Posted on 09/16/2001 3:04:32 AM PDT by Norn Iron
Terror's brutal truth can no longer be dodged
Sunday September 16th 2001
Sinn Féin and the IRA cannot escape their current and historical connections to New York, writes Eilis O'Hanlon
WHEN he came out of his Gaza City office last week to offer his "unreserved condemnation" for the "unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable" massacres at the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and Pittsburgh last week, Yasser Arafat looked like a broken man. A man broken not just by the human scale of what was unfolding in the United States, but by a final realisation that this, though he did not know it until it was too late, was the end to which all the paths on which he had walked for decades were leading.
It is true that religious fanaticism was never one of the sins of Arafat's al Fatah organisation, even if it had plenty of others on its conscience. True also that there are other stress lines and grievances in the Arab world besides Palestine; other dissatisfied and disturbed peoples besides the Palestinians.
For Arab militants everywhere, though, whatever their differences, the Palestinian conflict is always the inspiration, the call to arms, the engine which drives and focuses the other disparate causes. Palestine is the graph against which all the fluctuations of terror in the Middle East can be ultimately tracked; and when the Palestinians are in turmoil, broader Arab terrorism inevitably follows. As Arafat surely knows.
But if the murder of Jewish children is, for Arafat, a price worth paying, the murder of thousands of New Yorkers was off the scale of all expectation. Hence the haunted look of realisation of what Palestinian agitation had, by whatever circuitous route, sown. Hence what can only be described as his shame.
He is not the only one who ought to feel shame at the sight of the heap of rubble that was once the World Trade Centre. Some of them ought to be feeling it much closer to home.
International terrorism has a complex genealogy, and the mutation of its darkest genes has woven an inextricable mutual support network, each thread of which alternately feeds off and sustains the others depending on which stage of the "struggle" they happen to have reached. And it's a network which stretches all the way from the Middle East to Dundalk and back to the Balkans and down to Colombia via the Falls Road, with a couple of weeks with those nice Basques to break up the journey.
Colonel Gaddaffi funded, armed and trained the IRA and the Lockerbie bombers. He didn't see the neat, convenient distinctions between the two which republicans might try to make in retrospect. He saw them all as of a kind, on a spectrum of anti-imperialist righteousness and that's just how republicans saw their fellows abroad, too, when it suited them. There isn't a Sinn Féin Ard Fheis which does not still take the traditional 'solidarity contributions' from the Palestinians, or Basque separatist movements like Eta and Herri Batasuna.
The IRA trained alongside Arab militants in Lebanon and worked with them in Cyprus, where both had offices. They even elicited the aid of Iran at a time when Ayatollah Khomeini was making it clear that it was the duty of every Muslim to kill and be killed.
The idea that, somehow, the republican cause can be untainted by its international associations, or just throw up its hands in horror along with the rest of the world, is absurd.
The IRA was assisting and making common cause with the PLO throughout the time when the organisation was carrying out the indiscriminate murder of Jews in synagogues, schools, hotels, buses, and (always the Palestinian favourite) planes. It's not as if the IRA did not know what those they were lining up with were capable of. Just as the car bomb was the fond choice of the IRA, so did the Palestinians always have a special attachment to aircraft, of which this latest atrocity is really just the logical next step.
Even now, An Phoblacht is regularly riddled with the usual references to the Israeli State's supposed "ruthless genococidal policies against the Palestinian people," with no word of disquiet about the ruthless genocidal intentions of Palestinian and other Arab states against the Israeli people.
Republicans now seem to think that they can support their jihad-hungry Arab brethren six days a week, then dissociate themselves from what they get up to on the seventh.
Alas for them, it may well be too late for that. Terrorism might vary in scale, and the scale in the US was terrifying; last week saw a tragedy greater than the Troubles in a single morning. But once political organisations have decided their consciences can bear the slaughter of innocents, the rest is just counting and the Americans may well remind Gerry Adams of that uncomfortable fact next time he comes to call.
The only possible hope now is that, faced with the obscene reality of Manhattan, the sentimentalising about murder which poisons Irish culture would finally come to a long overdue end.
