The current Islamic terrorists surely got their inspiration from the IRA campaign of the 1970’s and 1980’s in Ulster and mainland Britain. There is a lot of talk these days about distinctions between then and now and how the IRA always gave warnings about their bombs. Not true! The many deaths and crippled victims of their savage outrages refute this nonsense. Their strategy quickly progressed from shooting soldiers in the back on Belfast streets to planting bombs in bars, restaurants, rail stations and city shopping malls on the mainland and in other countries. Along the way they shot up people at prayer in country churches.
Unfortunately much of the Western world, guided by its Media and Leftists, other than issuing a few empty words vaguely condemning violence in general, gave a lot of tacit support. It seemed a good idea to bash British “imperialism”, the Ulster Protestants (far too religious for most journalists liking) and to get sentimental about Irish suffering in the 1840’s. No-where was this more true than in the USA and New York in particular, where funds for the bombers were collected daily and leading Democrats told the British to surrender to IRA demands. All the world’s political psychopaths saw that Western societies were divided and weak in the face of violence on their doorsteps. There was no shortage of academic apologists, either! In the end Gerry Adams and his gang became almost as famous and accepted in high political circles as Bob Geldorf. The current crop of (Muslim) political psychopaths have added only the suicide element and even that “tweak” dates back to the nihilists in old Russia.
Americans, even conservative ones, now have short memories about IRA terrorism in the UK, but “what goes around, comes around”, (another very good truism) and it all came around on 9/11. The Muslim fanatics, like the IRA, deal out death and destruction on innocent people in order to get their way, in the belief that we in the West are all too soft and hampered by sophisticated reservations to effectively fight back and that we are compromised by defeatists in our midst. The proof of this was surely in the IRA pudding, so to speak!
“Biting the hand that feeds you” comes to mind with the news that some of the bombing suspects in the UK tube attacks are the offspring of refugees. We should not be surprised at this. In the 1930’s in the USA, many Eastern European refugees took advantage of America’s generosity and then spied for the Soviet Union or made propaganda films in Hollywood with a secret communist agenda. I doubt that the majority of people who now get into the USA and the UK to escape poverty or persecution feel much gratitude to the people who take them in. Mostly they support political parties that lay the blame for our woes on ourselves and they bring their cultural attachments with them. Patriotic to the new country, in general they are not! There is little patriotism in the big, “culturally diverse” cities of the UK and the USA and much fertile ground for defeatism. Only the people in the Red States1 in the USA seem to have the backbone for the long war on terror. The rest will be led by the Media into defeatism, as no price is too high to sink Bush and his moralistic presidency.
Home truths
It is a truism that “there is nothing new under the sun”. “Biting the hand that feeds you” is another perenially true saying. The current terrorist attacks bear out both.
Note: 1. i.e. conservative states, traditionally the South and Mid-Western