Who's a Danger?

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was deported from the United States on February 21st as a danger to the American people.  How absurd.  How scandalous.  Bernadette has, if anything, been a champion of the American people, as they actually exist.  Not the cowboys in the White House and the bigots in the board rooms, but working class people, black people, women, immigrants and dissidents.

Bernadette has always spoken out during her many trips to the United States on behalf of the marginalized and oppressed with the sincerity and depth born of her own community's subjugation.  During the racist backlash in Boston to desegregation in the early 70's Bernadette proudly said she felt more at home with the black community of Roxbury than the Irish Americans of South Boston.  She has stood up against the death penalty and for women's rights.  She, contrary to New Sinn Fein, has always felt more comfortable speaking at a trade union hall than a 1,000-dollar a plate dinner.

Bernadette knows that the American people, in their working class and racially diverse majority, and the US government are two different things with different aspirations.  Those who truly put the citizens of the US at risk are not those opposed to war but those who advocate it.  Sending young men and women to kill and be killed, to handle depleted uranium and experimental inoculations against chemical weapons they previously supplied their current enemy. 

Those who enrage the world with their arrogance and violence.  Those whose military might is so asymmetrical that only a blow against the "soft targets" of the civilian population presents itself as a response by those sadistically inclined are the real threat to the safety of the American population.

Bernadette McAliskey has proven herself a genuine friend and, through her courageous campaign against injustice in Ireland, an inspiration to those in struggle for human rights, social justice and economic equality in the United States.  The real danger to the US population is the proponents of war and austerity who sit in Washington.  Bernadette knows this and speaks eloquently and with conviction of our common human and class solidarity in the face of their violence and lies.  And for that she is a danger, not to the American people but to the US government and that is why she was deported.