Posted on 03/09/2005 6:05:20 AM PST by Rogers324
BELFAST, Northern Ireland (Reuters) -- The United States has demanded that the IRA disband after the guerrilla group's astonishing offer to shoot the killers of a murdered Northern Ireland Catholic man. "It's time for the IRA to go out of business," U.S. special envoy Mitchell Reiss said Wednesday. For the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's biggest Irish nationalist party, the U.S. demand was yet another blow to its democratic credentials. Reiss told BBC radio: "It's time for Sinn Fein to be able to say explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence, that criminality will not be tolerated. "You can't sign up for the rule of law a la carte." The IRA's offer -- also condemned by London and Dublin -- handed fresh ammunition to Protestant rivals who say Sinn Fein is not fit for government until the Irish Republican Army disarms and disbands. The killing of Robert McCartney by a gang including IRA members has plunged the IRA and Sinn Fein into crisis -- coming just weeks after the guerrilla group was blamed for a £26.5 million ($50 million) bank raid in central Belfast. London and Dublin say there can be no progress on restoring the British-ruled province's regional government -- set up under a 1998 peace deal to share power between divided Protestants and Catholics -- until the issue of IRA criminality is resolved. Home rule was suspended in 2002 when unionists, who support ties to Britain, said they would no longer sit in government with Sinn Fein until the IRA got rid of the weapons which sustained its three-decade campaign against British rule. "It is their declared intent to murder," said hardline Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley in response to the IRA move.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Right.
A bit selective in our history lessons aren't we?
.
Yes you can, and..
Maybe the Irish guys should reconsider the 'back to the pub' part. Maybe if they cut back a tad.......
The IRA is probabaly even closer to Sinn Fein than Arafats own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Fatah/Tanzim were to his "Palestinian Authority."
Let's not forget that the IRA is running around Columbia and has had ties to Muslim terrorists.
Global sponsors of terrorism like Gadaffi (arms and semtex in the 1980's)..
Rogers324, see:
By Rachel Ehrenfeld (August 21, 2002)Following the Israeli incursion into Jenin earlier this year, Paul Collinson, a British explosives expert working with the Red Cross, identified hundreds of explosive devices found there and noted that "the pipe bombs I found in Jenin are exact replicas of ones I found in Northern Ireland." The Daily Telegraph quoted a U.S. government official as saying in response: "If there was clear and convincing evidence that the IRA has been training Palestinians in bomb-making techniques, then we are facing a grave and grievous situation for the IRA — it would surely lead to a reassessment of whether the IRA should be put on the designated list of terrorist organizations with a global reach."
The incident came on the heels of a shooting spree of ten Israelis with a bolt-action rifle, perpetrated by a single sniper who left his rifle behind. This technique was also identified as a Irish Republican Army (IRA) trademark.
But the IRA's connections are not limited to the Middle East or the Palestinians. On April 24, 2001, the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations published the findings of its investigation into IRA activities in Colombia. Their report clearly demonstrated a longstanding connection with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), mentioned at least 15 more IRA terrorists who have been traveling in and out of Colombia since 1998, and estimated that the IRA had received at least $2 million in drug proceeds for training members of FARC.
A more recent report, published in May by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, identified Hezbollah, Hamas, and a number of other Middle Eastern terrorist organizations as active in Colombia and the Triborder Region (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela).
Last week, President Alvero Uribe declared a state of emergency in Colombia as a result of mortar attack by FARC terrorists during his inauguration. This attack killed 21 people and injured 60 more, and was followed by further attacks resulting in more than 100 people dead. Colombian law-enforcement sources have confirmed that the bombing techniques used by FARC are identical to those used by the Irish Republican Army.
The IRA/FARC connection was first made public on August 11, 2001, following the arrest in Bogota of two IRA explosives and urban-warfare experts and of a representative of Sinn Fein (the IRA's political wing) who was known to be stationed in Cuba and on the payroll of the Cuban Communist party. The three had explosive traces on their clothes and luggage, but claimed they were in Colombia to advise the FARC on their "peace talks" with the government. The false travel documents they carried, however, raised doubts about their peaceful intentions. Since then, the violent attacks of the FARC have escalated, at a cost of hundreds of lives — of civilians as well as military personnel.
