There is a peculiar symmetry about the Bloody Sunday inquiry into the killing by soldiers of unarmed demonstrators concluding just as the Israeli inquiry into the shooting of unarmed peace activists is set up. But there is another fascinating common factor – David Trimble.
Trimble opposed the Bloody Sunday inquiry from the start. This from the BBC in 1998:
But the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, dismissed Mr Blair’s hope that an inquiry could be part of the healing process in Northern Ireland.
“Opening old wounds like this is likely to do more harm than good,” Mr Trimble said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/51740.stm
This week Trimble has been reinforcing that opposition to the diminsihing numbers who will listen – his reason? He thinks it is wrong that any soldier should be treid for murdering unarmed people:
David Trimble, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who led Protestants into Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord, told The Guardian newspaper he had long opposed the idea of a new Bloody Sunday inquiry because it would be certain to provide fresh ammunition for those seeking to convict or sue the soldiers involved.
Trimble was quoted as saying he advised then-
British prime minister Tony Blair not to throw out Widgery’s verdict, because “if you moved one millimeter from that conclusion, you were into the area of manslaughter, if not murder.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100611/ap_on_re_eu/eu_nireland_bloody_sunday
Why the Israelis would view Trimble as a good international frontman for their whitewash is blindingly obvious. Even more so when you consider that on the very day of the flotilla murders, David Trimble was in Paris chairing the glitzy launch of a new “Interrnational Friends of Israel” group.
It is therefore no surprise at all that it was that indefatigable – and extremely well remunerated – Friend of Israel, Tony Blair, who gave Netanyahu Trimble’s name as a safe pair of hands for the cover-up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/14/eu-gaza-raid-inquiry
Look let’s just give it 40 years or so before any Inquiry starts.
We waited that length of time for the Brits to come clean. Does anyone really think the Israelis are gonna do the same in the near future?
On the inescapable parallels between the two settler siege-mentalities in N.Ireland and Israel-the geo-political strategists who planned the Jewish settler colony wanted future “Israelis” to be exactly like the militant ethno-supremacist Unionists in Ulster.
One of these planners Sir Ronald Storrs’s wrote in 1937 that Britain needed a place in the Middle East started by emigrants from Russia who would set up an Ulster-like garrison colony that would become a perpetual thorn in the side of all its neighbours.
Like the powerful Sabbatean Jews who hijacked Zionism these planners had no real wish to live in the state they created!
Who could blame them?
The ethno-supremacist outlook of Israeli Jews is rarely mentioned in mainstream sources. Well I mean how could any Jew be ethnocentric?
What after the “Holocaust” ?
Never!
People who’ve actually lived there tell a different story.
Jack Bernstein a US Jew married a Sephardi and moved to Israel.He and his wife were despised as second class citizens because she was Sephardi.
In Israel where Ashkenazi supremacy reigns Arab and Ethiopian immigrant populations are likewise second class citizens.
Likewise the ethno-ascendancy mentality of the N Ireland Unionists rarely commented on in British coverage did not escape the notice of Geoffrey Bell who wrote the first factual analysis of the Ulster Protestants (1976).
Another link between the enmity betwixt Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and Israel and its perceived enemies is the financial interests who fostered it in the first place.
In Ireland this goes all the way back to Cromwell.
Check out John Kaminski’s Tale of Two Traitors re-Cromwell and Churchill.
http://www.johnkaminski.info/pages/the_next_chapter_/a_tale_of_two_traitors.htm
Trimble was the last representative of the Ulster Unionist horse the British had backed throughout the history of the N.Ireland statelet.
When he was finally cast aside by Protestant voters who overwhelmingly backed Paisley the British and Trimble ended up with egg on their faces.
The British had always been riding a losing horse and their failure to foresee that peace could only be achieved when the Loyalists could cut a deal with Sinn Fein typified the lack of judgement shown by Britain throughout.
There are no prizes for guessing who next losing horse is going to turn out to be.
The day will come when the Israelis will be cast aside by their British sponsors just as easily as were Trimble and the Unionists.
It won’t be before time either.
I just read two fascinating comments with links re-the unmissable resemblance between the Unionist and Israeli settler mindset.
You need to be very quick though to read the best stuff on this site because our editor is apparently now employed by B’nai B’rith/ADL and has now become addicted to blanket censorship.
