Macdara is keen to emphasise his agreement with Abbott’s basic point: the racism (or prejudice) suffered by minorities now classified as white, is different in various ways to that experienced by non-white people. This closes nothing down, but is a reasonable starting off point for exploring all the various ways that different groups experience different kinds of prejudice in different contexts. 

But the reaction was telling in focusing only on what Abbott said about Jewish people. Jewish people have been subject to every indignity and violence, the Holocaust having taken place just years before Abbott was born, and in that sense the media was right to criticise what Abbott said. However the present writer so much believes in antisemitism that he doesn’t believe that those who cry out about antisemitism actually care about Jewish lives, as distinct from using the word as a convenient weapon against the Left. 

The state of which Abbott is a prominent member has not waged a war on Jewish people in Abbott’s lifetime; in the abstract—that is, if one knew nothing about the laziness and stupidity of the London media—one might expect an informed media to criticise her statements using detailed evidence about the London-based State’s violence against Irish people in the Occupied Territories and on Britain. Torture, murder, incarceration, in addition to all the little things that make life hell—calling it racism or prejudice makes no difference—Abbott knows that these things happened, but still wrote her letter, and the London media should know that they happened, but chose to skip over the the issue. 

Looking further back, we find even greater acts of violence, over centuries, with the administration of genocide through starvation a century before Abbott was born. In a more recent podcast from the Financial Times, one quite thoughtful correspondent referred back to the letter, citing its comments on Jewish and Traveller people. What would this man have to say if called on to explain why Irish people were missing from his sentence? Is it that Irish people are so accepted as white that it is just absurd to include them in this context, or is it that Irish people, as a subject people, must be discounted, removed from political discussion wherever possible?

In short, the London media would show it was serious about racism if it had engaged with what she said about Irish people. Let us note too that while the letter is ostensibly about racism directed towards Black people, the effect of its phrasing renders Black people weirdly absent, or out-of-focus. Macdara also notes the lack of a reference to the parties responsible for the slave trade, which includes the Kingdom of which Abbott is a representative, as Mother of the House of Commons. If she is going to get a monstering in the media, Macdara suggests that Abbott might be better off being attacked for clearly articulating the past and current racism of this country towards Black peoples, whether or not she wishes to note the prejudice suffered by other groups too.