I've been meaning for weeks to comment in more detail on former Alba man Neil Sinclair's claim that vocal opponents of the Gaza genocide are 'piggy-backing' their cause onto the independence movement, and that Yessers must 'protect' the movement at all costs by silencing all views about Gaza or at least putting them into a sort of sealed antechamber where they cannot contaminate the drive for independence. There's a paradox here, of course, because Neil also demanded that Gordon Millar's "Sacred Comment" defending and 'contextualing' the genocidal views of the Israeli civilian population must be published in full on this pro-independence blog, and he denounced my earlier deletion of it as "censorship".
So why wasn't he logically consistent by applauding my refusal to allow Millar to contaminate this pro-independence space with a pro-Israel agenda and frankly repugnant apologism for genocide? There was something really rather comical about the way that Neil initially broached the subject on his private chat group for former and disillusioned Alba members. He grandly announced out of the blue that we were going to have to discuss the issue of "censorship" and that on this occasion it just so happened to touch on the issue of Israel/Palestine. As several people instantly pointed out in a state of some bewilderment, whenever anyone else had wanted to make comments that just so happened to touch on the issue of Israel/Palestine, Neil had always been extremely quick to invite them to either shut up about it or to take it elsewhere. But perhaps it's different when it's a mate of Neil who wants the freedom to express views on Israel/Palestine and to do it in the pro-independence space of his choice? Perhaps it's different when Neil himself has strong private sympathy with the specific views on Israel/Palestine that are being piggybacked onto the independence cause? Or perhaps it's because he saw Millar's 'contextualising' of genocide (essentially saying that Palestinians are undesirable troublemakers who 'nobody wants') as just 'regrettable statements of fact' that need to be introduced into the pro-independence space to 'help people to understand' why it is so terribly important to silence or banish all other expressions of views about the subject?
Openly expressed anti-genocide views might, for example, offend the many independence supporters who are supposedly pro-Israel and pro...well, pro-genocide, not to put too fine a point on it, or who at least, like Stuart "Stew" Campbell, think there are overwhelmingly strong arguments against taking any sort of principled stance about the mass extermination of an ethnic group. Above all else, it might prevent us from immersing ourselves totally into the 24/7 crusade against women with beards, and we can't be having that, can we? It was interesting that after I called Neil out publicly on his hypocrisy, his main cheerleader kept saying to me "Neil and I don't like the genocide and we've criticised Israel's actions on occasion, but..." The operative word is always 'but', isn't it?
I can see absolutely no evidence to support Neil's fantastical claims of entryism of anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian activists into the independence movement or into specific pro-independence parties. There would scarcely need to be any entryism, because the anti-genocide cause is the cause of literally millions of people in this country, and those people can therefore entirely naturally be found in huge numbers in all walks of life and in all organisations. And there's an especially strong affinity between independence supporters and the Palestinian cause, for the obvious reason that it touches on issues of self-determination and domination by a more powerful neighbour. If Palestinian flags were ever to be banned from pro-independence marches, as Neil Sinclair and his ilk demand, many Yessers who have been devoted to the goal of independence for years or decades would feel hurt and confused. They'd think the movement had lost its heart, its soul, its humanity, that it had been turned into a sterile, soulless environment by dictatorial headmaster types with no moral compass or even common sense. They might start walking away from the movement in their droves, and for what? To protect the sensibilities of the supposed hordes of 'silent' pro-indy folk who are disgusted by Palestinian flags, either because they think the genocide is cool, or because they think the arguments for and against the genocide are far too complex to grapple with? Well, where exactly are these people? Where are they hiding? Frankly I think there are about twelve of them, and they're all helpfully closeted off in Neil Sinclair's chat group or the Wings Over Scotland comments section.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Israeli sympathisers on the Sinclair chat group informed me on the night of the Eurovision Song Contest that the twelve points awarded to Israel by the "UK public" was indicative that there was a silent pro-Israel majority out there, or a silent majority that doesn't care at all for the Palestinians. I pointed out that there was massive evidence that the vote had been manipulated on an industrial scale by the State of Israel and by sympathetic actors, and that it hadn't been at all hard to do given that each phone number or payment card could vote up to twenty times for the same song. With the overall vote split between 25 different countries, it didn't take all that many sets of twenty votes to push Israel into the 'douze points' position. There were even some people boasting on social media that they had managed to vote EIGHTY times for Israel because they had payment cards registered in four different jurisdictions.