President Uribe's decision to rid Colombia of the FARC follows years of attempts by previous governments to appease the narco-terrorists. The "Land for Peace" initiative — handing over almost half the country to the FARC in order to bring them to the negotiating table — was encouraged by both the European Union and the Clinton administration. The EU went as far as to invite FARC terrorists to Europe and send them diplomatic delegations, thus giving them legitimacy and political power. The more the former Colombian government and the Europeans appeased the terrorists, the bolder the terrorists became. Similar appeasement towards Palestinian terrorists groups, including financial aid and "Land for Peace" initiative, by the EU and the Clinton administration, had similar disastrous effect in the Middle East.
The Department of State for many years has designated the FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. Before 9/11, U.S. officials were quoted as calling it "the most dangerous international terrorist group based in the Western Hemisphere." Only in late June — and over French and Swedish objections — did the EU add FARC to its terrorist list, still omitting the second-largest narco-terrorist groups, the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) and Hezbollah.
Students of terrorism can easily trace the IRA's connections to the PLO and its numerous factions back to the 1970s and 1980s, when IRA and PLO operatives trained together in Libya and the Bekaa Valley. Today, IRA involvement is ongoing in Colombia, where al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad factions — to name a few — are engaged in illegal arms and drug trafficking and money-laundering. Recent revelations about al Qaeda training methods has been also identified as carrying some of the IRA's trademarks. If the EU and the Bush administration would unify their terrorist lists with "global reach" to include all terrorist organizations — including the IRA, Hezbollah, all Palestinian terror organizations, and the ELN — we might then have a better chance to win the war on terrorism.
— Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the Manhattan-based Center for the Study of Corruption and The Rule of Law, is the author of Narco Terrorism and Evil Money, and is working on a new book, Funding Evil: Follow the Money Trail, to be published in 2003.
"What's your take on the IRA offering to put bullets in the heads of McCartney's murderers? ... You can be sure the IRA didn't dream this up - the rot at the top of SF gave them talking points."
This is a huge issue in the context of the WOT, America's Border control issues and what some consider "censorship" here at FR. Not in all countries is it "legal" for dissenting parties to exist. Where it is legal, still there is a huge difference between a political organization's existence--and its right to advocate violence. There is a terrible relationship between an organization's advocacy of violence--and its actual involvement in, or inciting of, violence. When we have the advocacy, all too often it leads to the involvement--often by the members who are incited by the thug bosses who don't do the jail time except for tax evasion and other wrist-slaps.
It is just such advocacy that Jim Robinson GUARDS DILIGENTLY AGAINST in his prohibition here of "vigilantism."
Those who advocate citizenry violence actually destroy government by their collective anarchy--and prime the populace for a totalitarian regime to seize control to "keep the peace." We must always seek lawful means to achieve our ends. To do otherwise is to be unfaithful to the noble goals we claim to want to protect.
Sinn Fein has complained that Britain sells arms to Israel (specifically, Gerry Adams said it in a speech on September 30, 2001). To me this is not a problem, we ought to be selling more arms to Israel, in fact giving military aid.
Regards, Ivan
Thanks, Ivan.
Sinn Fein is a bunch of Marxists. And you cannot separate them from the IRA.
The protestants in the north do not want unification and they are the majority.
The thought that a minority should dictate to the majority is a typical DUmmy belief.
You're missing my point. A lot of people don't believe that there was calculated genocide by the British against the Irish when in fact there was to the tune of millions over a 5 year period.
I'm not addressing reparations.
As a boy he was one of those displaced Catholics forced to move to a ghetto..his father lost his job at a shipping company because the owner invoked a Protestant Only rule for his crew, with the blessing of the Brit. Gov by the way, who was his biggest contractor. They lived in a decent government assisted housing project, but the N.I. Government, again with the blessing from the Crown, came in and kicked all of the Catholics out and moved in poor Protestant families and sent the Catholics to the slums.Yeah, I guess it was their own fault for having so damn many kids.
His brother was sent to Long Kesh (sp?) for 4 months because he organized a Hurling League, a sport that the Brits outlawed because, well, they didn't like it. The Brits came in to their slum and tore down all of the street signs, which were Gaellic names, and replaced them with names like Bombay Street and Queen's Way. They outlawed the teaching of Gaellic in all schools.
There are a thousand stories like this, and yes, many Catholics ended up in the ghettos for the same reasons many here in the US do, they refuse to break the cycle.