Textual references deleted included the following:
Sir Ronald Storr’s Orientations (1937)
Jack Bernstein’s Life Of An American Jew in Racist Marxist Israel (1985)
The Protestants of Ulster by
Geoffrey Bell (1976)
I have read the last two and can vouch for the fact that Bernstein’s is a standard anti-Zionist text that thoroughly corroborates the ethno-supremacism practised in Israel by the Azkenazi elite.
Bell’s book was the first in-depth study of Ulster Protestants and Bell made noticeable reference to the ethno-supremacist attitudes against Irish nationalists shared by many in that community.
Freeborn noted that Storr’s 1937 book stated the British geo-strategic preference for an Ulster-like garrison state in the Middle East to be populated initially by emigrants from Russia. It was Storrs’s wish that the new state in Palestine would become a perpetual thorn in the side of all its neighbours.
I think Freeborn made mocking reference in his comments to people who simply did not believe that Israeli Jews could be capable of ethno-supremacist attitudes. The “Holocaust” is believed by such people to have rendered them quite above such capacity for prejudice and discrimination!
Why on earth Mr Murray believes blanket censorship of such comments and ideas is compatible with free speech is difficult to fathom until one looks beneath the surface.
Evidently Craig Murray believes his audience are not capable of making up their own minds about the glaring parallels between Israeli bigots and Ulster Protestant bigots.
When the topic of the post actually invites such parallels the aforementioned comments could not have been deleted on the grounds they were off-topic. Both writers obviously had some understanding of the topic as was reflected in the choice of texts they made to support their argumnts.
I am now convinced that Mr Murray actually believes he can find new employment in some field where Zionist money and Lobby influence pulls the strings-could it be the corporate media?
Therefore rather than allow free comment on Israel and related topics he is so fearful of alienating his potential employers he won’t take the risk any more.
Now that Obama now has the legal emergency power to shut down the internet:
http://propagandamatrix.com/articles/jun2010/061610_kill_switch.htm
-perhaps Mr Murray is shutting down his site in anticipation of Internet 2!
Any comments deemed critical of Israel and its supporters by his future employers will be verboten.
Another fake opposition scam just outed itself!
Can’t wait to come across Craig’s new “media project” re-Perfidious Albion. It’ll be Imperialism with mention of the money behind it completely deleted.
A bit like Niall Ferguson!
Sad liberalism has evidently gone the way of the Enlightenment as described by Adorno and Horkheimer.
Are we allowed to mention them here?
I once met an Israeli consultant in an airport queue in New York. He was returning from some medical conference in Europe. When he realised I was Irish he asked me aout my views on the situation in Northern Ireland at that time (early 1990s). I shared my views with him, assuming he was thinking in terms of an NI/Israeli parallel.
When I then attempted to explore with him the possible application of approaches to an NI solution to the Israeli/Palestinian impasse, he clammed up.
That was my first contact with an Israeli and I was not impressed.
Depicting Ulster Protestants as ‘ethno supremacist’ is as bigoted as depicting Ulster Catholics as lawless beligerents.
That Unionist politicians are suckers for anti-terrorism rhetoric is unfortunate but perhaps more excusable than those politicians in more peaceful constituencies.
Steelback- You dont want to know what your so called resistence fighters used to do captured soldiers, and policemen and people who dared to just socialy integrate. The IRA used medievial style torture strategicaly. It wasnt a fight for common human rights, it was brutal old cultural divisions enflamed by protagonists and guns and bombs and money for divils donated by foreigners.
That is the true meaning of the troubles in Northern Ireland for the great majority of population of Ulster – who are CIVIL people, protestant and catholics combined.
It should be more than obvious that Israel and Ulster are vastly different places and stories.
You can draw parallels between a chair and a toilet, but mind where you…
“Can’t wait to come across Craig’s new “media project” re-Perfidious Albion. It’ll be Imperialism with mention of the money behind it completely deleted.
A bit like Niall Ferguson!”
Perfidious Albion is another thread. Besides, Ferguson DOES mention where money for wars comes from. In particular in, “The Ascent of Money”. Even the Rothschilds get a look in.
But why let facts get in the way of Steelback’s obsessive narratives?
