Regards, Ivan
Posted on 03/12/2005 4:56:46 PM PST by MadIvan
No event in Northern Ireland in recent years has distilled the abominable and corrupted reality of life under the peace process as the murder of Robert McCartney. Half beaten to death, one eye gouged out, his throat cut, and then gutted like a fish, he was left to die while his IRA killers returned to the pub from which they had flushed him, to warn the customers there of the fate awaiting them if they informed. Then making off with the cassette from the CCTV, they proceeded to destroy all the forensic evidence associated with the killing.
This was an exception to recent IRA activity only in the steadfastness of the victim's family, for the IRA has been murdering the inconvenient and the awkward throughout the decade of the so-called peace process. It now rules nationalist ghettoes with a kneecap-breaking rod of gun-metal. Violence is turned on and off at will. The green gestapo of one day become emerald-coloured community workers the next. Everyone knows this, and almost everyone - the two governments in Dublin and London in particular - has turned a blind eye to it. Denial of the criminal regime governing nationalist areas was the price to be paid for keeping Sinn Fein-IRA in the peace process.
So the two governments are probably bitterly regretting the dogged persistence and courage of Robert McCartney's five sisters and his girlfriend Bridgeen: if only they had been the passive and acquiescent kin of the nearly four dozen other victims of IRA murder gangs of recent years, who meekly buried their dead and stoically concealed their grief and anger.
This was the world according to P O'Neill, the mythic signatory of all IRA statements, in which at the IRA's insistence, the old RUC was dismantled, its Special Branch destroyed, and in return, the British Government was given precisely nothing by Sinn Fein.
This was deal-making at its most supinely inept, for IRA authority in nationalist areas is now effectively absolute, as became clear after the McCartney murder. While the Police Service of Northern Ireland investigation floundered, in part because of the street-opposition organised by Sinn Fein, the IRA was able to assemble a clear picture of the events of the night from witness statements gathered by its own investigations team. This might almost be entertaining if it wasn't so utterly appalling, not merely for what it has meant in the past, but what it inescapably means for the future.
You cannot civilise or tame Sinn Fein-IRA. It is not possible. For bred in their bone and blood is a uniquely barbaric ethos. Of all European political parties, perhaps only the Nazis so successfully wove tribal myth, ancient heroes, victimhood, violence and utter immunity from civil and criminal law into an integral part of their identity. The peace process didn't draw the Sinn Fein movement away from these defining toxins: quite the reverse. In the agreeable culture of appeasement, the political antibodies that should have been combating the spread of the republican virus failed to respond.
So, far from being banned from the airwaves, republicans inhabited them almost full-time, and the Sinn Fein malignancy spread through nationalist Ireland, north and south of the border. In the past decade, the political map of Ireland has been utterly transformed, and for thousands of young people across the island, Sinn Fein is the future.
Thus, reassured by the governments of Dublin and London that separate rules applied to them, IRA men felt free to butcher poor Robert McCartney, confident they could get away with it. And indeed they would have done but for the five McCartney sisters who in their resolution were more than a match for the IRA. Mesmerised by such principled opposition, of a kind it that it had never met before, it made the public announcement that it had offered to shoot the murderers of their brother Robert. Thus spoke the authentic, visceral voice of Irish republicanism, finally and no longer emptily miming the meaningless patois of democracy.
For poor Robert McCartney was not some entirely unprecedented and unexpected victim of the deranged morality of the peace process, but merely the latest. Again, only the grotesqueness of this wretched business prevents it from being thoroughly farcical. His killers had, with exquisite sensitivity, spent the day in Londonderry, at a march commemorating the dead of Bloody Sunday. The chief steward there, an IRA-man called Bart Fisher, was awaiting sentencing for the knife-killing of a fellow working class Catholic man, Jimmy McGinley. Here again, all witnesses had been intimidated by the IRA into silence, and what might have been a murder charge was reduced to manslaughter. And now, this killer was an honoured leader on what has become a feast-day in the republican calendar: thus the peace process, thus the peace.
No doubt Sinn Fein-IRA are expecting that the routine denunciations of the IRA by both governments will soon be forgotten, as so much else has been in the past 10 years. After all, the extraordinary anti-terrorist measures just passed by Parliament were not framed to deal with the most active and lethal terrorists in the United Kingdom.
However, such republican optimism does not take into account the feelings of Unionists, who will not allow any of their representatives to get within shouting distance of the peace process. More importantly, it neglects the shift in policy creation towards Northern Ireland within the US away from the State Department and towards the CIA. It is clear to the US administration that Gerry Adams is no more than an Irish Yasser Arafat - and no more reliable. Moreover, US intelligence is no longer prepared to tolerate either a potentially lethal terrorist enclave, a little Tora Bora in the South Armagh triangle, or the unfettered authority of its local warlord, Slab Murphy.
So Washington is now taking a more unforgiving look at Northern Ireland than are Dublin or London. Moreover, the Colombia Three, the Northern Bank robbery, and Robert McCartney are a reminder of the old CIA adage: the first time is happenstance, the second time is coincidence, but a third time is enemy action. US officials are now demanding that Sinn Fein disband the IRA.
