 |
David Vance is the editor of , an online Unionist newsletter that seeks to help maintain Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom.
|
|
|
|
By David Vance
October 24, 2001
Israel and Northern Ireland share many similarities. Both countries have suffered tremendously at the hands of terrorists and both countries are recipients of Clinton-era generated "peace processes."
Both countries now appear set to suffer further, this time as a direct consequence of the International coalition against terrorism. The USA and UK are now offering them up as a form of blood sacrifice. This vainglorious attempt, to sustain a muted Arab support cast to the International War on Terrorism in the former case and to buy off the IRA in the latter, is doomed to failure.
The supreme irony of these democratic countries being thrown to the wolves in order to facilitate a "battle against terrorism" will go unreported in the mass media, as usual. Instead the media will celebrate the abandonment of the democratic people in these countries by pretending that new candles of hope have been lighted. Stomach churning hypocrisy is nothing new of course when it comes to media presentation of the terrorist danger faced by Northern Ireland and Israel.
When the passenger jets smashed into New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, a deadly political sequence commenced. Prime Minister Sharon has already identified the real risk that Israel faces in becoming a latter day Czechoslovakia for the USA. Colin Powell and Jack Straw have flagged up their desire to see a Palestinian State created. Tony Blair and George Bush have chimed in chorus favoring the establishment of a Palestinian State. Arafat must think Christmas has come early. One moment "his people" are dancing in the streets celebrating the death of 6000 Americans, the next he is cordially invited to Downing Street for afternoon tea with Tony Blair. The sight of a grinning Arafat standing beside Blair must nauseate Israelis in the same way as a grinning Gerry Adams standing beside Blair appalls decent people in Northern Ireland. Blair performs a central role in the appeasement of terrorism and media comparisons to Churchill are ridiculous. Chamberlain is the better analogy.
Yasser Arafat and his terrorist backers in Hamas, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad, do not seek a reasonable accommodation with Israel; they seek the obliteration of Israel; they seek the eradication of the only beacon of western style democracy in the Middle East area. Quite why Bush and Blair think this will enhance world peace is hard to fathom! Their advisers are either spectacularly uninformed or else pursuing aberrant political prejudice. Gerry Adams and his terrorist backers do not seek an accommodation with Unionism. They seek the destruction of Northern Ireland and it's incorporation in an anarcho-marxist 32 county Irish Republic.
In Northern Ireland, the representatives of terrorism have already made their entry into Government. They preside over Education and Health. Ongoing vacillation by the Blair administration over the total lack of genuine IRA decommissioning has been exposed by the events of September 11th. Yet rather than respond by unambiguously demanding the handover of all IRA weapons, an objective which the USA would have to support, the British Government is instead conspiring with the terrorists and their Irish Government accomplices to conjure up a few acts of cosmetic decommissioning. The IRA will shortly announce that it has concreted over a few of its many arms bunkers. This will be hailed as "historic" and the world media will effuse that at least something good has come out of the horror of September 11th. In fact the consequence will be that the terrorists' front men will be concreted into Government and the need for real decommissioning side-lined once and for all.
The only acceptable response to the threat posed by terrorism is for the USA and UK to abandon their tactical appeasement policy and recognize that all terrorism is wrong and that compromise is not a viable option, if right is to prevail over wrong.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
|
|
|
|
Click on the blue headline to read a Talkback comment and respond to it. Click on the  icon to send a private email to the talkback writer. The icon appears only if the writer has decided to be contacted. If no popup window appears, please make sure your popup blocker allows israelinsider.com.
|
|
| |
|
|
