Ireland becomes victim of Terror - At last!

I read with some bewilderment in the last few days that Ireland had finally become the victim of terror and that the harsh reality was that we weren't as immune as we thought we were before now.

I don't know where we got the idea that we were. I would have thought that if we had some sort of immunity to terror then that person who was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg by Cromwell's troops would have survived the incident which would have mafe for a few good fireside stories. Likwise the man who was waving a white handkerchief at British troops on Bloody Sunday. He'd probably still be alive today, appearing on talk shows telling the world how the bullets just bounced off him. Or the people who were killed in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974. I could go on and on, yet there would still be people who would argue that what they meant by terror was islamic terror.

In a perceptive critique of the media coverage of the Oklahoma city bombings in 1995, Robert Fisk noted how the bombers were referred to as "terrorists" when it was assumed they were muslims and then suddenly morphed into "extremists" when it turned out they were white Americans.

White Protestants don't do terror. They do Final solutions, collateral damage, strategic limitation and a whole load of other euphemisms. Terror is something that only Paddies and Arabs get up to.

To an outsider, the representation of the facts by the Anglo-Saxon media can seem bizzare but if you understand the puritan ethos that underpins Anglo-Saxon societies, especially the US, it makes a little more sense. When puritans first landed in the US, they believed they were on a mission from God to kill the Native Americans whom they regarded as savages. In the same epoch, Cromwell also cited some historical passages from the Bible as justification for his use of State terror against Ireland. When the famine struck Ireland many in the British government believed it was a gift from God, who they believed to be a big fan of Anglican hymns.

I was a bit digusted to find out that the person who first came up with the phrase "manifest destiny", the belief that Americans are so much better than anyone else that it's their right to impose their way of life on the rest of the world was one John O Sullivan, somebody with a very Irish-sounding name.

I'm sure there were many in Ireland who were shocked by the attacks in London, believing that as we speak the same language and share so much common popular culture that they can empathise. Yet I've seen one article after another in the British press over the last 10 days that tars "Irish" and "Islamic" terrorists with the same brush, even though the journalists writing these pieces know as well as I do that only a tiny proportion of the population of Ireland and the Islamic world supported either the IRA or Al_Queda, though many of their readers won't.

The sad truth is that no matter how we think we are just the same as the English, most of them have a superiority complex that leads them to see us as pugnacious leprechauns.

The fact that the Waterford teenager who died in Turkey wasn't the first Irish person to die in violent circumstances won't provide much consolation for her family or friends. The papers are full of encomia which present her as a bubbly, evervescent young girl which I've got no reason to disbelieve. The question has to be asked, what was a nice girl like her doing in a place like Turkey?

I have to admit, to my shame, that everyone in my family other than myself has funded the coffers of the brutal junta of this this state with their tourist euros. It's easy to see why they might, as the brutailty of the conflict in Kurdistan is so far away from the tourist beaches of the Aegean. It's shameful that tourist agencies encourage package tours to places like Turkey which normalise what's in reality of the most violent, repressive countries on Earth. To put it in some perspective, one of the key reasons Bush and Blair invaded Iraq was that he had allegedly killed 100,000 Kurds. Yet the Turkish junta has killed at least 30,000 kurds, and the US and Britain arm them to the teeth and encourage the EU to accept them as a member.

As people who've suffered a long history of exploitation our sympathies ought to be with the kurds who want nothing more than their own autonomus state. But until now, we've seen the situation there much as Chamberlain saw Czechoslovakia: A country far away about which we know nothing.

Sadly, instead of engaging with the PKK and asking ourselves if it's morally right to visit Turkey, we'll probably all dismiss the "terrorists" as evildoers to whom it would be cowardly to cave into. Which would be great news for the Turkish government and the American and British arms firms who get so much of their money.