Tuesday, March 08, 2011

USA/COMMENT: Peter King's terror fantasy

A Republican Representative from Long Island in New York has just commenced Congressional Hearings in the United States on the dangers posed by Muslims. Apparently they haven't been doing enough to fight terrorism and extremism among their ranks. As a result, the whole of the United States is threatened.

No, Peter King isn't holding Congressional Hearings on extremism or terrorism. He's holding hearings on Muslim terrorism. Because as we all know, not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims. Just ask King, who was quoted in the NY Daily News on 29 November 2010 as follows:


Hey, let's be honest with ourselves. King can spot an Islamic terrorist a mile away. I mean, the dude pictured below sure looks like a Muslim to me.

Making matters more interesting, King chairs the Homeland Security Committee.

And you thought having Cory Bernardi as Tony Abbott's Parliamentary Secretary was nuts.

There's just one problem. Peter King himself is (or at least was) a supporter of terrorism.

Back in June 22 2005, the New York Sun reported:


The Nassau County politician ... used to travel to Belfast as often as twice a year ...

Once a vocal and frequent House champion for the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, and its leader, Gerry Adams ... The politician once called the IRA "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland," he was banned from the BBC by British censors for his pro-IRA views, and he refused to denounce the IRA when one of its mortar bombs killed nine Northern Irish police officers.

It makes interesting reading. Here's some more.





If Peter King helped give the IRA a respectable face in America, in Ireland and Britain the IRA's reputation as a ruthless and skilled terrorist group was solidifying. The product of street disorders in 1969 in the wake of a civil rights campaign on behalf of Northern Ireland's minority Catholic population, the IRA's violent effort to end British rule against the wishes of the majority Protestant population lasted 25 years. Despite killings by state forces and Protestant terrorist groups who favored retaining Northern Ireland's British links, the IRA emerged as the single most violent group. More than 3,600 civilians, soldiers, and policemen died in the conflict between 1969 and 1994 - the per-capita equivalent death toll in America would be nearly 700,000 - and the IRA was responsible for around half of those killings.

Ireland was no stranger to episodic political violence, but the strife in Northern Ireland was the most intense and prolonged of all. At one stage, Britain had 30,000 troops stationed there to quell the violence. Meanwhile, the IRA took its campaign to Britain - where London's financial district was twice devastated by bombs - and to mainland Europe, where British NATO bases were frequently targeted. The IRA nearly killed Prime Minister Thatcher and her cabinet with a bomb in 1984, and it assassinated prominent British politicians and members of the royal family. The IRA's primary contribution to international terrorist know-how, the car and truck bombs now commonplace in Iraq, were devised and first deployed by the IRA in Belfast in 1972. The organization also developed homemade explosives, like the fertilizer-based device that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma in 1995.

Much of the conventional weaponry and a great deal of the money necessary for IRA violence came from Irish-American sympathizers. Mr. King's advocacy of the IRA's cause encouraged that flow and earned him the deep-seated hostility of the British and Irish governments. In America, official animosity was no less intense. The GOP in Nassau tried, unsuccessfully, to muzzle him, and he complained that the FBI was opening mail sent from Ireland, including letters from Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams. In 1984, the Secret Service listed him as a threat when President Reagan made a trip to Nassau County to watch a Special Olympics event.

Mr. King and the IRA made the oddest of political couples. While Mr. King was an opponent of legalized abortion, a fiscal conservative, and a prominent supporter of English First - which campaigned against federal funds for bilingual education - the IRA and Sinn Fein are close to supporting abortion rights, have campaigned to give the Irish language official parity with English, and were in a pseudo-Marxist phase when Mr. King made his alliance with them. None of that bothered the IRA's American supporters.

"People like Adams were banned from America, there was censorship in Ireland, and there was no one around who would support armed struggle," a former head of the Manhattan unit of Noraid, John McDonagh, said. "But here you had this guy whose father was an NYPD cop - a politician, a lawyer, and from Queens. We may not have liked his politics, but it was so good to have someone like that, a very credible person who spoke up for us."

As Mr. King became more outspoken in his support for the IRA he was also fashioning his political career. In 1977 he was elected to municipal office in Hempstead, and four years later he became Nassau County comptroller. His breakthrough came in 1985,and for that he could thank IRA supporters in New York.Four years before, 10 IRA prisoners had starved themselves to death on a hunger strike in protest of being denied political status by the British. Week after week during the lengthy fast, tens of thousands of Irish-Americans turned out for noisy Noraid protests - and mainstream politicians, from Mayor Koch to Senator D'Amato - lined up to speak from Noraid platforms.

