IRA lay down arms

Come and get me.

 

You're proud of supporting a terrorist organization?

 

Just feelin' ornery. You seem to be also, throwing around the word "terrorist" and all.

I've made my feelings clear on another post not too long ago. I'd be happy to have all of the active IRA members incarcerated for life if the same could be done to the Protestant criminals who mirror them (Including and especially those who's day job is the Police Service of Northern Ireland). Since it can't be done (yet) and since GB is still occupying the emerald isle, I'll keep my sympathies and you can keep yours.

Anyway, the lads have disarmed, turned to bank robbery (alegedly) and can't keep from killing thier own supporters in Catholic neighborhoods, or offering to kill thier own members rather than hand them over to trial. HOW BIG A THREAT ARE THEY ANYMORE? (I'm sure the Big Fellow is rolling over in his grave) The war on terror will be their last gasp as paramilitaries, they know this, and they're gearing up to becoming a political force. Heck, Sinn Fein has had elected MPs (but with thier policy of "active nonparticipation" in Parliament, how much are they going to get done?) for some time now.

Could they re-arm? Certainly. Will they? Hell, I don't know, and neither does anyone else (except P. O'Neil and he ain't talking).

 

As I mentioned before, any organization that plants a bomb in a toy store, just before Christmas, certainly qualifies as a terrorist group.

Just curious....how would you feel if Mexican nationals started planting bombs in Houston, Austin, and Fort Worth, with the stated goal of having Texas "returned" to Mexico?

 

Or maybe the Native Americans should ship all them white folks back to Europe. Of course, the question remains what to do with the mixed bloods.

 

And exactly how long must one's ancestors live in a place before you're there legitimately? The Brits in Ireland have been there for centuries. Some mediaeval pope from the 1100s used the Donation of Constantine to supposedly give Ireland to England. Initially, the English occupied an area around Dublin called the Pale (while the Irish lived beyond the Pale). Then in the 1500s and 1600s, first Henry VIII and then Cromwell decided to really make good on their claim to Ireland. But at any rate what I'm saying is: if your ancestors have lived somewhere for 400 or even 900 years, should you be shipped away on a leaky boat to G-d knows where on account of the sins of your ancestors?

 

So do organizations who throw hand grenades at funerals.

That's interesting. I can see how the Tex/Mex border can be in dispute, it's just a line on a map. Ireland, though, is an island, which leaves little to the imagination regarding appropriate borders.

 

Do keep in mind, Charles, that the Provisional IRA is attempting to defeat any sort of majority decision on the future of Northern Ireland and to do so by means of terror.

You are dead right that the IRA, in this incarnation, anyway, appeared in response to Protestant militia violence against Catholic citizens. Nowhere have I suggested that the IRA be treated any differently from these Protestant terrorist groups.

Well, look, folks, the original partition of the island in, what, 1921? when the Irish Free State came into being, WAS the best compromise that could likely have been achieved. It honored the principal of self determination on (it appears) a county-by-county basis, granting independence (in disguise) to the majority of Catholic Ireland while allowing the six Protestant majority counties to remain part of the U.K.

If I could rewrite history, I'd have had both sides grudgingly accept this compromise, but that's not what happened.

If the current IRA really IS disarmed, then Charles, I will glady buy you all the Guiness you can drink (if you ever come here). Like you, I too want the peace to work. But don't you think that assuming that the IRA IS telling the truth implies one of two nasty things?

Either the IRA is engaged in an armed struggle and defending its rights and the rights of the Irish people against Protestant violence, in which case a unilateral total disarmarment strikes me as STUPID and DANGEROUS;

or

The IRA really IS virtually the ONLY significant terrorist group left in which case its continued use of terror after, say, 1996, is immoral, unnecessary, and criminal.

The IRA is without excuse, friends.

 

They are not faring a full scale war against an army but against disarmed citizens, among which there were children and women. If their fight had any legitimacy they lost it. The IRA is no better than Al Qaeda or Hezbollah. To compare the IRA with Mandela is laughable. For both the EU and the US Secreatary of State, the IRA is a terrorist organization.

