The Irish media have been accused of helping to fuel the anti-American hatred that led to the suicide attacks on 11 September, 2001.
Retired American diplomat George Dempsey has claimed sections of the Irish press and broadcasters share the responsibility for what happened in New York and Washington DC on 9/11. In an exclusive extract from his memoirs published next month, the former head of the United States Embassy’s political section in Dublin has also launched a bitter critique of Irish foreign policy.
On the Irish media’s response to the attacks, Dempsey said: ‘Let us be clear about this. The Irish media, in general, bear their share of the responsibility for what happened in the United States. For far too long in this country there has been a prevailing view, which denigrates and condemns and even vilifies American foreign policy.
Many of these venomous falsehoods — such as claims that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed in the Gulf war — have continued to spill out over Irish airwaves this last week. The hatred of America, which drove the suicidal terrorists, doesn’t flourish in a global vacuum.’
He claimed that Irish columnists appeared to blame the United States itself for the terrorist attacks rather than Osama bin Laden’s Islamist network.
Dempsey, who served as a senior US diplomat in Dublin between 1988 and 1992, singled out the Irish Times and RTE in particular for what he described as ‘witless pandering to Arab irrationality and intransigence’.
The ex-diplomat claimed that the Irish media were dominated by ‘an invasion of the body snatchers from a planet peopled by time-warped 1960s radicals and Marxist revisionist historians’.
Dempsey said this domination led to coverage that was more favourable to dictators like Saddam Hussein than the United States. He pointed to the constant use of anti-American journalists and commentators on RTE and the Irish Times who were asked to report or analyse foreign affairs as evidence of this alleged bias.
In his critique of Irish foreign policy at the time of the 1991 Gulf war, Dempsey noted that Ireland ‘was the only country in the civilised world which did not support the coalition in that war — the only assistance lent by Ireland was to allow US military transports to transit Shannon airport’.
He added that during the build-up to last year’s invasion of Iraq, ‘Irish attention seemed preoccupied with questions of Ireland’s neutrality, as though there was a moral case to be made in support of Saddam’s contention that Western ”imperialism”was behind it all’.
Dempsey, who led the US Embassy’s political section in Dublin during the critical years before the 1994 IRA ceasefire, also attacks the notion that President Clinton engaged in the peace process simply to garner Irish-American votes.
Paying tribute to John Hume, Dempsey said the central reason why Bill Clinton took a direct role in Northern Ireland was down to the persuasive powers of the SDLP leader. – Guardian Unlimited Â