Peter King: Hillary Republican surrogate?
Back in 2006, when GOP Cong. Peter King was involved in a reasonably competitive race for Congress with Democrat David Mejias, it was sometimes noted that the King and Queen of NY Democrats, Bill and Hillary Clinton, didn't do much of anything for Mejias.
On one particular late October campaign swing through LI, Bill keynoted a big Dem rally in East Farmingdale by not mentioning Mejias even once, and not mentioning King either during his ritual denunciation of Republicans. King said afterwards: "I have an excellent personal relationship with Sen. Clinton and President Clinton."
Apparently, payback time is here. A couple of weeks ago, when a Nobel Peace Prize winner and various other figures from the Northern Ireland peace process dismissed Hillary's claim that she had proven her foreign policy expertise by being a big player there, one of the people who came to her defense was King, who is seen as an Ireland expert by some.
Today, he pops up again as a big critic of Obama's speech yesterday -- this time, apparently an expert on race relations and African -American churches. Telling Newsday:
"I think it's an obligation of any opponent to use this issue, to make Reverend Wright a centerpiece of the campaign. His speech was disappointing and shameful.... This goes to the heart of who Barack Obama is. He's trying to say he represents the 21st-century view on race and here he's sticking up for this guy."
It's perfectly OK to disagree with Obama, and to think he should have gone further. But an "obligation" to make Jeremiah Wright a "centerpiece"???
Obama gives a speech that was mostly devoted to calling for racial healing and understanding -- a speech even Clinton has declared to be a good speech -- and King thinks it's an obligation to focus on the racially divisive sermons that Obama denounced? Is that his idea of moving the country forward, and representing a face of Long Island that the country will respect, or just his idea of how to get a cheap political advantage?
The local congressman who himself has been accused more than once of Muslim-baiting, a man who stuck up for Gerry Adams and the IRA when they were actually killing people, is claiming now to be offended by Obama denouncing, but not denouncing utterly enough, a guy who gave some inflammatory sermons?
Please.
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Be careful Riley, you are no in Kings terrorist-loving sights. He's going to fire off an angry letter about this post.
From the NY Sun:
"The politician once called the IRA "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland," he was banned from the BBC by British censors for his pro-IRA views, and he refused to denounce the IRA when one of its mortar bombs killed nine Northern Irish police officers...
He forged links with leaders of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Ireland, and in America he hooked up with Irish Northern Aid, known as Noraid, a New York based group that the American, British, and Irish governments often accused of funneling guns and money to the IRA. At a time when the IRA's murder of Lord Mountbatten and its fierce bombing campaign in Britain and Ireland persuaded most American politicians to shun IRA-support groups, Mr. King displayed no such inhibitions. He spoke regularly at Noraid protests and became close to the group's publicity director, the Bronx lawyer Martin Galvin, a figure reviled by the British.
Mr. King's support for the IRA was unequivocal. In 1982, for instance, he told a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County: "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry."
By the mid-1980s, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were openly hostile to Mr. King. On one occasion, a judge threw him out of a Belfast courtroom during the murder trial of IRA men because, in the judge's view, "he was an obvious collaborator with the IRA." When he attended other trials, the police singled him out for thorough body searches."
Lets not ignore the IRA-Muammar Gaddafi link.
King raised money to pay Libya for weapons.
Libya connection
But the IRA's acquisition of arms through Libya in the 1980s helped transform the organisation into one that could fight a devastating and sustained campaign.
Eskund: 150 tonnes of arms seized
The first arms connection with Libya was discovered in 1973 when a ship laden with guns and ammunition, the Claudia, was apprehended off the Irish coast.
According to Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, he resumed contact with the IRA in 1986 after the UK assisted the US in bombing Tripoli.
It is believed that three substantial shipments of arms reached Ireland before the French authorities apprehended a ship, the Eskund, laden with some 150 tonnes of weaponry.
Infamous weapon
It is these supplies from Libya which provided the IRA with its most significant and infamous weapon: Semtex.
Semtex: Smuggled from Libya
The plastic explosive was first made in Czechoslovakia and is virtually odourless, easy to use and, unlike home-made bombs, stable.
The IRA began using it to create landmines for attacks against soldiers in border areas. But instead of using up supplies as a primary explosive, the IRA used Semtex as a "booster" for large home-made bombs.
t wasn't Sean who was mad
Ruth Dudley Edwards
Ruth Dudley Edwards toured the United States with the reformed IRA killer -pursued by idiots
The Spectator Mar 29, 1997
The next most entertaining event involved another energetic publicityhound, Congressman Peter King, whose support for the IRA recently garnered him a peace award at a Freedom for All Ireland dinner. King has a secure place in the IRA's pantheon of useful idiots: in the National Review he recently compared Gerry Adams to George Washington and Sean O'Callaghan to Benedict Arnold, which so amused the editor, John O'Sullivan, that he instigated a King-O'Callaghan public debate on Capitol Hill under his magazine's auspices.
