Suppose they had scrawled on the posters and banners 'Jews out', or 'Blacks out', would the reaction of some unionists have been any different? You betcha.
Would the district commissioners at Stormont have made statements? For sure.
Why? Because they understand that type of expression of racism.
What did they make of the actual banners? We dunno. It was only Catholics being threatened so that doesn't count.
English MPs are completely baffled when confronted with unionism's 19th century vocabulary of racism, for that's what it is.
Anti-popery, anti-Catholicism, is the racism of unionism.
The very word 'popery' has long since passed from common parlance elsewhere. To hear people talk about popery is incredible to someone from Britain born in the second half of the 20th century.
Our district commissioners don't know what to say and their local pro-Union officials aren't going to rush to put words in their mouths.
Only one unionist, Esmond Birnie, emerged from last week's despicable scenes with any credit. He called the leaflets drumming up support for the mob in Sandy Row "sectarian propaganda".
He called the mob "intimidatory". He was right. It was plain to see.
All that is except for his colleagues Bob Stoker and Michael McGimpsey. You'd expect nothing different from Stoker, who described the Israeli flags festooned around the Village district in 2002 as evidence of Belfast's "multi-cultural make-up".
His quirky concept of multi-culturalism does not include Catholics though. He suggested they leave their flats in Sandy Row "voluntarily". As justification he cited incidents of which the police had no knowledge, about which they had received no complaints.
Michael McGimpsey duly appeared representing the officer class of unionism. He hadn't seen the leaflets but he could talk about them. He too cited incidents for which there was not a shred of independent evidence. He defended the mob as a 'non-threatening protest'.
How depressing. Yet how predictable that the only difference between McGimpsey and Stoker was McGimpsey's better grammar.
What is it with unionists that given the choice between leading, and following the blind prejudices of the herd, they opt to justify the rabble?
Does McGimpsey not know that those yahoos straggling behind the big drum not only don't vote for him, but that they don't vote at all?
Did he ever think for a second that the residents of the £120,000 flats – Chinese, Irish, Catholic and Protestant – were his constituents, entitled to his protection, and, wait for it, that they were more likely to have voted for him than the rabble in the streets he clung to? Not now mate. Shame. Shame.
Shame too on the statutory bodies. We heard the man from the NIO's failed front organisation, the Community Relations Council, waffling while he wrung his hands and demonstrated once again that the only attempt the British administration here makes to deal with sectarianism is window-dressing.
By coincidence, the Equality Commission gave 'evidence' on hate crime to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on April 21. You know the Equality Commission? It's the bowl of blancmange in which the NIO buried the Fair Employment Commission and the Equal Opportunities Commission.
Its figurehead, Joan Harbison, spoke at length, if not with substance. You'd have thought she was talking about Oldham or Bradford until Eddie McGrady asked her about sectarianism. He said: "Strangely, you have little to say about sectarian hate crimes".
Now this is from the uncorrected transcript, so maybe she'll change it. She actually referred to the "1990s whenever sectarian violence decreased" Whaa? McGrady pointed out that many believed the situation had deteriorated. Like Drumcree maybe?
Incredibly, the Equality Commission hadn't a clue about sectarian hate figures. An official jumped to her boss's aid and assured McGrady that figures for sectarianism were important and the commission was starting (sic) to collect them "so we know what we're dealing with".
The truth is that until unionism's version of racism, which fuels unionist anti-Catholic violence, is addressed by law and dealt with by law like other racism, there'll be scenes like Sandy Row last week.
That requires action by Dublin and London. The Equality Commission isn't a bad place to start.
