far from the only example of the syndrome.

The original aspect of this case is that Münchhausen Syndrome by Proxy found the internet, and in particular Facebook, where every half-witted fool is willing to respond to to every half-witted message.  Münchhausen Syndrome finally found the place it had yearned for.

Lacey Spears found Facebook and Twitter.  Lacey Spears found Blogspot.  Lacey Spears found Münchhausen heaven, but  poor little Garnett Spears found Hell.

garnett spears

Baby Garnett was born in December 2008 and spent his first year in hospital twenty-three times, while his mother sought comfort from social-media friends.

At ten weeks old he stopped breathing, due to high sodium levels, the condition that would eventually kill him.

In 2011, his mother took him from Decatur, Alabama, to Clearwater, Florida, to live with his grandmother, when she spent a good portion of her time posting on Facebook about raising a sick child whose police officer father had died in a car crash.  A lie.

The child was constantly in and out of emergency rooms in Clearwater, and a fellow parent complained that Lacey was slapping the baby as hard as possible to make him cry.

During that time, Lacey posted Facebook photos of herself with a child.  My World My Everything.  He Completes Me.  A Mother’s Love Is Unexplainable.

The child in the photos is not Garnett, but Jonathon Strain,a child she minded before her own son was born.  This woman is clearly unwell.

In 2012, Lacey Spears left Clearwater and moved to Chestnut Ridge, New York State where she joined a Steiner group, the Fellowship Community.

In January 2014, Garnett was admitted to the Westchester Medical Center with spiking sodium levels.  As he lay dying, his mother called a friend in the Steiner Fellowship Community, requesting that she dispose of  a bag that she had injected salt into.

Eventually, doctors at the hospital called the police and on the 23rd January, the little boy was declared dead.  His mother posted on Facebook  Garnett the great journeyed onward today at 10:20 a.m.

Lacey Spears received a sentence of 20 years to life for killing the child and yet, frankly, I can derive no satisfaction from it.  This is clearly a woman with a severe psychological disorder, probably learned from behaviour exhibited by adults in her early childhood.

I’m not trying to justify the murder, but I am trying to mitigate the punishment.

We recently had a murder case where the sadistic perpetrator was obviously deranged and deserved to be incarcerated for life, because he is clearly a danger to society.  Graham Dwyer is clearly a nasty piece of work who will continue to seek out victims as long as he has the physical capacity to do so.

Lacey Spears, on the other hand, is a person suffering from an extremely distorted understanding of the world, who has now lost everything.  Is there any point in punishing such people?

How does it benefit society?

I don’t know.

 

Categories
Murder Sexual abuse

The Many Victims of Graham Dwyer

Graham Dwyer has been convicted of murder, confirming what everyone in Ireland, including the trial judge, knew.  The only doubt was this: would the circumstantial evidence be enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he had murdered Elaine O’Hara?

graham dwyer

As it turned out, the prosecution did more than enough to convince the jury, who wasted no time in finding Dwyer guilty of this filthy crime.  Given the appalling evidence presented to the jury, it was to their credit that they didn’t  immediately convict him solely on the grounds of his utter personal vileness.  They didn’t succumb to that temptation.  Instead, they retired and considered the evidence for almost a week, occasionally asking for clarification before finally returning to pronounce him a murderer.

The jury had no scope to convict him of being a pervert, a sadist, a deviant or a psychopath, and that’s just as well, since these labels tell us nothing about the urges that motivated Graham Dwyer.

They tell us nothing about a charming, talented young man who was sacked from at least one architectural practice for destroying the desk of a colleague he’d provoked a row with in the pub.

They tell us nothing about the man from a humble background in Bandon who was so obsessed with his status and his diminutive stature that he hacked the  computer system of an employer to find out how much his colleagues were being paid.

They tell us nothing about the popular, guitar-playing architectural student, liked by women but who preferred to target vulnerable girls with low self-esteem.

Graham Dwyer isn’t suffering from some syndrome.  He doesn’t have a psychiatric condition.   He has no mental illness.  Graham Dwyer is simply bad, all the way to the bone.  This is one evil man and that’s all there is to be said about him.

