[Mb-civic] The Discreet Charm of the Terrorist Cause - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Discreet Charm of the Terrorist Cause

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, August 3, 2005; Page A19

Since the bombing attacks in London last month, a welter of columnists, 
writers, talking heads and ordinary people have puzzled over the mystery 
of British Muslims, one in four of whom recently told pollsters that 
they sympathize with the July 7 suicide bombers.

The idea that British Muslims, whose parents received asylum, found 
jobs, and made lives in Britain, could be so deeply affected by the 
"oppression" of Muslims in countries they have never visited seems 
incomprehensible. The notion that events in distant deserts should lead 
the middle-class inhabitants of London or Leeds to admire terrorists 
seems inexplicable. But why should this phenomenon be so 
incomprehensible or inexplicable, at least to Americans? We did, after 
all, once tolerate a similar phenomenon ourselves.

<>I am talking about the sympathy for the Irish Republican Army that 
persisted for decades in some Irish American communities and is only now 
fading away. Like British Muslim support for Muslim extremist terrorism, 
Irish American support for Irish terrorism came in many forms. There 
were Irish Americans who waved the Irish flag once a year on St. 
Patrick's Day and admired the IRA's cause but felt queasy about the 
methods. There were Irish Americans who collected money for Catholic 
charities in Northern Ireland without condoning the IRA at all. There 
were also Irish Americans who, while claiming to be "aiding the families 
of political prisoners," were in fact helping to arm IRA terrorists. 
Throughout the 1970s, until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked 
President Ronald Reagan to stop them, they were the IRA's primary source 
of funding. And even after that they were widely tolerated.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201943.html?nav=hcmodule 

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