Eamon McCann on the Menezes killing

In the wake of the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes, Eamon McCann draws some parallels with state killings in Northern Ireland.

There’s the unwillingness or inability of the political and judicial establishment to accept that the State condones not just trigger-happy police and soldiers and occasionally irresponsible behaviour, but deliberate murder. They shut their minds against the possibility. Or rather, against admission of the possibility.

There’s the notion of no smoke without fire, that for all the apparent innocence of the victim, he or she must have said or done something to “send out the wrong signal” and attract the lethal attentions of the killers.

There’s the operation of deep-set prejudice against the category of people from the whom the victim is most likely to come. In the North, for example, 86 percent of non-paramilitary civilian victims of State killings in the last 30 years have been Catholics.

And there’s the fact that the media and other more subtle manipulators of opinion will set out deliberately to ensure that a false account is first into the public domain and therefore likely to overshadow the truth when and if it eventually emerges. (TheBlanket)