Sadly, Graham Dwyer has left a string of victims behind him, including, but not confined to, the mother of his first child, who provided the court with horrifying evidence of his desire to stab women during sex.

Including, but not confined to, his wife and his children, who have obviously decided that he’s already dead, ignoring him in court as they gave evidence against him.

Including, but not confined to the family that raised him in Bandon.

We don”t know who else Graham Dwyer has hurt in the course of his violence-obsessed life, but it’s safe to assume that his proclivities didn’t suddenly appear on his fortieth birthday, or his thirtieth or his twentieth.

This is an evil man.  There’s no other way to describe him.

He’s not disordered.  He doesn’t have a psychiatric condition.

He’s simply evil. This evil man enjoys violence against women and when the evil urge overtakes him, he has no control of himself.

It seems clear that the murder of Elaine O’Hara can’t be  Graham Dwyer’s first foray into that horrible world of sadism, so the question now arises, what other murders and disappearances should be re-examined to see if this pervert had some involvement.

Sadly, Dwyer compounded the hurt in the statement he issued after conviction, in which he appears to imply that his children are not his family.  His lawyers, who facilitated this statement, appear to have little difficulty with this.

I wish to take this opportunity to formally thank my legal team, my solicitor Jonathan Dunphy, senior counsel Remy Farrell, barristers Ronan Kennedy and Kate McCormack, for their work and dedication since 2013.
I also wish to thank my family, friends and colleagues for the continued unwavering support throughout this period.
To the members of the media, I am grateful for the privacy you have afforded both my family and people close to me during the trial.
I now respectfully ask that you continue to respect their privacy and I confirm that there will be no further comment by my family or myself concerning this case whatsoever.
Thank you,
Graham Dwyer.

Statement

By contrast, this statement released by his estranged wife, Gemma, shows concern and compassion for Dwyer’s victim.

Gemma Dwyer and her immediate family have noted the proceedings of the court and its guilty verdict today.Their thoughts and condolences are with the O’Hara family for the grief and pain they are suffering.
In the interests of maintaining privacy, and in particular to protect the interests of her children, Gemma Dwyer and members of her immediate family – parents, siblings and children – will not be making any further comment now, or in the future, on the case.
The family would request that the media and members of the public respect their privacy in any further reporting or commentary, particularly with regard to the need to protect their children from any intrusion into their lives.
Categories
Murder Sexual abuse

Graham Dwyer Murder Trial — Lessons to be Learned

The details emerging in the Graham Dwyer murder trial are some of the most disturbing I’ve ever come across, but that’s not because I find the gruesome details shocking.  I’ve encountered some terrible things in the course of my life, including violent death from many causes.

I find the details shocking because the case has exposed a whole sub-culture, a world of people obsessed with inflicting and suffering pain.  A world where some people think of themselves as gods, while others view themselves as worthless objects to be abused and disposed of.

Innocent or guilty of Elaine O’Hara’s murder, this is the world Graham Dwyer immersed himself in, to the extent that his corporeal existence as a partner in the architectural firm Wejcherts seems to have become the fantasy side of his life rather than the reality.  If the evidence is to be believed, Dwyer plunged into the darkness of a world where pain is the only reality, the only currency worth possessing.  The fictional stories found on his external drives detail fantasies of abduction, torture and murder, but what’s deeply disturbing is that these files were kept on the same drive as pictures of family occasions and even a scan of his child in utero, as if they were just another normal part of human existence.

No wonder Graham Dwyer kept his head in his hands as these details were read out to a court cleared of the public by Judge Tony Hunt, though in truth, the judge might as well not have bothered, since we’re already hardened to the brutality of modern life.

On the other side of this equation, Graham Dwyer seemed to find common cause with people who wished to be harmed, humiliated and ultimately murdered.  And he seemed to make contact with them easily enough on the internet where people exist who have such a low opinion of themselves that they consider themselves worthy of nothing better than torture followed by murder.

Out there are people who will gladly offer themselves up for such treatment, and not all of them are women.  In 2001, Armin Meiwes posted an advertisement on  Cannibal Cafe  for “a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be killed and eaten.”   Bernd Brandes replied to the ad, and together they tried to eat Brandes before he died of his injuries.  There was no coercion involved.  Brandes wanted to be killed and eaten.  Some very strange people inhabit the world of pain and humiliation.

