— Mrs. Bennett urges you to cast your attention in the general direction of Natalie Solent:
The Arabs are at the present time the world’s premier admirers of those who “martyr” themselves while killing children and other civilians. However we must not neglect the Western, nominally-Christian world’s own substantial contribution to this field of human endeavour. On October 23rd 1993 the IRA exploded a bomb in a fish shop in the Shankill Road. They used a bomb with a fuse set for eleven seconds: so you can safely assume that the bombers intended to give themselves time to get away but to kill the customers and staff in the shop without warning. And kill them it did, nine of them, including Michelle Baird aged seven and Leanne Murphy aged thirteen.
Gerry Adams was a pallbearer at the funeral of one of the Shankill bombers, and Oakland, CA (home of Barbara Lee) just named a street after him. We seem to have a bit of a consistency problem here.
I’m not sure I see the connection here. I don’t know anybody who favors the war on terrorism who doesn’t consider the IRA to be terrorists.
Currently, the IRA is not in the target sites of the war, but there are a couple of reasons for this. 1) They have not been terribly active lately; 2) They have not declared war on the West.
The IRA is an internal problem to the West, one that needs to be dealt with, but the greater threat comes from without (I’ll be posting something on this subject at hbo3.com later this evening, so check it out).
Not terribly active? Presumably you’ve not been following the IRA/Columbia story, nor have you read this –
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F04%2F07%2Fnira07.xml