I was careful not to condone the IRA in my post because I don't. I just said I have a much broader understanding of it now. I would like to see the Brits and US demand that ALL paramilitaries disarm, and require the British Goverment to acknowledge the UVF and its splinter groups as terrorist organizations on the level with the IRA. They need to completely disband the RUC, and get the bloody hell out of Ireland.
The IRA/SF has become so bastardized and splintered that the damage is irreversable.
When the Orange Hand kooks start running European-wide money laundering operations and bombing Dublin, let me know.
This has happened several times over, which was the point of my post. Protestant paramilitaries have set off several bombs in Dublin killing countless innocents to make it appear to be an IRA bombing. This is the dirtly little secret I was alluding to. I am just trying to say we can't ignore the FACT that the protestant paramilitaries have killed MORE innocent civilians than the IRA, yet the Brit. Gov. and the U.S. refuse to accept this.
By the way, when I was there my friend took me to the 'secret' IRA graveyard, and lo and behold, there is a giant memorial there (in the socialist area of course) to the Kennedy family. I just had to laugh.
You signed up yesterday to post that, eh boyo?
Even the most unrepentant fenian types here, myself included, recognize the IRA as a murderous gang of thugs with nothing better to do than run drugs and fence stolen property. Their days as "freedom fighters" are over for now. Military and political figures are legitimate targets of "freedom fighters", not 500lb car bombs parked in Omagh's market district (or anywhere else).
Those marxist bastards cooked their own goose when they trained in the desert with PLO Islamofascist pigs. Remember that if it wasn't for IRA men wanting to train in Lebanon and Syria, car bombs and suicide belts of such high caliber wouldn't have made it to the streets of Jerusalem and Gaza.
Now this same mentality has led them to the jungles of Columbia, trainging marxist FARC rebels in exchange for cash and a cut of western Europe's lucrative narcotics trade. These "freedom fighters" shoot innocent people in the hands, stab innocent family men in barfights, and their offer to "Shoot the people directly involved" are like John Gotti offering the same thing to the Mayor of NYC.
Yeah, it's crappy that the Northern 6 Counties are mixed unionist and nationalist from years of English and Scotch trasnplants. But that's today's reality. It's assholes like these murderous thugs who've wrecked the North's economy and continue to keep it depressed. No wonder the average bloke in the Republic is mixed on re-unification! They'd have to pay a fortune in tax subsidies because of decades of terrorism, not freedom fighting!
regards,
a pissed off American cousin!
<< .... the "guerrilla group" [Drug and gun running, bank-robbing, standover and shakedown mob of psychopathic, death-cultist, lying, looting, thieving, gutlessly-mass-murdering gangster-bastards] "was blamed for" [Perpetrated] a ... Fifty Million Dollar "bank raid" [Armed robbery] in central Belfast. >>
CNN -- its every employee but a mindless moron forming and but a bit part of a dangerously subversive, un-and-anti-American whole -- and the deadly enemy of freedom and liberty in general -- and long the champion and respectible facade of Saddam Hussayne and -- from Singapore to Peking, Damascus to Vientienne -- of every other, among its scores of customer states -- of the world's very worst despots and tyrannies -- cannot to this day -- and Eason Jordan et al notwithstanding -- call a spade a spade -- or the self-styled "ira" a mass-murdering psychopathological Irish Mob!
CNN?
What an obscene bunch of moraly and intellectually insolvent traitors -- every one of them but the supercilliously sanctimonious simpering servant of evil's every manifestation!
Bastards!
Yet, the IRA will not turn over murderers for justice, but they publicly offer to shoot them. These are the actions of unrepentant thugs.
Honestly, with a March 8, 2005 sign up day, you sound like a troll needing a sound Zotting.
Amen to that. It's not like they aren't ALREADY paying a fortune in taxes.
Terrorists are terrorists. It doesn't matter if they're Christian or Muslim, their victims are just as dead. Trying to pretend otherwise paints you as a terrorist sympathizer. I wonder if you tried to justify what Tim McVeigh did...
The Brits have been pretty supportive of us in the WOT, more so than any other country (the Aussies are pretty high up there too), and I find it a bit hypocritical and kind of a slap in the face to them to say that AQ and their kind are terrorists, but IRA isn't.
Time for you to admit you are a troll.
Ireland and Britain are both VERY SUCCESSFUL countries now. There's no excuse for the current violence. The IRA needs to just go away.
Best to wait until at least noon to have a bit of the Guinness.
Think of Sinn Fein as the Teamsters and the IRA as the mafia.
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