McPherson: Trump Supported Terrorists?

Donald Trump is scoring well with voters – very well – and that has his many enemies in a bit of a tizzy. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll shows The Donald hitting a record high of 35% , despite weeks of relentlessly covering his endless ability to stick his foot right in his mouth. The more ridiculous he becomes (though, to be fair, not everything he says is ridiculous), and the more the media tries to whip up anti-Trump hysteria, the more people seem to like him.

The mainstream media has nothing but contempt for the average American, like the politicians for whom they carry so much water. Don’t we stupid plebs understand that global climate change is more dangerous than terrorism, and guns are bad? Americans reject such nonsense – so the mainstream media hates us. And if more Americans than ever are supporting The Donald, that means the mainstream media needs to work harder at hating him too.

Even to the point of making up stories about him.

Most recently, the Guardian ran this story, with a misleading headline and even more dishonest subtitle. Worse, the shallow text of the story itself is a Petri dish of distortion, conjecture, and plain ol’ bad reporting.

Let’s take things one at time.

First, a little background.

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In August 1994 the Irish Republican Army (IRA) declared a unilateral ceasefire in preparation for multi-party negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland, a tiny province of the United Kingdom carved out of the island of Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-22) and handed over to a bigoted, fascistic government in Stormont Castle outside of Belfast – a “Protestant parliament” serving a “Protestant people,” as an early Prime Minister would put it.

Late in the 1960s a civil rights movement, modeled largely on our own, developed to work for peaceful change on behalf of the minority Catholic population. Following a series of missteps and brutal acts of repression by the Stormont government the civil rights movement quickly morphed into an armed struggle, giving birth to a revitalized IRA (virtually defunct since the end of the Irish Civil War, 1922-23) and launching a generation of violence. (Chapters 6 and 7 of my ebook cover these important time periods in 20th Century Irish history.) Around 1991 or 1992 representatives of the IRA and British intelligence agencies starting talking to each other, leading to an agreement by the IRA in 1994 to declare a ceasefire and begin working with other groups in Northern Ireland to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.

The “Irish Peace Process,” as it was commonly called, would eventually involve the British government, the Irish government, representatives of Protestant paramilitary (i.e. terrorist) groups, peace activists from the around the globe – and even the President of the United States. It would also, I should add, lead to the historic Good Friday Agreement, and peace in Northern Ireland.

The headline of the Guardian story reads, “Trump attended fundraiser for Sinn Féin before London terror attack.”

Little is left to the imagination here. A “fundraiser” implies that attendees financially (and, by extension, morally) support the organization in question and its agenda; “before” suggests imminence. Both claims are arguably false.

At the time Donald Trump was “attending a fundraiser,” the IRA was about 7 months into its ceasefire, and Sinn Féin, the political party representing the IRA, was enjoying a high-water mark of popularity in Britain, Ireland, and the US. A ban forbidding Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams from traveling throughout the UK and Ireland and a legal gag prohibiting him from speaking on television and radio was lifted by the British and Irish governments, and the US government issued him a visa so that he could come here, raise money, and spread the word about the peace process. A US-based group called Friends of Sinn Féin asked him to come speak in New York, and the cost of attendance was $200. Donald Trump paid the fee and watched the speech. End of story.

That’s all the Guardian’s got, but it didn’t stop the reporter, Henry McDonald, from making great leaps in his attempt to wrap The Donald in a bloody Irish tricolor. Incapable of finding anything substantive that might stick to the GOP candidate (who does appear to be made of Teflon), he decides again to let the reader’s imagination fill in the Swiss cheese-like credibility of his story by stating that, “As well as paying the $200 entry fee, business leaders and other donors, including a number of US celebrities, were asked to give donations to Friends of Sinn Féin.” Business leaders – he means Donald Trump – were asked to make a donation. There’s no evidence The Donald did any such thing. If there was, McDonald (and it would be fair to reference the popular fast food clown at this point, given the laughable reporting and complete lack of substance in this story) would be offering that up for consumption, rather than baiting readers with petty innuendo.

It gets worse.

The subtitle to the piece states, “Republican presidential candidate attended a 1995 dinner in New York for Irish party accused of supporting terrorism just before attack in London,” followed by the first paragraph, which reads, “Donald Trump attended a Sinn Féin fundraising dinner in New York just months before the party’s allies in the Provisional IRA ended its ceasefire with a massive terror attack in London’s Canary Wharf district.“ (Emphasis mine) We get the impression that IRA bombs starting going off immediately after The Donald handed over his two Benjamins. But its paragraph number four that fully betrays McDonald’s gargantuan failure as a reporter here. He writes, “Trump and Adams met in the Essex Hotel in Manhattan in March 1995 at an event organised by the US-based Friends of Sinn Fein,” and (paragraph six) that ”less than four months later the [IRA] ended its ceasefire with a huge bomb in London’s Docklands on 9 February 1996. Two men working in a nearby newsagents were killed in the massive explosion, which caused £100m in damage to the Canary Wharf/South Quay district.” (Emphasis mine)

I remember that day vividly; I was living in Bristol, England at the time, and my wife was traveling to visit friends in Southampton. That event did take place, as McDonald says, in February 1996.

The trouble is, that’s almost a full year after The Donald was allegedly giving money to a terrorist group. McDonald knows this, because he wrote it in his own damn story. He’s clearly willing to stretch facts until they scream, and right under our noses. An editorial note at the bottom of the story says that the original version incorrectly dated the Essex Hotel event as taking place in November 1995. That was corrected, but the insinuations and bad math remain.

Are mainstream reporters so arrogant that they don’t even try to hide their biases anymore?

The IRA did in fact break their ceasefire in early 1996, and renewed it the following year, fortunately for good. During both of these cessations in violence many prominent people met with Sinn Féin leaders, including Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. Talking heads at the time even surmised that the IRA’s slouch toward peace greatly contributed to Sinn Féin’s considerable success in subsequent elections – and the willingness of many respectable (sic) figures to step forward and voice their support for the peace process. Does anyone remember another major political figure who met Gerry Adams around this time? President Bill Clinton shook the man’s hand the same month as Donald Trump. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a headline linking the Clintons to Irish terrorists.

No one needs to be a Trump supporter to see desperation within the mainstream media, and the political establishment. Eager to separate the man from his enthusiastic supporters, reporters will stoop to insinuation, innuendo, and even bad journalism if they think it will help. All of that just further cements people’s disdain for the mainstream media, and may even be driving voters into Trump’s camp.