When I was growing up, I knew a young lad who took great enjoyment from inflicting pain on small animals.  I don’t know where that impulse came from, but the last I heard he was a school principal somewhere.

How can anyone understand such a thing?  I can’t and neither, in all likelihood, can you.

But the fact is that the world is full of sadistic people and most of them will never kill or even inflict a tiny cut on another human being.  For every gross murder that grabs the headlines, a dozen dysfunctional sadists in business inflict unnecessary pain on a vulnerable colleague, a dozen nasty-minded care professionals humiliate some old person, a dozen power-maddened policemen  force an innocent passer-by to the ground, a dozen direct-provision hostel owners bark instructions at a desperate refugee from torture in a foreign country and a dozen petty Social Welfare officials humiliate some unemployed dole-applicant queueing at a hatch.

Maybe we should ask ourselves if the Graham Dwyer case simply reveals the extreme end of deeply-ingrained human tendency.

 

Categories
Murder

Prurient Reporting of Elaine O’Hara’s Sad Life Needs to Stop

Clichés become clichés because they’re mostly true, except when they happen to be utterly dishonest excuses for vile behaviour.

One that stands out for me is the utterly-discredited nonsense about hard cases making bad law, a pre-digested fallacy that has been used to justify every sort of oppression against women for as long as I can remember, and what’s more, a thoroughly meaningless mantra which is never challenged by our world-leading, cutting-edge journalists.

Sadly, our world-leading, cutting-edge journalists are now bowing the head to another truism: paper never refused ink, even when that paper is metaphorical and thus we see the tabloidisation of our broadcast media, including RTÉ.

We know the broad outlines of the Graham Dwyer murder case.  We also know that Elaine O’Hara was a woman with unusual and personally-harmful preferences.

Do we need to know any more than that?

Do we need to hear an RTÉ reporter, wearing a fake-respectful mask, intone the humiliating details of Elaine’s texts and interactions on social media?  We know what was going on.  We get it.  Do we need to hear Fergal Keane telling us in his particularly soulless delivery things that only Elaine and her therapist needed to know?

In my opinion, this is vampire journalism.

This is news porn dressed up as public-service broadcasting.

Shame on RTÉ.  Shame on the Independent.

We know what was going on with this poor, dead woman.  There is no need to drag the details around like a dog would drag some unspeakable thing found in a hedge.

Isn’t it about time to show some respect?

 

 

Categories
Murder

Copenhagen Shootings

Some pictures from our man in Copenhagen.

Thanks to Brian O’Connor for providing them.

Copenhagen shooting 01

Copenhagen shooting 02

Copenhagen shooting 03

 

Copenhagen shooting 04

 

Copenhagen shooting 05

 

Copenhagen shooting 06

"Muslims and Jews refuse to be enemies
“Muslims and Jews refuse to be enemies”

Copenhagen shooting 08

Copenhagen shooting 09

Copenhagen shooting 10

Categories
Murder Religion

Bizarre RTE Coverage of Cobh Murder-Suicide Tragedy

A man recently released from the Central Mental Hospital,  having been found guilty of a crime but insane, stabs his wife to death, stabs his daughter and then kills himself.

What’s the first thing that crosses your mind there?

The word Why, perhaps?  Why was he released so soon?

And if it’s the first thing that strikes you and me, then we can be certain that a cutting-edge national broadcasting agency will be all over it, asking the hard questions, can’t we?  Why wasn’t this man receiving the psychiatric help he so desperately needed?  Why was he released?  Why wasn’t he under constant supervision in case he experienced another violent episode?  What precisely were the protocols governing his release?  What medication was he on?

You might imagine this was the thrust of RTE’s reporting on the death of Michael Greaney, his wife Valerie and the stabbing of their daughter Michelle, but if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

Instead, RTE led each news bulletin with the information that prayers were being offered.  At 8 am, they quoted a statement from the local Catholic bishop, following up in subsequent bulletins by interviewing a nun and a Catholic priest who was pressed hard by the interviewer to describe how shocked he was, how shocked the community was and what sense of shock hung over Cobh.

