So a congressman and an IRA Terrorist Go Into a Mosque ...

Terrorism is always in the eye of the beholder. The trick is to see it through the victims' eyes, even if those victims are your enemies.

From Raw Story:

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) appeared on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown Wednesday night to discuss Rep. Peter King’s latest hearing on radical Islam.
During the hearing, King said that the Somalia-base Al-Shebab terror group was “a growing threat” to the United States. Ellison said on Countdown that not a single witness at the hearing backed up King’s claim.

King earlier denied a request by Ellison to testify at the hearing. Ellison is the sole Muslim in Congress and represents a district that includes the largest Somali community in the U.S.

Olbermann concluded the interview by saying: “Congressman Peter King is un-American and frankly — forgive the language — he’s an asshole.”

Watch video, courtesy of MoxNews.com, below.

But Peter King has a special, almost unique perspective on terrorism. He's supported it for years.

Dave von Ebers explains:

My mother is a Durkin and her family comes from the Land of Heart’s Desire, County Sligo in Connacht on the northwest coast of Ireland, where William Butler Yeats spent much of his youth. In other words, the Moms is Irish. For my part, I’m a mutt; but being part Irish and growing up in the Chicago area within dead-cat-swinging distance of literally hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics (which is to say, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one), it was hard not to identify them.

Consequently, I grew up with the idea that all thirty-two counties of my mother’s ancestral homeland should someday be one nation; that after 800 years or so of British oppression, it was time for Her Majesty’s Armed Forces to head back across the Irish Sea where they’d come from and to leave Ireland to the Irish. That’s most likely what you thought if you were Irish Catholic in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s. Even if you were only part Irish.

SNIP

As it happens, when I first started frequenting the Madison Street bars in the early 1980s (Madison Street in Forest Park, Illinois, that is – it being the place where just about all the taverns were located in the vicinity of once-dry Oak Park, my home town), the Troubles in Northern Ireland – what the Irish call Ulster – were in full swing. And if you frequented taverns with Irish-sounding names back in the early 1980s in places like Forest Park, or in, say, Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood or in the Southwest suburbs, you were likely to see, as I often did, pro-Irish Republican Army graffiti on the walls of the men’s rooms – nasty things about the personal shaving habits of Queen Elizabeth II, and even nastier things about Margaret Thatcher, Ian Paisely or the UDA – the kind of things that seemed oddly out of place in America in the age of Reagan, darkly threatening and bigoted and ugly; militant in the worst sense of the word.

And what’s funny is, in places like Chicago – and, I’m sure, New York and Boston and any big city with a large Irish Catholic demographic – support for the IRA was not only not uncommon, it was often fairly out in the open. For example, back then my late brother Tom was the lead guitarist in a British Invasion-themed band – you know, four guys in matching white-shirts-with-skinny-ties-and-pointy-shoes type outfits, playing Beatles and Stones and Kinks tunes in front of a huge Union Jack – and, ironically, on at least a couple of occasions they were booked to play private parties that turned out to be NORAID benefits. Maybe the party organizers figured the Union Jack provided cover, or maybe they just didn’t care. But, in any event, according to Tom these were parties with automatic-weapons-toting armed guards at the door, that sort of thing; and at one particular NORAID function, during a break between the band’s sets, the organizers passed around a black coffin-shaped box with an infamous bit of IRA graffiti scrawled on it:

13 Gone and Not Forgotten/We Got 18 and Lord Mountbatten …

into which party goers stuffed wads of cash.

And I don’t think any of that money was declared on anybody’s tax return, if you catch my drift.

In fact, in the late ’70s and early ’80s support for the IRA and its sectarian cause was so wide spread, a young Republican Congressman from New York, Rep. Peter King – yes, that Rep. Peter King – openly embraced the terrorist organization:

[King] 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.”

That’s worth repeating: In the early 1980s, Rep. Peter King’s “support for the IRA was unequivocal.”

And lest anybody should forget, the IRA was involved in the business of killing people – innocent civilians, civilian politicians and civilian police officers among them – for the purpose of effecting political change. That’s what we call “terrorism” – using violence against civilian targets to terrorize a civilian population and pressure its political leaders to act in accordance with the terrorists’ wishes. Say what you will about the Irish Republican cause – I, for one, have always supported it – the methods of the IRA were despicable and unacceptable, as were the methods of their Unionist opposition in Ulster.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but more than 3,000 innocents died in Northern Ireland’s Troubles from the early 1960s until the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998. And that’s a number that ought to resonate with Americans today.

3,000 innocent men and women killed in the name of sectarian extremism. That’s pretty close to the number of people killed on September 11, 2001; and while the IRA and their Protestant extremist enemies may have been less efficient at killing than al Qaeda, they proved they could be no less deadly over time. So, you’d think support of the IRA – as I say, once common in the U.S., at least in the big cities – would carry the same sort of stigma as support for Islamic extremism. You’d think that, but if the political success of Rep. Pete King means anything, you’d be wrong.

Liberals know that terrorism is terrorism and is never justified.

And yes, Peter King is an asshole. If only he were the only one.