After partnering with Ross Greer this week on the Ross Greer’s Gross Rear Photo Competition, which unfortunately had to be cancelled, a reader sent us a couple of articles/statements by Ross Greer that we thought should be investigated.
Firstly there is this Tweet from Aug 1, 2022:
Now, we at The Notional don’t begrudge any MSP a holiday. They all do fine work. Some so fine you can hardly see it. Assuming that Crail is a wee village on the coast in the Kingdom of Fife, that does look like a lovely location to take a break at. You could cycle there, walk, maybe even take public transport if the buses are running. (Not always as reliably as we’d like)
Ross Greer also travels further afield. He shares in this article for our evil twin sister paper of his time on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Not mentioned in the article is how he traveled there. Donkey perhaps? Surely not by air travel! Even RyanAir or EasyJet who pack passengers in like tuna in a can. We do accept that if you are going to save the environment, packing passengers in at the expense of their comfort is one way of doing so.
Of greater interest to us though was Mr Greer’s quoting of Jesus teaching. The article was published on 26th May 2017. The Manchester bombing had just been carried out, according to Wikipedia an Islamic terrorist suicide bombing. Now, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out how lazy it was of us to quote from Wikipedia. Sky News described the bomber as A Very Naughty Boy. Mr Greer draws parallels between the bombing and the “refugee” crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean. He fails though to identify that Muslims are the ones doing the killing and forcing people to leave their homes and countries and are blowing people up. (We also have to acknowledge the the UK, America and others share a lot of responsibility for killing the dictators that were keeping a lid on the whole Muslim terrorist problem. Well done Tony Blair and George W Bush!)
Greer quotes from John’s Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John was directing people to Jesus – the light of the world. Jesus is also famous for his call to let our light shine before mankind. (Including, for the feminists and trans women at the back, everyone.) Perhaps it would have been a good thing for the UK to take in unaccompanied children. We are concerned with the unintended consequences. Sometimes it is worth taking the risk. It would be better always to acknowledge and try and mitigate such risks. We would also point out that Jesus teaching needs to be taken as a whole. If more of us studied and applied Jesus teaching in our lives, we believe the world would be a better place. We wonder if Mr Greer may one day agree with us on this?