“Sad liberalism has evidently gone the way of the Enlightenment as described by Adorno and Horkheimer.”
Ich bin eine Frankfurter!
sandcrab
What a pity you couldn’t find any texts to support your argument re-Ulster Protestants not being ethno-supremamcist.
You then moved on to make an irrelevant point re-IRA tactics being particularly cruel.
I assume the point you’re making is that the Republican side had etnocentric tendencies too. I would’t disagree. Anyone who’s familiar with rebel songs would have noticed references to Saxon Hun etc.!
At the same time many of the studies done on cross-community interaction found each community made constant reference to ethnic and cultural stereotypes as markers in their dealings with “the other”.
But IRA tactics simply point to the fact that no war is pretty and only a piss-poor resistance army is going to make life comfortable for occupying troops!
Yes, I agree with polo’s comments re. the parallel drawn by Freeborn wrt British imperial policy wrt Ulster and Palestine. Also re. supremacism in general. This is the commonality.
N. Ireland, S. Africa, Kashmir, Palestine – all very different, but all serving the same purpose.
I think that’s an excellent parallel and is one which peoples in many parts of the world have often commented on. I don’t think the comments have been deleted, though, have they? They’re still there – unless there were others which I’ve not noticed. As I said on another thread, while sometimes he gets carried away and extrapolates, etc., basically Freeborn has a hell of lot of powerful and useful things to say – and link to.
However, sandcrab has made a very good point as well. This is emphatically not to draw a parallel b/w ‘Ulster Protestants’ and Israeli rulers – in my view – but simply to demonstrate the common threads that ran thru’ British imperial policy in C19th and C20th centuries.
Indeed, there was always a vibrant tradition of argumentative discourse and left-wing activism among the Ulster Protestant communities – information about which one never hears. Same with Republicanism, there were left-wing groups, etc. who wanted to have, and were actively building, cross-community political activism – but (surprise, surprise) the Provos, Ian Paisley and the assorted UK assets crushed all that.
“What a pity you couldn’t find any texts to support your argument re-Ulster Protestants not being ethno-supremamcist.”
Are you telling us all that text = empirical evidence?
I think not, in fact I find that personal anecdotes from many contributors here provide more honest and factual information on any given situation than much of the media distorted, politically and financially biased articles, books, and column inches written by those with a financial incentive to write.
well said Craig, how apt you speak of the connective tissue here.
There there is the facts to be seen here on the ground.
Arbuthnot (former Tory Chief Whip who ‘renegotiated’ Lord Belize’s peership in secret and kept stumm for ten years) current Chair of the Conservative Friends of Israel, has just been given one of the chairmanships of a key select committee (would that be defence procurement?)
A nastier list of Zionist supporting fascists you would NOT like to be listening to.
http://www.tfa.net/thefreedomzone/speakers.html
All the usual suspects are there inc Trimble.
Ingo – re Arbuthnot
I can spot at least eight FoI here without even checking and there are probably more.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2010/06/results-of-elections-for-select-committee-chairs-announced/
Freedom indeed! The organisers behind that conference I linked to above. I can’t believe that Rhodes Boyson is still alive. Wikiedia says that he was born in 1925. http://www.tfa.net/the_freedom_association/whoarewe.html
“piss-poor resistance army is going to make life comfortable for occupying troops”
In Ulster the majority of the population where historically established britons and *wanted to remain british*. British troops were no more ‘occupying’ Ulster than they were occupying Scotland and Wales! The population of Ulster, for came under physical attack from foreigners with different political ideas for the people of Ulster. In that situation of course you have some people, many people in traumatisted communities who support ‘ethno supremacist’ statements. That is different from saying they all instinctively *are* ethno supremacist – they find themselves in a foreigner funded dog fight.
For my dreams, Scotland and Wales should leave the Union, Northern Ireland too, then we could all get together again in a new union which could maybe cope with westminsters disproportionate appetites.
But Northern Ireland joining the South on its own has never been a viable political solution – because! the majority of the people never wanted it.
How can you know that fact and talk about occupying imperialist troops?
@Suhayl
You probably know about it but worth mentioning after your earlier post.
http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/
@Suhayl
following reading this article. I know where I would like to put a cattle prod, following insertion of the drugs and Kalashnikov we discussed on the drugs thread.