But these points were met with sneering incredulity: "Don't you think, James (snigger) that it's just a tad more likely that these were just ordinary British people voting for their favourite song, as they do every year?" No, I replied, it was far more likely that the State of Israel has engaged in massive manipulation of the vote, partly because of the evidence I had already identified, and also partly because the Israeli song was pretty bland and clearly wouldn't have topped a public vote on its own merits. And with impeccable timing, a Find Out Now poll conducted among a demographically representative sample of UK viewers of the contest was published only a day or two later, setting out exactly what would have happened if British people had just voted for their favourite song and if there had been no Israeli manipulation of the vote -
Find Out Now poll, 18th May 2025:
Of the following countries, whose performance did you particularly like? Please select any that apply. (UK excluded from below numbers, because British viewers couldn't vote for the UK in the contest itself.)
1) Sweden: 28%
2) Estonia: 19%
3) Austria: 18%
4) Malta: 15%
5) Iceland: 14%
6) Spain: 12%
=) Latvia: 12%
=) Finland: 12%
9) Italy: 11%
=) Israel: 11%
11) Luxembourg: 10%
=) Switzerland: 10%
=) Germany: 10%
14) Denmark: 9%
=) Netherlands: 9%
16) France: 7%
=) Armenia: 7%
18) Norway: 6%
=) Greece: 6%
20) San Marino: 5%
=) Lithuania: 5%
22) Ukraine: 4%
23) Portugal: 3%
=) Poland: 3%
25) Albania: 2%
So, as I suspected, there would have been no humiliation for Israel if the vote hadn't been manipulated, but it would have been no better than the upper end of mid-table respectability for them.
The irony is that the
whole reason that Israel went to such lengths to manipulate the vote was to mess with people's heads and to try to get them to say things like "uh-oh, maybe we'd better disassociate our political cause from the Palestinians, it looks like we've misread the public mood". It is nothing short of
astounding how easy it was for Israel to deceive some members of Neil's chat group into precisely the desired response - but, then, that was because the fictional version of the British and Scottish public that Israel was presenting them with was one that they desperately wanted to believe in.
"Relative" is an interesting choice of word, because here is a direct comparison from Stew's very favourite traffic comparison site SimilarWeb:
Estimated total visits in the 28 days up to 16th June 2025:
The National: 2,079,000
Wings Over Scotland: 242,808
Looked at that way, The National's anti-genocide stance appears to be almost ten times more popular than Stew's "both sidesing" moral bankruptcy. I know some will argue that it's unfair to directly compare traffic for a newspaper website to traffic for a mere blog, but who are we to argue with Stew's long-standing delusions of grandeur? Perhaps of more significance is the comparison between The National and their own direct competitors such as The Herald and The Scotsman. The Herald are not all that far ahead on around 2,700,000 visits, while The Scotsman are on around 4,300,000. In both cases, the differential is less than I would have expected given the perception of The National as a relatively 'small' publication.
It may well be that The National is gaining significant traction simply by being the only mainstream media outlet in the UK to actually provide a genuine news service on the Gaza issue. Many people well beyond the borders of Scotland have pointed out that literally nobody else is doing what The National is doing. That has vastly improved the paper's reputation - and by extension it has enhanced the reputation of the independence movement itself.
Once international organisations and academics are able to access Gaza, the full scale of one of the gravest crimes against humanity since 1945 will become apparent and will be documented in detail. There will then be a reckoning about the complicity of western governments and western media. The National, the only pro-independence newspaper in Scotland, will shine like a beacon for having been on the right side of history from day one. Why anyone in the independence movement could possibly think that is a bad thing is beyond me.
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