I was recently looking at Facebook and noticed that one of my relatives in Ireland is always posting pro-IRA propaganda.
Now, as every schoolboy knows, the centenary of the Easter Rising has just passed and there is a fair bit of agreement that those involved in the Easter Rising are quite different kinds of men and women to those who formed the Provisional Wing of the IRA. The former are seen as more legitimate revolutionaries put down by an imperialist power, and whose executions actually galvanized the Irish republican/independence movement.
While people like James Connolly have plenty of admirers, people like the Provos are usually considered to be criminals and thugs.
However, my relative sees no distinction and supports all members of the IRA and refers to them as "on active service" and "killed by British terrorists" (The British Army and SAS, he means). Also on a recent Facebook meme in which you give "things to tell your children" where there are some general platitudes and you can type your own one in to number 6, he sent this meme to his teenage son with number six filled in as "Up the Ra!"
Of course, much of this could be support for the IRA in a spectator sense. But who knows? Maybe he is a participant supporter of some kind.
It makes me think about the exhortations we often hear that the Muslim community needs to get tough with terrorist supporters in "their communities". Now, I don't think that IRA violence is on anything like the scale that Islamist violence is, and it is currently, supposedly dormant. And yet, maybe the authorities would be interested in this kind of thing.
I'm not going to shop my relative, however. Does that make me wrong? And should we start thinking of some guidelines by which passive support of terrorism should be given the benefit of the doubt?
Now, as every schoolboy knows, the centenary of the Easter Rising has just passed and there is a fair bit of agreement that those involved in the Easter Rising are quite different kinds of men and women to those who formed the Provisional Wing of the IRA. The former are seen as more legitimate revolutionaries put down by an imperialist power, and whose executions actually galvanized the Irish republican/independence movement.
While people like James Connolly have plenty of admirers, people like the Provos are usually considered to be criminals and thugs.
However, my relative sees no distinction and supports all members of the IRA and refers to them as "on active service" and "killed by British terrorists" (The British Army and SAS, he means). Also on a recent Facebook meme in which you give "things to tell your children" where there are some general platitudes and you can type your own one in to number 6, he sent this meme to his teenage son with number six filled in as "Up the Ra!"
Of course, much of this could be support for the IRA in a spectator sense. But who knows? Maybe he is a participant supporter of some kind.
It makes me think about the exhortations we often hear that the Muslim community needs to get tough with terrorist supporters in "their communities". Now, I don't think that IRA violence is on anything like the scale that Islamist violence is, and it is currently, supposedly dormant. And yet, maybe the authorities would be interested in this kind of thing.
I'm not going to shop my relative, however. Does that make me wrong? And should we start thinking of some guidelines by which passive support of terrorism should be given the benefit of the doubt?
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1X19ib5
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