Declan Hayes
Lavrov, like Zakharova, is doing his job. He is making Russia's case and, if NATO want to laugh, so be it.
NATO's media recently had a jolly good giggle highlighting an Indian audience laughing at a recent presentation Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov gave in New Delhi. Lavrov's apparent faux pas was in saying Russia, far from being the aggressor in Ukraine, instead responded to years of attacks on the Russian speakers of the Donbas. If, instead of watching NATO's doctored clip of the talk, we watch the entire presentation , we see that Lavrov handled himself very well and the laughter, which occurs at 28:50, is probably as much to do with the modalities of the presentation and that Lavrov is less proficient in English than he is in French, Dhivehi, Sinhala and the Russian language itself, which is amongst the core targets of this unconscionable war.
Either way, Lavrov can be pleased enough with his performance and, if some NATO clowns got a laugh out of it, so much the better. Lavrov, Zakharova and their crew have been solid performers and their arguments, made on behalf of the Russian authorities, are always worth a listen for those of us with functioning brains.
This is so even though Lavrov's New Delhi speech falls just short of perfection. At 13:07, for example, Lavrov asks "Can you imagine, for example, in Ireland, they cancelled the English language?" If Lavrov cares to read up on Irish history, he will see that the British, as part of their Penal Laws, cancelled the Irish language as well as the Irish Catholic religion and Irish property rights and, as in Donbas, that those wrongs still fester with those of us who don't have a NATO price tag sticking out of our ears.
Although Zakharova stumbled on a similar fence when she referenced the deliberate slaughter of Irish Catholic children by the British Army in the northern part of the island, given the blanket censorship and mini army of Quislings the British used to prosecute their dirty war, her less than perfect knowledge on those events is to be expected; it is par for the course and, in itself, is no big deal.
The point here is that Zelensky's terror campaign is neither new nor novel and it has precedents not only in Ireland but throughout the former Third Reich as well. All of that should be a given. We should not have to waste time trying to find streaks of grey, silver linings in the crimes of the Kiev criminals.
And nor, of course, should Lavrov or Zakharova. But that, unfortunately, is their job, forever slopping out, with nothing bigger than an egg cup, NATO's oceans of lies that forever flood our media.
Irish MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace find themselves adrift in the same leaky boat, with waves of NATO lies, innuendos and smears crashing in on them, much like the Atlantic's waves that pound Ireland's Western shores. Although I have previously written about their travails, controversial Irish MEP Barry Andrews, who has an umbilical link with NATO, is now hot on their case, calling them all sorts of school-yard slurs for not being on NATO's payroll.
Being independent-minded means, according to the CIA, that Daly and Wallace are Putin puppets. Though that is certainly what this dodgy American think tank is implying about Wallace and Daly, its real relevance is that people in Ireland are being paid to help these Americans defame them, as some of the phrases used could only have come from embedded Irish sources, the Navalnys, Quislings and Bialiatskis of the Emerald Isle.
The relevance of that is the Yanks are not straight shooters. Whether it is Ireland or India, Moscow or Minsk, Kiev or Kenya, New Delhi or New York, they have armies of hirelings, heel-of-the-shoe flotsam, paid to help them spread their toxins. This is not to build altars to Lavrov, Zakharova, Wallace or Daly but to say this is where we are, dealing with NATO's serial liars, whose signatures on Minsk and other agreements are meaningless, who regard Russian journalists and German pipelines as legitimate targets and who are, in short, the most amoral, untrustworthy and despicable of creatures.
On the subject of amorality, let's look at where I fell as short on the recent Syrian earthquake as Lavrov did on Ireland's language question. When the U.S., like some gout-ridden Caesar of old, gave us a 180-day window to send aid to Syrian children, I naively thought the Americans and their Israeli sidekicks would leave off bombing Syria until almost the end of that grace period. But then, I mistook the Israeli and American militaries for something less demonic.
If you want to make donations to Syria, send what you can to the Salesian nuns, who run hospitals in Aleppo and Damascus. Make payments out to Istituto Internazionale Maria Ausiliatrice, Via Ateneo Salesiano, 81 - 0013. Banca Popolare di Sondrio - ag.1 Rome - 062 Number: 6400X49; IBAN: EN 20 M 05696 03201 000006400X49; BIC / SWIFT: POSOIT22; UniCredit Banca - Rome. IBAN bank account IT 39 A 02008 03298 000010741637 - BIC/SWIFT: UNCRITM1Y91. Alternatively, send the money to me through here or here and I will send it on in full. And at least have the satisfaction that Barry Andrews' corrupt GOAL or some similar NATO aligned group of thugs is not pocketing it.
On the subject of substantial donations, note that, years ago, the Russian air force offered to air lift shipments of donated baby milk powder, diapers and similar goods from Dublin to Damascus gratis but that the oh so humanitarian government of Andrews et al vetoed it, no doubt having first consulted "our American partners", who are now imposing on Syria the same sort of diaper and calorie counting Belsen regime Israel racks Gaza with.
Let's just think about that for an Auschwitz moment. As another Easter looms on Syria's near horizon, our silent complicity starves Syrians to death as "our American partners" rob their oil and food and deny their infants baby milk powder and diapers. We are no better than those Israelis who bring armchairs with them to watch their Luftwaffe strafe Gaza when they are not forcing pregnant Palestinian women to die at their checkpoints.
But then we, who scoff at Lavrov, along with our "our American partners," may not be as morally omnipotent as we think. As for Lavrov, he let the laughs pass him by before finishing his presentation.
Lavrov, like Zakharova, is doing his job. He is making Russia's case and, if NATO want to laugh, so be it, let them laugh and enjoy their laughter as much as they like. Not only are General Gerasimov and the hundreds of thousands of tooled-up Russian troops he has at the ready no laughing matter but they and their Asian allies are going to wipe those smirks from the faces of Hunter Biden, Zelensky and his coked-up chorus of NATO politicians, propagandists and profiteers, who would have been much better off listening to Lavrov rather than showing their pig ignorance by laughing at their 20 second clip of his 31 minute talk.