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3043/full
“then we could all get together again in a new union” i meant including Eire – There is no insurmountable cultural divide between the Irish and the rest of the British Isles, we swap comedy music and materialist aspirations these days. There has just been this stupid prehistoric bloodsport encouraged between a tiny minority of republican and unionist gangsters. Stop supporting the right to kill and torture people over/for self determination, and we could team up pretty good.
Ah, Rhodes Boyson – there’s a name! Isn’t he the gentleman who met up with “Ali G in da house” and was rather proud of announcing that he “got caned” regularly whilst at school? Asked whether it affected his concentration at all, he missed the joke entirely, and cheerfully insisted that getting caned actually +improved+ his concentration.
Arf!
Thanks, Redders, I’ll check-out the link. Yes, I know what you mean!
Rhodes Boyson, the man who seesm to enjoy cultivating an image somewhat akin to that of Edward Casaubon from ‘Middlemarch’.
Steelback,
Oh! you are trying to connect ‘Zeta Beta Tau’ to the ‘Court of St James’ and eventually the link to zionist Larry who gathers intelligence from this site?
“Indeed, there was always a vibrant tradition of argumentative discourse and left-wing activism among the Ulster Protestant communities – information about which one never hears. Same with Republicanism, there were left-wing groups, etc. who wanted to have, and were actively building, cross-community political activism – but (surprise, surprise) the Provos, Ian Paisley and the assorted UK assets crushed all that.”
What seems to have been completely driven out is any memory of peoples’ peaceful attempts to demand what ought to have been “civil rights”.
sandcrab
If you deny that the British constituted an occupying army and subscribe to the “because the majority of N.Ireland people are law-abiding and did not aspire to a united Ireland” narrative-I’m afraid you are living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Moreover you are wilfully ignoring 800 years of Irish resistance to British rule-a not insignificant dimension of the conflict!
The communities that bore the brunt of the occupation were the ones who traditionally stood intransigent against any attempt to impose any externally-sanctioned (read British) form of domination.
Aside from the urban nationalist areas in Belfast like Ardoyne,the Falls,Short Strand et al there were whole swathes of the statelet including not only Derry but large areas of Fermanagh and Tyrone,S.Armagh where Unionists were the minority.
The corporate media and state-sponsored history may have encouraged you to think that the establishment narrative is the only show in town and anything that runs counter to that can be simply air-brushed-however in the real world you need to have made yourself aware of the counter-history.
Partition never enjoyed legitimacy
in any of these areas.It was bitterly resented in the South as well where a civil war was fought by those IRA people who felt the deal Collins had struck with the British was a sell-out of nationalists left stranded under Unionist domination in the North.
As with Israel the legitimacy of the N.Ireland statelet has always been questioned from the start by those who were the victims of the dispossession and ethnic cleansing by which it was first established.
The idea that the Protestants ever constituted a majority in Ulster is entirely specious.
The ancient Irish province of Ulster whence the O’Neills finally fled the British Plantation onslaught against Gaelic way of life was always the seat of rebellion up to that point in the 17th century.
Ulster was nine counties. The British confiscated six of these after the Flight of the Earls in 1607.But the patterns of settlement thereafter meant that Plantation Protestants could still not hope to control their territory without substantial British subvention and ultimately military support.
The current parallels between Britain and its planter Protestant population and the US and the Israelis are hard to miss.
In both cases the long-term financial and political price for settler ascendancy has proved ultimately prohibitive and unsustainable.
Steelback, you can only refer to 17th century conflict in your attempt to undermine Ulsters identity. You stood by the use of torture to achieve paramilitary objectives, and that puts into question once more the limits of your humanity.
Detailed Surveys have been taken again and again on Northern Irelands affiliations.
There is a decent account of its demographics on wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_and_politics_of_Northern_Ireland#Views_on_the_Union
With a revealing table on the strength of the populations support for the campaign of violence against its imperialist occupiers. Remember these figures the next time someone blethers on about the brave paramilitary struggle against oppression in the north of Ireland…
Life and Times Survey 2006/2003
Protestants (approx 40% of pop)
Unionist 69%
Nationalist 0%
Neither 30%
Don’t know 0%
Catholics (approx 40% of pop)
Unionist 3%
Nationalist 54%
Neither 42%
Don’t know 2%
Total
Unionist 36%
Nationalist 23%
Neither 40%
Don’t know 1%
iirc,
‘Unionist’ – means definitely dont attack police soldiers and civilians to achieve a unified ireland.
