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Notes -
Ireland has its very own George Floyd.
... kind of.
Two weeks ago, a 35-year-old Congolese man named Yves Sakila was accused of shoplifting perfume from a department store in Dublin. Private security guards from the department store restrained him by holding him down on the footpath outside the department store. By the time police officers arrived on the scene he'd stopped moving, and despite performing CPR on him, he was pronounced dead at the hospital. An autopsy was conducted the following day, but the results have not yet been published (that is, it has not yet been conclusively established that Sakila's death was caused by his being restrained). An investigation is ongoing.
Depending on what the investigation determines, I will have little difficulty believing that the private security guards acted overly aggressively in their restraint of Sakila. It's the nature of the profession that private security guards tend to be macho and aggressive, often with criminal records for violent offenses, and tend to have much less training in how to safely restrain someone than a police officer would. However, it will not surprise you to learn that I don't think Sakila was killed because he was black, that the security guards "murdered" him, that the security guards would have treated him with more forbearance had he been white, that he would still be alive today had he been white and so on. It will equally not surprise you to learn that these are the exact accusations already being irresponsibly lobbed by Ireland's cadre of woke activists and NGOs, not to mention (and far less excusably) elected officials. Who will then immediately turn around and accuse the mythic Irish far-right of employing "hateful" and "divisive" rhetoric.
It's all so tiresome.
Compare to the murder of Henry Nowak. A Sikh man stabbed him with a knife he was allowed to carry for religious reasons. His mother stole the boy's phone to hide the evidence of the altercation. When police arrived, the murderer accused Henry of "racial abuse" and sans any other evidence the police cuffed Henry and left him to bleed out while saying he couldn't breathe.
Or indeed with Alex Coughlan, a man in his thirties who was murdered by two black Muslim teenagers in a less central part of Dublin five days later. Where are the protests for justice for him? Where are the accusations that his murder was a racially motivated hate crime? Nowhere to be seen, of course.
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