Selective Outrage: NY Times Suddenly Concerned American Politicians Sympathized With IRA

Of course there's only one politician they're concerned about here.

For Representative Peter T. King, as he seizes the national spotlight this week with a hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims, it is the most awkward of résumé entries. Long before he became an outspoken voice in Congress about the threat from terrorism, he was a fervent supporter of a terrorist group, the Irish Republican Army.

So now to the New York Times the IRA is unequivocally a terrorist group. Not freedom fighters, not militants, the name typically reserved for Islamic terror groups. Their agenda is all too transparent: Peter King supports terrorists, therefore his holding hearing on radical Islamists in America makes him a hypocrite.

In later years, by all accounts, Mr. King became an important go-between in talks that led to peace in Northern Ireland, drawing on his personal contacts with leaders of I.R.A.’s political wing, Sinn Fein, and winning plaudits from both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the former president and the British prime minister.

When he hung around with Bill Clinton, he was their kind of guy. Now he's going after those the Times sympathizes with and he's the enemy. Selective indignation.

Mr. King, son of a New York City police officer and grand-nephew of an I.R.A. member, offers no apologies for his past, which he has celebrated in novels that feature a Irish-American congressman with I.R.A. ties who bears a striking resemblance to the author.

Of comparisons between the terrorism of the I.R.A. and that of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, Mr. King said: “I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel. The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.”

Memo to the Times: The New York City and Boston areas are filled with Irish immigrants and the sons and grandsons of Irish immigrants, with a countless number who either had ties or sympathies with the IRA. This goes back 90 years, back to a time when my grandfather was expelled from Ireland for suspected ties to the IRA. That came after he was conscripted into the British Army as a 16-year-old to fight in World War I, and he was fortunate to survive numerous injuries.

Yes, New York Times, a lot of people looked upon the IRA not as a terrorist group, but as those fighting for independence from Britain. Their actions and collaboration with radical leftists and terror groups -- again, groups the Times openly has sympathized with over the years -- left a bad impression upon many of us who later wanted nothing to do with them, family ties or not. The events of 9/11 also provided a stark realization for many: If we're going to unequivocally denounce terrorism, you better be consistent. But for the Times, they prefer hypocrisy over consistency.

Even Mr. King’s critics acknowledge a fundamental difference between the violence carried out by the I.R.A., which usually sought with varying success to minimize civilian casualties, and that of Al Qaeda, which has done the opposite. The I.R.A. was responsible for 1,826 of 3,528 deaths during the Northern Irish conflict between 1969 and 2001, including those of several hundred civilians, said the historian Malcolm Sutton.

We wonder, where was the Times all these years denouncing St. Edward of Hyannisport for his support of the IRA?

Kennedy was no doubt a dedicated servant of Congress and a passionate believer in combating poverty, but his lasting legacy on this side of the Atlantic was to poison Anglo-American relations for a generation. It’s not often said aloud but many British people when they first saw United 175 hit the World Trade Centre felt, alongside shock, pity and a sense of solidarity with the American people, also a feeling of “now you know what terrorism is like, will you stop funding the murder of our people?”

For years Kennedy was the bang-drummer-in-chief for brainless Irish-American IRA sympathisers, dimwits who shouted “troops out of Dublin!” and sang maudlin songs from the comfort of Boston and New York, giving money for strangers 3,000 miles away to murder their neighbours.

For despite the pseudo-Marxist justifications the IRA used, which was obviously lapped up by useful idiots on both sides of the Irish Sea and across the Atlantic, their goal was always ethnic cleansing against their neighbours, the people who Americans still call “the Scots-Irish”.

This pathetic effort at smearing King has been ongoing for months now, calling him a terrorist lover. But dare to call liberals terrorist lovers when they bend over backwards to rationalize away Islamic terror and they immediately wail about themselves being smeared and whine about McCarthyism. Now how ironic is it they're calling him the new McCarthy?

So if King is the new McCarthy by warning about homegrown terrorism, what does that make Attorney General Eric Holder?

Also, if the Times is now so grossly offended by the ties of Peter King and the IRA dating back to 1982, why is it just last week they slobbered all over convicted terrorist Lori Berenson? The group she belonged to was designated a terror group years ago, along with "the real IRA."