‘Nationalist’ – means mostly ‘sure it would be nice but lets be civil about it’ but for some people a bit of terrorism is alright too.
And ‘Neither’ – means give us some f’cking peace will you (my vote).
..
I know the politicians are embarassment, but please dont portray Ulster Protestants as a racist settlers. None of my family have stolen any land in distant history, and i have never know any state imposed apartheid in Belfast, other than the military checkpoints everywhere in the 70s and 80s which seemed to most of us religion aside (see figures) to have most to do with battling the hard men making a living bombing , shooting and beating people, week in week out for decades.
Why haven’t Steelback’s comments been erased yet?
Sh/e has done the research and is clearly antagonistic towards the establishment narrative.
That means s/he’s racist/anti-semitic/homophobic/psychologically warped doesn’t it?
I don’t spend much time on mainstream sites like this but this is how we think here isn’t it?
And I just had this thought….Steelback never mentioned the Potato Famine/Gentleman’s Genocide.
He’s a Holocaust-denier too!
DELETE! EXTERMINATE! OR BOTH!
The British may call it the “potato famine” but many Irish people believe the territory was saturated with British troops in the nineteenth century.
Each British regiment was assigned a region of the occupied territory.
Because Britain was not producing enough food to maintain its own population, especially those who had migrated to the new cities, the job of the troops was to see that the abundant Irish produce was shipped to Britain-at gunpoint.
Whether or not you share this belief Holocaust denial is probably more of a problem in the British case than it is in the Israeli one.
Tony Blair’s apology for the “famine” did not cut much ice with those people who believe Britain has used the “potato blight” narative to absolve Britain of the far more serious degree of culpability it holds for the Irish Famine.
sandcrab
Rather than imagine, like a lot of PC liberal leftists here, that you have some kind of monopoly on humanitarianism-ask yourself whether you have done enough to prove your own humanity.
You might be capable of conveying one-sided (e.g.Unionist) versions of history but you utterly lack the capacity to empathize with the history of the indigenous community.
You can probably state the Israeli case against the Arabs equally well but to imagine you’re telling the whole story and giving fair play to each branch of the human family is patently absurd!
When you get just as angry about the injustice suffered by the other community with whom you have to live as you do by the injustices you perceive have been perpetrated against your own community-when both forms of injustice anger and upset you then you might have a more realistic claim to be motivated by humanitatrianism.
Wasn’t there a guy called “Crabs” who used to shill with Larry,angrisoba and the other disinfo. crew on the 911 thread?
This is the same guy posing as an Ulster Protestant!
Any fool can cite wikipedia polls to support an argument but an Ulster Protestant would have decidedly more ammunition at his disposal than this!
In fact I’d have far more respect for a genuine Ulster Protestant viewpoint than I have for this dingbat shill fabricating a wholly spurious humanitarian discourse.
You’ve been outed-you’re full of CRABS,pal!
This guy seems deficient in the humanity stakes because he’s not real!
He’s auditioning for Internet 2!
@sandcrab: In Ulster the majority of the population are ethnic Scots, and identify with the Ulster-Scots culture. During the Ulster Plantations, Scottish settlers were deliberately sent over to colonise land confiscated from the indigenous Irish in order to establish political control of a wayward population. They established a set of traditions designed to cement their cultural allegiance to an overseas government to the exclusion of the civil and political rights of the native population (catholics were barred from office because of their religion): these traditions which are now represented and preserved by the Orange Order. Please consult the Wiki entries for “Ulster-Scots people” or “Plantations of Ireland” for more background; then reflect on whether there was actually a landgrab and who the real foreigners might be.
Generations of the settler community were brought up to believe that the “fenians” or “taigs” were morally, culturally and genetically inferior; that the “devil danced around them”. Interfaith marriage, even amongst the wealthy political moderates, was not just discouraged but actively punished. The enmity intensified during the last century following partition, lest the North suffer the same fate as the South. The ethnosupremacist ideology was certainly not confined to reactionaries in loyalist ghettos or extreme religious sects, though they were the most vocal about it. The UDR and their precursors the B-specials recruited from the Unionist population and imposed their dominance by harassment.
