To: aculeus
Barbarians on both sides aculeus.
Adair ordered that his own son get knee-capped. That's the mindset.
2 posted on
09/15/2002 7:33:39 AM PDT by
Happygal
To: Happygal
Yes, both sides. Here's a column from the same source.
We indulge Sinn Fein's two-faced approach to democracy
Sunday September 15th 2002
Punishment beatings are still acts of terrorism, says Alan Ruddock
EARLY last Friday morning, Raymond Kelly was dragged from his car by eight or nine masked men, taken across the border into south Armagh and beaten so savagely that he almost lost his life. His family, who live in the republican heartland of Crossmaglen, know that his attackers were members of the Provisional IRA. Kelly, just 20 years old and a few weeks into a new job as a civil engineer in Drogheda, underwent four operations last week as surgeons tried to save his legs and his life.
It is an horrific story, yet one so commonplace in Northern Ireland that it barely registers. Punishment beatings are a weekly, even daily, occurrence on both sides of the sectarian divide. They are the brutal evidence that the terrorists have tightened their grip on their communities and are immune to police scrutiny. The beatings are acts of terrorism that carry no sanction because they are inflicted on members of the terrorists' own community.
In the era of the peace process, they are not even called terrorists any more. Paramilitary is the politically-correct turn of phrase to describe anyone from a drug-runner to a murderer to a beater of young men. But it is terrorism, pure and simple, and it is carried out by the same organisation that lectures us daily on the failings of the new police service in Northern Ireland.
The men who tied Raymond Kelly's hands and beat him with iron bars and nail-encrusted sticks are all members of an organisation that sits in our Dail, is a member of the government of Northern Ireland and which claims moral superiority over the forces of law and order on this island. Everyone who voted for Sinn Fein in the last general election, everyone who helped elect men like Martin Ferris and Arthur Morgan to the Dail, voted for Raymond Kelly's beating and the beating of scores of young men like him.
Each vote was a personal endorsement of Sinn Fein's violence, its hypocrisy and its contempt for the institutions of democracy. No one voted in ignorance of Sinn Fein's past, or present: they sniffed the violence, and they liked the smell.
So the next time you hear Mitchell McLaughlin, or Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness sound off piously about policing standards in Northern Ireland, remember that their organisation's idea of solid police work is a brutal beating. But remember too that many people on this island are prepared to tolerate, even celebrate, Sinn Fein's rule of law. They are not alone, of course. Loyalist terrorists are even more likely to beat their own: but Loyalist terrorists do not sit in government. We indulge Sinn Fein's two-faced approach to democracy and fool ourselves that our indulgence will wean it away from brutality. Raymond Kelly is yet another tragic symbol of our shame.
8 posted on
09/15/2002 8:08:59 AM PDT by
aculeus
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