re: #337 Charles

This is a good one.

Oh no! Sinn Fein aren’t “religious extremists” at all! Those thousands of bombings, murders, and people tortured to death were for a real cause! Not for religious extremism.

I’ll try to get back to logic soon, so I can understand how the IRA had nothing to do with religion.

Sinn Fein and the IRA have as much to do with Catholic extremism as the PLO and Fatah in the 1970s had to do with Islamic extremism.

Catholicism in Northern Ireland is a rough indicator of one’s ancestry as Irish Irish, and Protestantism is a rough indicator of Scots Irish descent. The radicals among the Irish Irish of Northern Ireland have hated the Scots Irish since the latter were brought over to colonize Ireland for the British crown. The IRA killed Orangemen because they deemed them “invaders” with “no right to the land,” on exactly the same basis on which the PLO and various secular terror groups attacked Israelis.

And, in fact, in the 1970s the PLO and the IRA had extensive connections and gave each other mutual support, as in this mural: PLO-IRA One Struggle.

Sinn Fein embracing Hamas has much more to do with their reflexive hatred of Israel going back decades and their view that Hamas, not Fatah, currently represents the active segment of the valiant struggle to destroy the invader state. Not everyone who supports religious extremist murderers is a religious extremist: sometimes they’re secular opportunists taking advantage of the religious extremists’ willingness to murder a common enemy, and sometimes they’re political extremists who feel the religious extremists are acting in a way that reinforces their political ideology.

And the kicker in this is that if the IRA represented a religious agenda, it might be possible to defuse it through an appeal to shared Christian values between Catholics and Protestants — but as they represent an agenda of ethnic cleansing and giving back to the Scots Irish the oppression that the Irish Irish suffered under British rule, religious arguments have had and will have no effect on them.