Old Peter Hubbard

By AM Friday, March 18, 2011

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if your test for whether or not terrorist violence is acceptable is whether or not you agree with the cause that it furthers, you will never have the moral authority to condemn such acts when they are carried out by others. The use of violence against innocents must be wrong in whatever form it takes. Take any other position and you are open, as Congressman King undoubtedly is, to charges of hypocrisy – Tom Parker.

If there is one lesson Peter King has learned from his experience of Ireland it is to reinvent the past. He may even have been tutored in it by his long time ally and grand master of the denial game, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. The type of absurd denial sitting at the heart of the peace process works a bit like the Holy Trinity. Don’t try understanding it, just believe it.

has not been having it all his own way – in fact he’s been having a terrible time of it … His problem is that the US media has finally caught up with his past as a cheerleader for the Provisional IRA back in the 1980’s and 1990’s when he and Noraid were inseparable and when he was on first name terms with and a house guest of many in the IRA’s national and Belfast leaderships.

Because these things have a tendency to be recalled by those who suffered their effects rather than those who caused them, King’s forgetfulness has found a critic in Tom Parker, the policy director for terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International USA. Parker, who was injured with 20 others in an IRA bomb attack in London in 1990, displayed scorn toward King’s newly acquired disdain for what many define as terrorism:

I have no problem with his support for a unified Ireland. What really bothers me is the hypocrisy of the man … This is a guy who is happy to bully other people when he has a whole crowd of skeletons in his closet on this issue.

King does not want these skeletons flaunted so has picked a different cupboard for the audience to look into, Old Mother Hubbard-like, and discover it bare of content apart from some words scrawled where the skeleton might be expected to hang: ‘Lis¬ten, I think I'm one of the people who brought about peace in Ire¬land’ as he told the Washington Times. Move along folks nothing to see here. Although King has emulated the Sinn Fein leader in creating a fictional past in which his role was only to bring peace to Ireland, his problem has been concisely laid out by Tom Dierner:

From his days as the elected Nassau County comptroller in the early 1980s, King has spoken out for the IRA, a nationalist group that waged a bloody bomb-and-bullet campaign for three decades in an effort to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. To King and other supporters, the IRA volunteers were freedom fighters. But to others, including many Irish Americans, the Provisionals (as the main IRA group was known) were terrorists.

Moreover Ed Moloney, a long time observer of the IRA, contends that history does little to support King’s account.

By the time the process got seriously underway in secret, circa 1987/1988, King had been supporting the IRA for seven or eight years … King’s closest contacts in the IRA in these years were the military men, people who had never been nor would ever want be in Sinn Fein, activists who would have little truck either with the peace process. King told me himself that he didn’t meet Gerry Adams, the architect of the peace process, until 1984, four years after his love affair with the Provos began

In a riveting account in the online journal Counterpunch, Moloney adds to our understanding of King’s immersion in the twilight world of the IRA.

Peter King … had friends and contacts at the very highest levels of the IRA at a time when both the British and American governments had vowed to achieve the organisation’s destruction … Peter King owes all that he is to his own support for a foreign terrorist group. He accuses Wikileaks of enabling Al Qaeda to kill Americans but he was cheerleader, confidant and friend to the leaders of one of Europe’s bloodiest and most violent terrorist groups.

In seeking to establish anti-terrorist bona fides King has been critical of bodies like Wikileaks and demanding that it be placed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations on the grounds that ‘Their activity is enabling terrorists to kill Americans?’

Even for those of us who do not view the IRA per se as a terrorist organisation we can hardly deny that there were many occasions when it did employ terrorism. And despite his professed stance in defence of US citizens from the ‘terrorism’ of Wikileaks the historical record would appear to show King was in a dalliance with the IRA at the time the organisation bombed Harrods in London in 1983 on one of the busiest shopping days of the year making it most unlikely to avoid civilian casualties. As a result of that attack Kenneth Salvesan, a Chicago businessman died and an Irish American, Michigan man Mark McDonald was seriously injured. As Niall O’Dowd wrote ‘it was as bad as anything Al Qaeda could have pulled off.’ He added on King "I think he's gone off the rails."

Like the man who made him respectable, Gerry Adams, King was even banned from the airways by the BBC because he refused to condemn an IRA mortar attack in 1985 that killed 9 British police men and women. Not many US politicians have that on their CV.

Peter the Good may be trying to reinvent himself as the new American hero stepping forward to save US society from the ravages of evil Islam. But hero to zero can often be a quick non-stop journey. As a character in the film Somebody’s Hero said there is only one thing US society loves more than the rise of a hero – the fall of one. Let’s see where this one goes.