King happily supported radical extremism and terrorism when it suited his own understanding of his ethno-religious identity. It was okay for him to spend years promoting and raising funds for violent terror cells. The Irish Catholic jihad was his jihad.

Now things have changed. Funny, that. Still, it isn't just terrorists of the wrong religion that Peter King has a problem with.

HUMOUR: Islamic French superheroes

It’s often said that Paris is the city of lovers. Which might make you wonder whether such wimped-out lovey-dovey Parisian types might ever need superheroes to protect them. After all, isn’t love supposed to conquer all?

But like any big city, the real Paris is a place where organised crime and terrorism can flourish. This might explain a recent decision by the board of multinational Batman Incorporated to expand its operations beyond Gotham City, with new branch offices established in Paris and Tokyo.

Heading up the Parisian operation is some bloke named Nightrunner. Nicely tanned and sporting black and grey tights, Nightrunner is on a mission to defeat a group of highly organised criminals and leftist and rightist terrorists carrying out high-profile assassinations.

There’s just one problem. This particular Frenchman isn’t really French at all. One righteous blogger, Warner Todd Huston, complains that DC Comics and “Batman couldn’t find any actual Frenchman to be the ‘French saviour’”.

It’s easy to laugh off the likes of Huston as just a bunch of far-Right fruitloops. But their claims seem to resonate across so much of the mainstream. For a change, let’s try and take Huston’s argument a little seriously. Not too much. Just a little.

So what’s so un-French about Nightrunner? Apart from Nightrunner’s attire suggesting dubious sexual preference (heck, real blokes wouldn’t be caught dead in black and grey tights!), what else could any conservative blogger have a problem with?

I did notice that Nightrunner’s skin is of a slightly darker Mediterranean shade. Does Mr Huston imagine that persons of Mediterranean appearance aren’t welcome in a country with a Mediterranean coast? Not exactly.

You see, DC Comics has decided that the ‘French saviour’, the French Batman, is to be a Muslim immigrant ... The character’s name is Bilal Asselah and he is an Algerian Sunni Muslim and an immigrant that is physically fit and adept at gymnastic sport Parkour.
Mr Huston goes further:

The whole situation is a misreading of what ails France. The truth is, neither communist union members nor neo-Nazi parties are causing riots in France. Muslims are. Yet DC Comics is absurdly making a Muslim immigrant the 'French saviour'?

Bloody oath! These immigrants can never be real Frenchmen. Marshall Philippe Benoni Petain understood this well. He was a French national war hero and eventually headed the government of the French State during the 1940s. Petain’s government managed to rid France (which in those days included Algeria) of many nasty foreign types – Jews and Gypsies. I wonder how Petain would feel at his beloved capital having yet another foreign superhero!

Huston continues:

This is PCism at its worst. Not only that but it is pretty condescending to France, too. France is a proud nation. Yet DC Comics has made a foreigner the 'French saviour'. This will not sit well with many Frenchmen, for sure. Nor should it.
Huston is absolutely right. The French have had experience with nasty undisciplined foreign Mozzlems. This explains why they never allow Muslim guys like Bacary Sagna or Abou Diabyinto their national side. The French only allow real actual Frenchmen like Franck Ribery to be their football saviours, not a bunch of non-Christian immigrants. Anyone who disagrees deserves to be headbutted by this dude.

And so we have a problem. To fight Parisian terror, the folks at Batman Incorporated have chosen a superhero whose background means he is genetically disposed to being a nasty Ay-rab Mozzlem jihadist Islamist fundamentalist Islamofascist extremist Talibanist terrorist.

Seriously, if Batman had to choose an immigrant as the first French superhero, couldn’t he have found a Christian? Perhaps a Christian of Romanian heritage, a kid emerging from a Roma gypsy camp and with a history of fighting street crime. French people love gypsies because they’ve never been involved in rioting anywhere in France. We also know how welcome these good European Christian Roma folk are made to feel in the Republic. Just ask the current head of the French State, Nicolas Sarkozy.

OK, I've tried my best to take Huston's argument seriously, but I just can't. The idea that migrants from particular backgrounds cannot be saviours of their (or their parents’) adopted country is just ridiculous. It’s too dumb even for the world of comic strips. If only it was too stupid for certain elements of the allegedly conservative blogosphere.

First published on ABC The Drum on 18 January 2011.