Explosive

Even the damage to property in Dunmurry is unusual these days. Hezbollah, which is probably the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, supposedly droned RAF Akrotiri without managing to damage anything at all, never mind kill or injure anyone. Just as everyone always knew that the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA were riddled with Police informants, MI5 assets, and such like, so it is widely assumed that the New IRA is a false flag operation, while the “New Republican Movement” has been universally greeted as such. The Loyalist organisations have always been known to be off-the-books arms of the British State. And in March 2023, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime, especially drug-dealing, leading to generations of professional and social interaction.

Elsewhere in pyrotechnica, the Daily Mail no longer bothers to call RAF Fairford anything other than a “British air base used by [the] US to strike Iran”. But of course that fire must have been an accident. “Not our war”, and all that. Yet we are to proscribe the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as if the Terrorism Act were to counter the Armed Forces of other sovereign states. Performative proscription is so much cheaper than defence, and no MP should vote against this theatrical display, since that would give satisfaction to Keir Starmer, who has been reduced to whipping the other 402 Labour MPs against referring him to the Privileges Committee for having misled Parliament.

The Iran War, with other questions now following in due course, has thrown into sharp relief the de facto schismatic character of the conservative, or at least the MAGA-minded, wing of the American Church, possibly even complete with one bishop, as would be enough to confer the Episcopate in the manner of Dominique-Marie Varlet. This is far worse than the Western Schism. People on both sides of that have subsequently been canonised as Saints, since neither side, nor eventually any of the three, held any heretical proposition. One, or eventually two, sides merely erred as to who was in fact the Successor of Saint Peter at the given time. Moreover, that error made nothing like the doctrinal or moral difference that it would today.

By contrast, JD Vance’s clear threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran was contrary to everything that the Church had ever taught on the subject, since it was immediately apparent, when such weapons were first developed, that such use could not possibly be reconciled with just war doctrine. That could in fact have been said about the entire war with Iran. As it was. By the Pope. Not for the first time, Vance has demonstrated the inadequacy of his instruction for reception into the Catholic Church. He himself has said that he swam the Tiber because of his political views and at the prompting of his mentor, Peter Thiel, who is many things, but who is not a Catholic. No one else would have been let in on that basis, so someone needs to answer for obvious treatment of the Elegiac Hillbilly as clearly too big a catch to let slip. The hardly ever exercised charism of infallibility does not enter into this. No, the recent and ongoing protestations have been and are against the protestants’ overdue introduction to the Ordinary Magisterium, which is exercised all the time, and to which this Pope has made no addition on the matters at issue. It is just that they cannot ignore an American.

As for proscribed terrorist organisations, the Court of Appeal, which is this week due to hear Shabana Mahmood’s appeal against the High Court’s ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful, has already rejected at least one submission in her support, but has accepted at least three against her, including one from the United Nations. When was anyone last prosecuted for expressing support for the Continuity Army Council, or for Cumann na mBan, or for Fianna na hEireann, or for the Irish National Liberation Army, or for the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation, or for the Irish Republican Army, or for the Loyalist Volunteer Force, or for the Orange Volunteers, or for the Red Hand Commando, or for the Red Hand Defenders, or for Saor Eire, or for the Ulster Defence Association, or for Ulster Freedom Fighters, or for the Ulster Volunteer Force? Last month, Starmer literally gave the red carpet treatment to President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of “Tommy Robinson”, and who is massacring Christians as befits a sometime second-in-command both of Al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State to which Shamima Begum was trafficked such that she was not permitted to return to Britain, even to the point of having been stripped of her British citizenship.

The same has been done to Mark Bullen for nothing more than living in his wife’s and children’s native Russia while disliking British support for what ought to be proscribed terrorist organisations:  Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and anything else in similar vein. Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

Does the proscription of the Wagner Group extend to the Africa Corps, which yesterday joined the Malian Armed Forces in killing one thousand Al-Qaeda and IS terrorists while injuring three thousand more? Would it be a criminal offence to express approval of that outcome? Might it attract something like the treatment to which Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky, was subjected not long before his recent death at the age of 86? Returning to the Realm of which he was a Peer, the Britain of whose Academy he was a Fellow, he was detained under counterterrorism legislation. I am in no fit state to travel abroad, but it would almost be worth doing so if I could guarantee that on my return, I would be counted in the illustrious company of Lord Skidelsky, Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, and George Galloway.