Why, in March of 2020, is The Washington Post devoting four pages of the Sunday newspaper to a one-hit wonder from 1992? Because she ripped up a picture of sainted Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. There won’t be a four-page spread with eight pictures on Ugly Kid Joe or the Soup Dragons. But say “Christianity lied to me,” and your latest attempt at rehabilitation gets another round of hosannas.
The liberal publicity tour is something. “O’Connor was thrilled this month when Time Magazine named her one of its 100 Women of the Year, alongside Hillary Clinton, Aretha Franklin and Angela Davis,” oozed Post reporter Geoff Edgers, who interviewed O’Connor in Ireland and America. She is allegedly “one of contemporary music’s greatest and most original artists…a witty, compassionate, difficult, fearless, playful and unpredictable woman.”
And….she apparently converted to Islam in 2018. That was submerged off the front page, in paragraph 7. And absolutely nowhere in the piece does the Post ever wonder how rebellious Sinead reconciles her middle-finger feminism with Islam. Instead, her superfans in the “feminist punk riot grrl movement" appear in the article only to laud her.
“To say it was religious would be an understatement,” said Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, who saw the Feb. 9 performance at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles.
Perversely, Hanna rips the Catholics instead, over the Pope-picture-ripping: "“If they could have burned her at the stake,” Hanna says, “they would have.”
It still appears that O'Connor's take on religion is eclectic, as we're told in her house, "She’s got Hindu gods painted on her bedroom walls, a statue of the Mother Mary under the staircase."
She’s found a kind of peace in Islam, adopting a Muslim name, Shuhada, though she continues to use Sinead professionally. The beauty of being a Muslim is that she doesn’t have to discard what she appreciates about other religions.
“Christianity lied to me as an Irish person,” she says. “Christianity did nothing but rape the people of Ireland, metaphorically and literally. That’s why I like Islam. Because I can take the things I embraced with me. Jesus is still there but it’s the Jesus that makes sense to me.”
She claims her mother viciously beat her, and "the church created people like my mother," but there's never a collective guilt in the newfound faith. She hates talking about the SNL tantrum, but that's what the secular Left loves about her, so she sticks to her offense:
Pop singers are “supposed to shut up and be pretty and sing nice songs,” Geldof says. “Well, f--- off. And we learned that because that was the only option we had in Ireland. We were not going to be quiet anymore.”
Despite the backlash and the years of mistreatment, O’Connor has no regrets about the moment.
“An artist’s job is sometimes not to be popular,” she says. “An artist’s job sometimes is just to create conversation where conversation is needed. You drop the issue and then you run and you let everybody argue it out. I’m not at all sorry about it.”
And yet,
One morning, after several days of interviewing with The Post — both in California and in Bray — she shows up for breakfast feeling irritated and raw. And then the SNL incident is brought up. Again? Why, she asks, does everything have to be about the past? Her voice cracks and she wipes away a tear. Hasn’t she served her time?
Spare us the gunk about "an artist's job is not to be popular," and then compare your notoriety to imprisonment. The notoriety is exactly what makes her popular on the Left. It's what pays the bills. It's what spurs the adoring liberal-media spreads. And spare us how you're "not going to be quiet anymore," and yet it's a prison that someone talks back to you.