The IRA's brutal arrogance has finally won it a new and truly formidable enemy. His name is Bush.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
According to the NY Post, FWIW, the sisters have been invited to the White House for St. Patrick's Day.
Excellent! I wonder if the sisters or the girlfriend wrote a letter to President Bush.
The IRA's brutal arrogance has finally won it a new and truly formidable enemy. His name is Bush.
YES! His name is Bush!!!! God Bless Him and help him rid the world of thugs such as these.
I knew there was violence in Ireland, but I had no idea that it was this bad. What a brave family!
Well done and thank you Mr President.
I loved the IRAs' Alex Maskey (Lord mayor of Belfast) defense of this. He claimed the tapes were not been recorded at the time, but said nothin' about the dozens of witnesses that are compelled to silence.
As well as the sisters McCartney and Bridgeen. I hope they continue to rail against the IRA, and, in doing so, will give other people courage to do the same!
The IRA is nothing more than a terrorist organization, and it's a disgrace that there are those in this country that support it.
How brave of the sisters and the girlfriend. May they find comrades and allies of support in their countrymen.
South Boston. I worked there for a couple of years and the Noraid people were always hitting up businesses for "donations". I lost a couple of windshields and sets of tires for saying no. I'm Catholic, and I hate the IRA. And I'm still furious that the Pope sent a rosary to Bobby Sands in 1981.
And these "good" Catholics will still turnout for the Kennedys & Kerrys.
I'm Catholic, and I hate the IRA.
Ditto that
And I'm still furious that the Pope sent a rosary to Bobby Sands in 1981.
He shouda sent a ham sandwich :-)
Unfortunately, this long conflict will not end even in my children's lifetime. The rhetoric on both sides has been too severe for too long. I'm a 'Protty', and I remember being shocked and outraged by some of Ian Paisley's inflammatory and bigoted remarks, where on more than one occasion he referred to Catholicism as 'The Whore of Babylon' (and you WON'T make any friends talking THAT way). However, the IRA has always been short on rhetoric, choosing instead to rely on terror as their primary form of 'diplomacy'. The conflict's end will be in sight when ordinary people on both sides determine that silence (of the kind practiced by the witnesses to Mr. McCartney's abduction; and the kind practiced by the victims' families when compelled by despair) is less tolerable that the status quo.
Don't you think this is happening now? At least hopeful signs that it may be beginning?
A Secret History of the IRA
by Ed Moloney
paperback
<< According to the NY Post, FWIW, the sisters have been invited to the White House for St. Patrick's Day. >>
They have -- and the "ira's" "politicians" [Fronts] have been dis-invited!
Although this is not a fresh development.
We -- President Bush and the Administration included -- have been awake to the trans-national Marxist mob of bank-robbing, drug-and-gun-running, lying, looting, thieving, cravenly mass-murdering, psychopathological gangster bastards that so grandiosely calls itself the "ira," for decades -- but accutely ever since the Cli'ton Crime Family first allied itself with it.
And -- particularly given Tiny Blair's grotesque serial apeeasements of it -- even more acutely since September 11 2001.
Terrorists are terrorists -- they have no national loyalties -- and we have, [I have] up close and personal, for more than thirty years, seen the multinationally-corporate ira's death cultists with other terrorists in every corner of the globe.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
<< The peace process didn't draw the Sinn Fein movement away from these defining toxins: quite the reverse. In the agreeable culture of [The deeply character-flawed Blair's serial] appeasement[s], the political antibodies that should have been combating the spread of the republican virus failed to respond.
So, far from being banned from the airwaves, republicans inhabited them almost full-time, and the Sinn Fein malignancy spread through nationalist Ireland, north and south of the border. >>
Beyond the understanding of what it is -- that it is evil -- there can be no "understanding" reached WITH evil in any of its manifestations. Evil simply is and the self-styled "ira's" inherent evil is not by one iota different and/or separable from Hitler's or Mao's or Stalin's or Assad's or Hussayne's or Daschle Arafat's.
Or Mahummid's: -- Whose evil has inspired them -- every one -- and/or inspires them still.
Slick willie had Adams here any number of times....fundraising being the reason.....and Teddy swimmer doing the demanding that he be invited.
Slick willie had Adams here any number of times....fundraising being the reason.....and Teddy swimmer doing the demanding that he be invited.
<< Slick willie had Adams here any number of times....fundraising being the reason ..... and Teddy swimmer doing the demanding that he be invited. >>
Slick Willie's Crime Family muscled Kennedy's for its chunk of the ira's loot.
Chelsea Cli'ton's trust fund didn't get to be valued in excess of a net Three Billion Dollars on the paltry "earnings" of her co-serial-rapist, serial-parasitical "parents."
Until he hit DC Slick's biggest monthly paycheck was around $2,100.00 after taxes and his "spouse," Bruno, was a gangster's brown-paper-bag-woman -- and to this day has never held a real job -- nor earned an honest Shekel.
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