King obediently read out the most recent Sinn Fein briefing on Mr O'Callaghan (mentally deranged agent of British imperialism) and added a coda of his own: an IRA prisoner had told him, he explained, that in jail O'Callaghan had been observed eating light bulbs. The British ambassador, Sir John Kerr observed helpfully afterwards that British prisoners were not allowed to eat light bulbs: more prosaically, Mr O'Callaghan points out that for obvious reasons prisons do not in fact have light bulbs. Even the Sinn Fein organ An Phoblacht/Republican News, which in a recent hysterical attack has accused Mr O'Callaghan of everything short of breakfasting on sauteed Republican babies, balked at that.
The trouble with those who allege that Mr O'Callaghan is a fruitcake is that he comes across as sane and they come across as mad. King's cheerleaders were no exception. Although beefed up by the chap who explained that he was Jewish and believed that the Irish too should have their homeland, they were mainly typical of the malcontent fringe of Irish America - a daft breed I know well since I did an East Coast lecture tour in the mid-1980s. I still vividly remember Julia, Ann and Big Al, who would rise after every lecture to drone interminably and irrelevantly about colonial oppressors, Saxon yokes and the historic suffering of the heroic Irish people under the British jackboot.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The Main Defect of Peter King [John Derbyshire]
Here is Rep. King writing about Northern ireland in today's New York Post:
"And while there were murders, atrocities and human-rights violations on all sides, the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries caused more civilian casualties than did the IRA."
There are a couple of things to be said about this. The first is that it is probably not true. The best reference here is LOST LIVES, a careful tally of all the dead in the Northern Irish "Troubles" of 1966-99. The book has a long statistical appendix, breaking down the numbers of the dead in various ways. It does not address Rep. King's point directly, mainly because of the difficulty of defining "civilian," and of ambiguities in which "side" to award a killing to. (E.g. if a British soldier kills a loyalist terrorist — 10 UDA/UFF/UVF terrorists are listed as having been killed by the army.) Is a retired cop a "civilian"? The IRA did not think so, and targeted many. Is a prison officer a "civilian"? How about a clerical worker at a prison? Etc. etc.
The IRA's definition of a "legitimate target" included people like census takers and building contractors doing UK govt work. In fact, as Sean O'Callaghan has testified, for a lot of IRA operatives, "legitimate target"
simply meant "Protestant."
LOST LIVES lists 3,636 dead in the Troubles 1966-99, of which Table 2 — "Responsibility for deaths" awards 2,139 to republican terrorists, 1,050 to loyalist terrorists, 361 to the army and police, 86 to "other." That doesn't answer the question, since we don't have a breakdown of civilian vs.
non-civilian in those numbers. If, for example, all 2,139 of the deaths attributable to republican terrorists were British soldiers, Rep. King might be telling the truth. Plainly this isn't so, but to what degree is not clear from the stats presented.
Table 20 — "Deaths for which the IRA were responsible" shows 456 in the UK military (and one in the Republic of Ireland military), not counting the Ulster Defence Regiment and RIR (182 — part-time soldiers, many farmers in border areas who fell to the IRA's "ethnic cleansing" program in these areas
— those are real nice farms out there...)
If you rank the categories in this table, for deaths for which the IRA was responsible you get: Civilians (636), UK military (456), police (NI, British, and 6 Irish Gardai — 284), UDR/RIR (182), republican terrorists (i.e. their own "comrades"! — 161), loyalist terrorists (28), prison service (23).
The second thing to be said is the nature of the IRA terror, its deliberate and savage frightfulness, by comparison with the amateurish butcherings of occasional lone loyalist psychopaths and operational blunders by the British Army and NI police. The Enniskillen massacre was a characteristic IRA operation, to which no military, police, or loyalist-terrorist actions even come close. It was almost certainly planned and carried out with Gerry Adams's approval. Why does Rep. King admire this man?
Much of the conventional weaponry and a great deal of the money necessary for IRA violence came from Irish-American sympathizers. Mr. King's advocacy of the IRA's cause encouraged that flow and earned him the deep-seated hostility of the British and Irish governments. In America, official animosity was no less intense. The GOP in Nassau tried, unsuccessfully, to muzzle him, and he complained that the FBI was opening mail sent from Ireland, including letters from Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams.
******In 1984, the Secret Service listed him as a threat when President Reagan made a trip to Nassau County to watch a Special Olympics event.******