> When I was growing up in Boston, middle-class
> housewives would have fundraising parties for the
> IRA. The whole phenomenon of comfortable
> middle-class Americans' considerable financial
> support for violence elsewhere is a fascinating one
> that I would love to explore further. Indian-
> Americans in suburban New Jersey are sending
> tons of $$ to far-right Hindu nationalists in India.
> Then there's the cash from many American Jews
> supporting the settlements.
Come now, I don't think the NorAid of old or the -- to my mind -- honorable Irish-American support for the United Irishmen, Fenianism, Sinn Fein, et. al., deserves to be placed in the same camp as "Yankee Hindutva," Wahhabi and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood involvement in US mosques, or US Zionism.
It's not that Irish-Americans necessarily have the best politics (remember O'Connell's letter? or Bernadette Devlin's story about being greeted on her visit to the US with placards reading, "Brits out of Ireland, N-words out of Boston"?), but I don't think they're to be faulted for their support of freedom struggles back "home." And no matter what you think of the IRA, that is what they have been historically, basically just a military defense force for an embattled and oppressed community.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!