Just how shocked are you, Father?  How shocked is everyone?  Are you shocked?

Personally, I’m completely shocked, though I don’t quite know why, since RTE is so prone to this sort of thing, but still, how can we take them seriously as credible journalists when their default position in a case like this is to call a priest for a soundbite? ( A priest who, to his credit, seemed a little repelled by the insistent questions about how shocked he was).

Context is everything, and if this happened to be a once-off aberration, we could probably write it off as poor judgement by an individual editor, but RTÉ doesn’t exist in a vacuum.   This, after all, is the same organisation that cravenly capitulated to legal threats from Catholic ideologues at the beginning of the year, handing them out huge amounts of licence-money to assuage their wounded feelings during the Pantigate affair.

You’d nearly begin to suspect that there was a deep-seated culture of deference to priests in RTE that needs to be scrutinised long and hard.  It’s hard to imagine another news organisation that would open a report on a murder by quoting a bishop.

 

 

Categories
Murder

Medjugorje Pilgrims Stranded in Dublin

Isn’t it terrible to see those poor pilgrims stuck in Dublin airport after their plane had to return to the airport twice?

Well no, actually.  It’s not terrible.  It’s ridiculous and it serves them right for insisting on staying there.  This bunch of gullible eejits from Kerry, Donegal, Galway, Mayo and Limerick booked a flight to visit Medjugorje, one of the most  successful con-jobs Europe has ever seen, a site that attracted Irish fools right through the Bosnian war thanks to a private arrangement between the local warlords, such are the profits it generates.

Wouldn’t you think they’d get a grip and go home instead of waiting for a replacement plane to take them to this ludicrous Marian scam?

Unfortunately for them, the first plane had to turn back, due to a warning light in the cockpit, and when they took off a second time, they had to turn back again because of the same fault.  For such a superstitious bunch, wouldn’t they think the Virgin Mary is trying to tell them something?

You’d be wasting your time trying to tell this crowd  that the whole Medjugorje thing was a master-stroke of public relations, dreamed up by the local Franciscan friars to throw the bishop of Mostar off the trail when he was petitioning Rome to close them down because of their drug-dealing and prostitution rackets.  Of course they wouldn’t believe you, because they need this sort of nonsense in their lives.  They need magic.   They need fairies and apparitions.

That’s the same sort of thing that makes TV clairvoyants so wealthy.  People need nonsense.

Maybe the Virgin Mary, if she was still alive, would be saying, It’s all bullshit, folks.  Stay in Ireland and spend your money on a Declan Nerney concert or something.  Spend it on replacing your worn–out Bridie Gallagher collection.   Better still, spend it on a hundred new books you never read before.   Broaden your fucking mind.

Alternatively, they might consider taking a visit to a different part of the former Yugoslavia, to a place called Jasenovac, where the Croatian Ustasha fascists ran an extermination camp in WW2.  It’s not that far from Medjugorje – hardly more than 200 km as the crow flies – and it would be well worth the trip for anyone wishing to refresh their spiritual compass.

Why would they do a thing like that, you might be wondering?

Because the Jasenovac extermination camp was, for a time, commanded by a Franciscan friar, a man called Filipovic, a notorious mass murderer who became famous for his cruelty.  Ponder on that, people of Medjugorje, and ponder this while you’re at it.  Unless your Virgin Mary is nothing but a money-making shill, would your lady not be appearing first at the site of such horrors to remind the world of what even self-proclaimed holy men are capable of?

jasenovac camp

Our Lady of Jasenovac.

The story of the Franciscan involvement in the savagery of the Croatian and Bosnian fascist era has yet to be fully told, but maybe the truth-seeking pilgrims now stranded in Dublin airport might reconsider their plans and go to Jasenovac instead of spending their money on an enterprise set up by a bunch of pimps and drug-dealers wearing  Franciscan habits as a cover for their criminality.

What am I saying?  The last thing this crowd in the airport want is to think about anything.  Thinking is not on their agenda or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.  They’re looking for magic not insight, certainty not enlightenment, spectacle not awareness.

They are, in fact, the Psychic Sally audience on holiday.