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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Hamas and the IRA |
| 2006-02-15 |
| When Palestinians revealed their true colors electing Hamas to 74 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Arab world was dumb-struck. An Islamist terror group had finally snatched power from the ruling old guard and woke up the world to a new Middle East reality. But does Hamas' victory really represent the decisive shift where Palestinian politics began going down-hill? Historians and students of current affairs often compare the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to that between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), in which an organization claiming to represent Catholics took up arms against Irish Protestants and the British. For decades, the IRA's modus operandi was slaying thousands of innocent men, women and children. It also utilized terror tactics such as human bombs, which involved chaining one of its unfortunate victims to the steering wheel of a lorry laden with explosives, which was then exploded. The IRA was Western Europe's most successful terror organization and has spread its malign tentacles across the globe. The parallels with Hamas are inescapable. Balance at the link. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 It also utilized terror tactics such as human bombs, which involved chaining one of its unfortunate victims to the steering wheel of a lorry laden with explosives, which was then exploded. The chaining to the steering wheel incident never occured. (and note the interleaving of a single incident into a statement about a systematic pattern) What happened on a number of occasions is the IRA took family members hostage and forced someone to drive a car/truck bomb somewhere. Although, in some of the incidents the driver may have been a willing accomplice and the hostage taking staged to give the driver a cover story. As far as I am aware only one of the drivers died, and while there is a clear disregard for human life, thats not the same as saying there was an intention to kill the driver. Most or all were Catholics for one thing. IMO this is a gratuitous attempt to paint a (moral) equivalence between Islamic terrorists and others. BTW, the statement was plagiarized from TCS, which in turn seems to have got the info from Wikipedia. In Northern Ireland, in the early 1990s, the IRA forced men to become suicide bombers by threatening their families. Here is a summary of the main hostage taking bombings. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-15 20:39 |
| #1 I've always thought the Gestapo to be Western Europe's top terror organization. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-02-15 18:39 |