Which is worse:

a) dragging a mother-of-ten kicking and screaming from her home in front of her kids, brutally interrogating her, shooting her in the back of the head and then burying her in an unmarked grave?

or

b) using the “N” word in a tweet?

Well the answer if you’re an enlightened leftist is b) obviously. We know this from a cracking article in today’s Guardian by Gary Younge called Racism Is A System Of Oppression, Not A Series Of Bloopers. Younge, being black, has taken on himself to adjudicate on what he calls an “off-colour” tweet by the murderous ex-terrorist Gerry Adams, which made use of the “N” word.

Though he has consistently denied it, it is an open secret that Gerry Adams – now president of Sinn Fein – was a senior commander of the IRA during the Troubles in Ireland and according to several former IRA members has much blood on his hands. There are photographs of him acting as pallbearer at IRA funerals; he was described by former IRA commander Brendan Hughes as a “major, major player in the war”; and among his many alleged victims is Jean McConville, the mother murdered in 1972 – according to at least two witnesses on Adams’s orders – because she was mistakenly believed to be a collaborator.

You might think that, given a track record like that, the odd use of an offensive racial epithet on social media was the least of Adams’s image problems.

But nope, Gary Younge of the Guardian finds Gerry Adams’s bloody past so utterly trivial that he doesn’t even bother to mention it. Instead, like a laser, Younge focuses on the only issue with Adams which ought to trouble right-thinking Guardian readers, viz:

Whether we should we condemn Adams for having once tweeted the following while watching a Taratino movie:

Watching Django Unchained: A Ballymurphy Nigger.

And the good news for Guardian-reading Gerry Adams fans is that their hero is off the hook.

Yes, Younge is cross:

He shouldn’t have done that. He was wrong.

But it’s OK because a) Adams has experienced oppression.

But his attempt to explain it in the context of the nationalist community’s treatment in Northern Ireland makes sense.

and b) (don’t you love this excuse? Isn’t it just SO MUCH SO GUARDIAN?) Adams has done so much for the cause of social justice. Or, as Younge puts it:

To judge Adams, who has a life’s work of internationalism and antiracist solidarity, by a single tweet borders on the grotesque.

Grotesque? Hmm. I wonder what adjective Younge would use to describe kidnapping innocent mothers in front of their children and murdering them in cold blood.