When we are in a situation when the greats of Russia (and therefore the world) literature have to be pro-actively defended and when Israel can snuff out young Iranian poets like they are cigarette butts, we are not in a good place.

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Imagine my feigned surprise when I saw that Sally Hayden, whom I previously excoriated in this article, is slotted in to deliver Kilkenny Arts Festival’s 2025 Hubert Butler lecture, and that punters are paying €25 a pop to listen to that dewy-eyed fraud hold forth on the topic of “Impunity, normality, and the fall of a dictator: A journalist’s reflections on a year of reporting and living in the Middle East“, the alleged dictator being Bashar Assad, Syria’s democratically elected President.

As part of validating her presence at this and similar MI6 snow jobs, Sally claims to live in Beirut and to have visited Syria multiple times since the fall of “the dictator Assad”. The problem with that, as any sentient reader of the Syrian situation should know, is that Syria’s minorities are currently being subjected to ongoing mass pogroms and the conclusion that those readers should draw from that is that Skateboard Sally and all slappers like her are willing enablers, if not quite perpetrators, of those pogroms, which are commanded, controlled and coordinated from America’s gigantic embassy in Beirut, where Skateboard Sally lives.

Although Sally is an award-winning journalist (aren’t they all?), my argument would be that those awards are doled out to give the recipients and those doling them out credibility, just as the Presidents of France, the United States and other rogue regimes regularly dole out similarly meaningless trinkets to each other. In cases like Sally’s, it is all part of a vast ecosystem to convince us that they are somehow nobler than gutter whores who spin whatever yarns their clients pay them to spin.

Although I could adduce ample evidence to support that contention by, for example, giving details of Sally’s sister, her mad mother dancing like a lunatic on the front page of the New York Times, her uncle, the grubby street hawker, and her grandfather, the cement professor, better still just to look at Mary Fitzgerald, the CIA affiliated spook, who preceded her as foreign editor of the Irish Times and who not only travelled with Irish-based head hackers throughout Syria and Libya (some of whom like Shamseddin Gaidan and Hudhaifa El Sayed, she eulogised as good looking studs after they got their just desserts in Syria) after which she was gifted crash courses in Islam both at a CIA run Catholic university in Florida and at a major CIA spook hub in Amman, Jordan, before happily retiring to live in a villa in the south of France and do some media related nixers for George Soros. No doubt Sally will follow a similarly ignominious trajectory, perhaps again ending up in France, given its long track record of accommodating highly paid “courtesans” and similar slappers.

Though SCF contributor Sonja van den Ende walks an infinitely more desolate road, hers is a far nobler one and thus no nice Irish Times/MI6 gigs or Kilkenny Arts speaking gigs for her, or for Bruna Frascolla or Stephen Karganovic, who also follow the first rule of writing, which is to write about what they know about, and not just dress up like a second-rate skateboarder as Sally does.

And, though the independence of mind and the rigorous approach Karganovic, Frascolla and van den Ende display might be admirable qualities, they disqualify them ab ovo from any platform, big or small, NATO may have to offer. They are not only excess to requirements but antithetical to requirements so, metaphorically speaking for now, off with their heads.

Not so Skateboard Sally. Like Bellingcat and other MI6 frauds before her, she not only looks the part right down to her teeny bopper wardrobe and backward pointing baseball cap but she can also act the part of a plummy-voiced West Brit looking aghast, and with upturned snubby nose, at Syria’s seculars, while giving NATO’s head hacking, child raping Syrian savages a free pass, just like Mary Fitzgerald did before her. Sally and her fellow Lord and Lady Haw Haws are like Manuel, the waiter in Fawlty Towers, in that they know nothing when they are so ordered by their betters.

Skateboard Sally is not the only Irish slapper on the summer school gravy train. Defrocked priest Michael O’Flaherty, together with former Irish President Mary Robinson, are much further up the totem pole, even though, like South Park’s Meghan Markle, they too are empty vessels within.

That is the kernel of the issue. NATO have cemented over the information space with empty vessels like Meghan Markle and Skateboard Sally, and van den Ende, Frascolla and Karganovic have not a snowball’s chance in hell of having their voices or, more importantly, their causes heard through the vacuous waffle Skateboard Sally, her editors and their fellow slatterns deluge us in.

Although few folk read the Irish Times and similar rags any more and few businesses advertise in them, they remain afloat because they set the mirage that they are pools of information and, God help us in Skateboard Sally’s case, of expertise as well. But they are not and it is the job of Skateboard Sally, the Irish Times, the Kilkenny Arts Festival and all summer schools and sycophants like them to keep us perpetually emasculated and in the dark.

None of this is to argue that Skateboard Sally, the Irish Times or the Kilkenny Arts Festival are all that important in the bigger scheme of things but it is to show they they typify the compromised LGBT Peter Tatchell and Owen Jones instant experts NATO’s matryoshka doll factories drown us in. Hack your way past the musings of one of them and, like the densest Amazonian jungles, there are just endless miles of the same regurgitated drivel all around you. Better for most to sheathe their machetes, surrender and succumb to the media jungle’s all embracing vines and thickets.

Although my critics could argue that Mohammad Marandi and Maria Zakharova do cut through the foliage, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. When we are in a situation when the greats of Russia (and therefore the world) literature have to be pro-actively defended and when Israel can snuff out young Iranian poets like they are cigarette butts, we are not in a good place and, for that, Skateboard Sally, MI6’s summer schools and NATO’s other mis-information hubs and spokes must take their fair share of the blame or, as they frame it, the credit.