 

Laugh away. I think comparing the Provisional IRA with Nelson Mandela and MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe-the Spear of the Nation) is more accurate than likening them to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Just as Nelson Mandela refused to renounce his peoples armed struggle until the South African Government granted certain concessions, most notably full legal recognition of the African National Congress; the Provisional IRA also did not end its armed struggle until British Government granted certain concessions set forth in the Good Friday Agreement.

The next Independent International Commission on Decommissioning report is due in a few weeks. I will not post again, on this thread, until it’s released. I remain optimistic.

I’m not a huge Guinness fan, but I would like to have a drink with you regardless of our thoughts on this and other issues. I think New Mexico is beautiful. If I find myself out that way, I’ll let you know. Likewise, if you make it out to Northern Virginia or anywhere in the National Capital Region let me know.

 

I'm not comfortable making fine distinctions between 'good' terrorists and 'bad' terrorists.

All terrorists are good guys in the eyes of their supporters. Rationalizing evil isn't very difficult for most people.

 

I know you won’t post more until that report is released, but still I’ll use my reply right.

I find it perverse to distinguish between good and bad terrorism. The corollary of such distinction is that there are first class victims and second class victims; that those people that were killed in the WTC are more valuable than those killed at Omagh or at that toy store Bruce mentioned (to put an example). Osama´s apologists use identical reasoning to yours when justifying Al Qaeda´s crimes. For me, terrorism is indiscriminate massacres to intimidate the population, something that both Osama and the IRA practice. In Europe, the MEP consider the IRA a vicious, terrorist organization, and as such is listed.

 

Well, of course, there's first class victims and second class victims and maybe even many more gradations as well. Naturally, if you're a rich white Anglo-Saxon Protestant straight male, you have no oppression points and so you're the lowest class of victim. Your life can be taken with impunity. Now if you're a poor colored Catholic (or other non-Protestant) homosexual female, clearly you've earned the most oppression points and are a first class victim. Taking your life counts as multiple counts of hate crime.

 

Charles,

We have an excellent local micro brewery. Look me up if you are ever out here!

JLV,

I suppose I could have been clearer; since I certainly DON'T think that the Provisionals are stupid, I therefore deem them brutal.

 

A better comparison might be to the PLO.

 

The discriminating criteria seems to be whether the corpses are ours or "theirs". Only truly civilized people realize that all lives have equal value, and that all forms of violence are despicable.

 

I know. In case you didn't catch it, I was trying to be overly dramatic in order to make a point.

 

I fully understood you were caricaturing it.

 

Yes, but as one learns in Herbert Milgrim's [and other professors'] HUX 530: War and the Human Experience, in wartime, governments encourage an us vs. them mentality, which demonizes the enemy and makes them something sub-human, which makes it all the easier to kill them. Just like awarding oppression points allows (just to use an extreme example) a poor colored non-Protestant female homosexual to claim that she and others like her are worth five counts of felony hate crime if they turn up dead while the killing of a rich white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male heterosexual is constitutionally protected political speech.

 

Now I'M defending the IRA?

I REALLY hate to suggest this, but...

I think that the PLO is even worse than the IRA. Marginally. Just a teensy bit.

As Charles points out, the IRA came into Northern Ireland after the Protestant Ulster groups made unnecessary war on their Catholic neighbors. There IS a faint but distinct odor of self defense about the Provisional IRA at the beginning, anyway.

Not so the PLO. In 1948, the United Nations voted to accept a partition of British Palestine into a large Arab area and three tiny Jewish islands. The newly constituted Jewish State, against much internal criticism, accepted this and offered peaceful coexistence. The PLO declared war and goaded the neighboring Arab states to invade these Jewish enclaves, whose occupants had done them no harm, with the declared intent to erase the Jewish settlements from the map (and presumably erase the Jews themselves from the face of the planet.) All of this came after a decade or so of unofficial but deadly warfare between Arab and Jew during the Mandate. (The Brits, inevitably, sided with the Arabs.)

Following the War for Independence, Israel assumed the contiguous shape I knew from my childhood geography textbooks. This would not have happened, and very nearly did NOT happen anyway, had the PLO decided to play ball.