That we would just stop the ambivalence. Stop the sneaking regard. That we would stop making excuses for terrorists and their addiction to the same culture of death which was taken to its nadir in New York and Washington. That we would end the national delusion that terrorism means a sensitive doe-eyed Stephen Rea in The Crying Game, when what it really means is four-year-old girls slamming into the side of office blocks in south Manhattan. That we would stop, too, the knee-jerk anti-Americanism and veiled anti-semitism and 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' bull which passes for informed comment in this country's media establishment.
Last weekend, Martin McGuinness said it would take "nothing less than a miracle" to save the peace process. Republicans just got their miracle, albeit a devil's miracle, in Manhattan.
Here is their chance to finally do the decent thing, to hold up their hands and admit that it's just not worth it, whatever the grievances. Small signs suggest that they may do just that, and certainly nothing else will now suffice. A scream of anguish has gone out from America so intense and so pitiful that no one will even want to hear Ireland's self-pitying whine anymore.
And if we had any decency left as a people, we wouldn't want to hear it ourselves anymore either.
There has been a reluctance by terrorists on all sides here in NI to accept the mandate given by the people in the 1998 Agreement to pursue change by democratic means alone.
They need to decommission their illegal arsenals and to disband their illegal organisations. It would also be helpful if they had fewer 'cheerleaders' and funders in the USA.
There has also been a perception that the governments in London and Dublin are prepared to pay more attention to the demands of the terrorists than to the needs of the other 90+% of the population, especially the victims.
Let us remind him with a bullet. Or a garrote. Or cyanide in his Guinness. Or a baseball bat across the back of the head.
Gerry Adams must die.
I have been too disheartened by the week's events, and too glued to the telly, to spend much time on this forum. But I'm glad that this parallel is being drawn.
A relative in NI, who phoned Tuesday to see if my family was safe(since we live near Washington), said that now the US knows what the people in NI have been living with for decades. The same thought occurred to me that day as well. Perhaps now those who support the IRA and have defended their actions on this forum realise the kind of impact terrorism has, how hard it is to combat, and why the British government(and the Irish government) implemented measures such as internment in a desperate effort to stop it. Imagine weekly or daily bombings, shootings and disruptions to your life and imagine the pressure on the government to do something, anything, to stop the killing.
We are hearing calls for vengeance from the public as well as proposals for all sorts of extreme measures, including the deportation of all Arabs or Muslims. Perhaps now Americans understand the frustration, the feeling of helplessness and impotence against a faceless shadow enemy who hides amongst the general public and strikes out in secret.
Suddenly military vehicles and soldiers are on the streets of Washington, stopping civilians and checking IDs, and again I was reminded of NI. There has been a lot of abuse directed at the RUC and the army, but they were there to protect the citizens of NI, and for the most part they did a magnificent job. They were not perfect. No police force or army would be. But I have heard of Arabs being detained and arrested who were later released, and no one has criticised the armed forces for harassing innocent people simply because of their similar background to the terrorists. Instead the feeling here seems to be, "Do whatever it takes to catch these bastards, and if innocent people are affected, well, that's unavoidable - because we have to get them."
I hope that this week's events are never repeated. I also hope that the people who did this and their supporters are hunted down and punished, and I sense that Bush's image in Europe has received a tremendous boost from his handling of this crisis so far. But I also hope that those who have supported the IRA or any other terrorist group realise that the differences are only of degree rather than kind. Americans have been very naive about the world, blessedly so, but now that terrorism has reared its ugly head on these shores I hope that no one ever again says, 'Well those bombers are evil terrorists but these bombers are brave freedom fighters.' They're all evil and they will all have their reward - in the next world if not in this one.
Fortunately SF/IRA are not given to much self-sacrifice except at the time of the hunger strikes.
At that time the Government either didn't know the ideology behind the death fast or didn't care and more people died outside prison than died on the hunger strikes. The hunger strikes created martyrs and made the problems more difficult to resolve.
Let's hope Bush and his advisors don't add fuel to the flames when they act against those they believe produced or assisted in Bloody Tuesday.
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