Having served in the Her Majesties Royal Air Force during the 1980's I was unfortunate enough to lose colleagues in bomb attacks perpetrated by members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), to say nothing of the nearly more than 3,700 died and tens of thousands injured in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, the IRA murdered about 1,800 civilians and members of the security forces. Now let me state that I am like anyone with any sense of humanity and morality appalled and horrified by any act of terror no matter the cause. My question is "Hand on Heart (or Bible or Flag)" do you believe that were the IRA still as active today as they were back in the '80's would the USA still be its biggest source of income, weapons and support? Given that Mr Trump would ban all Muslims just in case one is a terrorist would he also ban all Catholics or at least the Irish ones on the same basis? Just wondering......
I always looked upon the IRA as commie terrorist. And most communist wars of liberation start out using terrorist tactics against the civilian population. National Liberation Front (Vietcong) started out as a terrorist organization murdering civilians. In 1981 or 82 I was in New York City just down the street from the Gramercy Park Hotel where I was staying at and while inside a Irish pub I discovered it was an IRA bar. I remember a 60 Minutes episode from the late 1960's of interviewing British soldiers in Northern Ireland and these soldiers said they would have rather been fighting in the Vietnam War that was taking place at the time. I think the IRA prevented British troops from participating in that war. But the UK and British troops were there in South Vietnam just like West Germany was. Back then the Germans weren't allowed to send German combat troops to the RVN but they had a German hospital ship off of DaNang and German hospitals all across South Vietnam.
Nah, entirely different. Fundamental Islam is based on islamic teachings, while militant Irish Republicans are engaged in a political campaign alone. It's not the religious division which defines the goals of the IRA but the political one. I mean Muhammad even promised his followers that one day they'd conquer Constantinople (now Istanbul). The religion of the sword is replete with material to justify violence. In comparison, what did Jesus ever promise to 'conquer'?
You are wrong the death and destruction wrought by the IRA had no more political justification than ISIS and its ilk has any religious justification. It is all about power and using terror and death as a way of displaying g that power. All of which comes back to my original question if Trump bans all Muslims (from known troubled regions) would he also ban all Catholics (from Ireland at least) using the same logic?
I say it was political because they were trying to remove the British administration of Northern Ireland.... so that you might call that power instead is inconsequential. The anti-Protestant component of it all was just one attribute of that political/power conflict. Which is why it's rather invalid to relate it to Catholicism.
The New Testament just condoned proselytism - the "right" to bother the whole planet with the belief that your opinion is the only one that's good - not violence or segregation. The Old Testament, on the other hand, promoted exclusion, war, slavery, genocide and terror as well as racial purity. Compared to the OT, the Koran is a book of peace and acceptation.
Sure, but the Christian Testaments are not new and old because of age, the NT corrects the OT where contradiction occurs. The Koran needs its own NT asap.
I agree with you but the protestants paramilitaries were also terrorists, so he would have to ban all Irish to be consistent. Remember we sent troops to NI originally to protect Catholics.
Really, I remember being there and seeing first hand how the country was divided along protestant and catholic lines, saying you were either in the wrong place got you a kicking at best!
I'd say they're about entirely different gods. A tribal one vs a universal one. If that's the same one, maybe he was in an adolescent crisis in the time of the OT. Furthermore, I think the union of the two books (and whatever came from St Paul) really messed up what the NT was about, and eventually it even fckd up christianity.
I can only imagine, and sure, as I said it was politics and power, not religion. Even though the lines drawn between the Brits and the Irish did also have that matching religious division.. all I was saying it was not the religious division which defined the intention or nature of the combative elements and therefore making the comparison as was done was not comparable. Anyway to the topic, once civilians take arms in conflict they are no longer non-combatants and become fighters of some description. So then if they target civilians I think they best use the title terrorist, and if they target military forces they can best are called insurgents, guerrillas, militia, freedom fighters etc but not terrorists. If we use the narrative of the actor to define it as a terrorist or not plays to that actor's efforts in the information space. The best way to defeat terrorism is to break the foundations of their narrative... so since intention can be easily hidden or used to deceive as well as being dictated by that actor, it just seems more useful to define terrorism by the deliberate targeting of civilians. This puts it as a crime according to laws of war, which then differentiates itself from other crime by its scope and the connections of the criminal organisation. Because lets face it terrorism is a type of organised crime for reasons other then monetary. Defining terrorism as part of warfighting to me flies in the face of the law of wars and undermines the efforts of Western nations to conduct warfighting in the way it trains to do ie legally.
