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  1. Stephen says:


    I would take issue with part of that statement. It was not so much that “US-based IRA affiliates” were “completely and utterly socially acceptable” (vis-a-vis Al Qaeda ones, presumably) but that their AIMS and OBJECTIVES were socially acceptable to many in the United States, at least back before 9/11. The US has a long history of funding groups which engaged in the sort of activities which would now get Al Qaeda a visit from a Predator drone. When the US’s own aims and objective change (as they did, for example, after 9/11, at least for Muslim terrorist groups), then the very people who were social acceptable PRIOR to that–eg the Taliban of Afghanistan–suddenly become persona non grata.

    On that score the IRA would doubtless have suffered the same fate as Al Qaeda had they started biting the hand that was funding them by doing in the US what they were doing in the UK (and Northern Ireland in particular): blowing up bits and pieces of US real estate, along with their inhabitants.

    In other words, if what Al Qaeda did was wrong, so were the actions of the IRA; and to say that their “US-based…affiliates” as socially acceptable is no more than what Al Qaeda itself doubtless receives in those countries where its views are in synch with those of important segments of the local population. The current US response is to aim drones at those countries. Imagine the response in the United States if the British had decided to send the Royal Air Force across the Atlantic to blow up IRA sympathisers in places like Boston and New York.

    On further point. If you really want to be controversial go read America’s own Declaration of Independence by the reflected light of 9/11 and ask yourself this question: is that or is that not the manifesto of a band of would-be terrorists?

    The fact that:

    a) the band in question was “socially acceptable” to other Americans (especially those of similar sympathies); and

    b) The offences that document alleges against the British were all true;

    does not of itself justify the actions they afterwards took, at least from the perspective of the British. In the latter’s eyes, the American colonists who rebelled against them were the Al Qaeda of their day. Needless to say their response was just as extreme as the one that the Bush Administration took following 9/11. Had they handled it differently America might still be part of the British fold, just as had Bush responded to 9/11 some of the unforeseen consequences of that action (eg from the ongoing potential for civil war in Iraq to a nuclear North Korea and would-be nuclear Iran) might not now be happening.

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