Unionist attitudes are determined by tradition and cultural conditioning, not contemplation or debate. Upstanding members of the Ulster-Scots community are unaware of being unjust: they know that the catholic communities are relatively impoverished, and have been routinely harassed by the security services, but that’s not fascism: sure, it’s just because of the type of people they are. Fenians have long been perceived as dirty, lazy scroungers, untrustworthy rats, violent yobs, ignorant labourers, etc who had to be kept under control because so many of them were up to no good. The IRA and INLA proved the point and reinforced the suspicions. So it’s got nothing to do with religious or political favouritism, right?
The Unionists clearly have a sense of righteous dominance, which is determined by tradition and cultural conditioning, not contemplation or debate. It’s instinctive; it isn’t a conclusion derived by argument from reasons, so if you project reasons based on ethnicity or economic interest you’ll be met with bafflement. Unreflective bigotry stymies reconciliation, because you can’t amend what you don’t acknowledge. That’s the kind of fascism we have to learn to dissolve, and you do it through education, not violence.
That’s something that many people fail to understand about the Israelis: most of them reject the notion that they’re evil supremacists. They don’t even think they’re being unfair. They’re acting appropriate within the world that they perceive, and they believe they’re under attack from their Arab neighbours who want to wipe them off the planet. The Arabs of course have an opposite set of instinctive prejudices. Argument and debate between these two groups will not work unless they start to examine the causes of their own attitudes, and not just the arguments based on them.
Trimble unfortunately has never conceded his own prejudices. The fact that he has embraced the self-righteous concepts of fairness and balance without realising that his own attitudes are skewed by historical factors means that he is likely to conclude that fairness favours the embattled community. He will not be conscious of being involved in any cover up.
nextus wrote:
Please consult the Wiki entries for “Ulster-Scots people” or “Plantations of Ireland” for more background; then reflect on whether there was actually a landgrab and who the real foreigners might be.
–
The problem here is you seem to have assumed that i am even more ignorant about my country’s history than you are.
The Plantations occured around 300 years ago, keep going back and you’ll find that you have just adopted a para-politicaly expedient slice of the regions history. Population and culture has moved back and forth between Ulster and the west and south of Scotland and Britain many times. The ancient native peoples there where the picts and the scots.
The modern celts themselves invaded Ireland from the south pushing the ancient britonic tribes northward.
But that is ancient history, and the plantations criminals are a very long time dead too.
The union occured about 200 years ago and the Uprising about 90 at which time the section of the island which wanted to leave the union was allowed to leave with relatively little bloodshed.
The modern practical situation is that since that time throughout all the troubles there has NEVER been majority support in NI for a unified ireland, never mind a bloody paramilitary campaign of murder and hatred.
The vast majority of the people in Ulster (who i know from growing up with and who i can know of through studies) are and have been for several generations at least, peace loving non-brutalising anti-terrorist, mothers fathers children lovers workers church goers atheists chancers eegits’ whatever -not torturous killers.
Apostate:
“ask yourself whether you have done enough to prove your own humanity”
Ask away yourself -i didnt apologise for torture here.. and i never dabbled in a bit of gaybashing, and other hateful cultural stereotyping which your lot have a habit of doing.
“You might be capable of conveying one-sided (e.g.Unionist) versions of history but you utterly lack the capacity to empathize with the history of the indigenous community.”
I am a member of the indigenous community thanks, i went to a mixed school and have freinds from varied backgrounds holding all sorts of convictions. and i do empathise with people spun a load viscous hate speak against maligned foes and i tell them where they should shove it whenever possible.
Ive not attached my protests in this thread against the nature of Ulster protestants ,with 17th century history which is all you guys can.
Did you deal with the surveys on the NI populations OWN wishes??
-Of course you didnt, you probably assume they are wrong. Maybe you have met a couple of bad asses that informed you that they were wrong, or you read a few books and your mind is made up.
That wasnt ‘a wikipedia poll’ its a major survey which wikipedia happens to refer to, uncontested.
I dont have loads more references to hand because i dont bother arguing this often. Its common knowledge here, hardly anyone ever wanted the trouble. Every survey ever done on the subject records it, show me one that doesnt tough guys.