The IRA (Irish Republican Army) managed to kill over 1,700 whilst waging was on the British in an attempt to create a United Ireland.
What did Britain do to bring this to and end?
There were a great many conversations both official and not behind the scenes with their political masters, Sinn Fein trying to broker a deal.
What did Britain not do?
Britain did not argue that they had a right to defend themselves, that all those living in Northern Ireland must travel to the south and then send in the bombers to flatten Northern Ireland.
Why did the British government not openly just bomb places where they thought terrorists might be?
Well, because terrorists look like the rest of us, they do not have any unique features which makes them easy to spot. There were some incursions into strongholds but they were generally a bit of a disaster.
What you see here is what the IRA very often looked like. Particularly they’d look like this at the funerals of their comrades.
Not that the civilians around them were not cowering in fear, they are clapping. This is the general story of terrorism. They succeed because they have the backing of a significant proportion of civilians.
In the 1930’s the Nazi’s under the leadership of Adolf Hitler came to power by distraction techniques. The populous were told that were it not for those ‘really’ in power (the jews), Germany would be a great nation, the World power.
Something very similar is happening in the United Kingdom currently. The government of the day will hide their own mistakes by blaming minority groups, immigrants, those on benefits, those who ‘won’t’ work for the problems of the country. It will also blame Covid-19 as well. What it will not do is say that leaving the European Union was a huge mistake.
Whilst we were part of the EU many industries sprung up and prospered employing a great many immigrants from within the Union. Many thousands of those left and suddenly, we do not have enough workers to operate in those industries we now rely on. The NHS, Logistics, hospitality, all of them desperate for workers.
Our economy took a nose dive and we have not recovered as the other power houses of the world have, we are still lagging woefully behind other wealthy nations but, it is not the UK Government but, the people who have caused this.
Back to Terrorism.
Decades ago the state of Israel was created, Great Britain played no small part in that creation. The trouble is, the land wasn’t empty, there were people already there. Conflicts came about, not to the surprise of anyone. The Muslim Arabs were pushed back into internationally agreed locations and that would be that except, it wasn’t.
Using the argument that it needed to create buffer zones to defend the country, Israel began building settlements on the land beyond their agreed border. They also refused to leave the occupied lands.
In the last decade, they ‘left’ Gaza, an area where these Muslims live supposedly for them to become their own country. Except, they didn’t really leave. They remained controlling every aspect of movement there with their military and checkpoints all over the place forcing the residents to justify themselves.
It’s way more complicated than that, there was and is wrong on both sides.
What the terrorists ‘Hamas’ did by killing so many innocents a short while ago was and remains appalling. The adopted typical terrorists tactics of targeting the innocent.
In reprisals, over 4,500 people in Gaza have thus far been killed by Israel in their retaliation on Hamas, the majority of those will be innocent civilians.
Is it proportionate? If we take it down to playground levels it’s like this:
You killed 1700 of my people so I am killing 4500 of yours, that’ll show you!
Of course, those figures will continue to grow. Inevitably, because it always is the case, Israel will kill many times more innocents than those killed in any terrorist attack by Hamas.
Does it matter in what way a baby is killed?
One side shoots the baby dead in the arms of its mother, the other side drops a bomb on the house of a mother carrying her baby. In both cases, the baby is just as dead and it achieved nothing except another lost life.
Personally, and I have heard this so much throughout my life, I am sick of Jewish people playing the victim card. Do they know what? It was not just Jewish people that were targeted by Hitler. The ‘Holocaust’ is generally taken to be the Killing of Jews by the Nazi’s (and their allies), over 6million of them and that is, in every way, appalling. There is no way any group can be compensated for that but, giving them their own homeland is certainly a worthy start.
However, it is estimated that a similar figure (close on 6 million) non Jewish people were killed by the Nazi’s (and their allies) also. The closest any of those got to being military targets were Russian Prisoners of War which amounts to around half the number. The rest were civilians ranging from political opposition, homosexuals, disabled people, gypsies, Polish People, ethnic Serbs, a small number (by comparison, of criminals), Jehovah’s Witness and black people. For some of those groups the best anyone can do is guess at the numbers as all records of them existing went with them.
Most of those groups were never compensated, many more survived inhumane treatment and torture, many used for medical experimentation. All of them victims of the same people and in the same war. A war which ended in 1945, nearly 80 years ago.
My point here is, absolutely, what happened to innocent Jewish people was the worst possible. There is no pretending it was in anyway ‘OK’ but, Hitler is dead, he lost, Germany is not the same country and the rest of the world should not have to apologies for ever more.
When a group of people portray themselves as victims, quite wrongly but ‘actually’, society will start to resent them. Right now it is seen and has been seen since 1945, that no Jewish person can be told they may be wrong ever.
Donald Trump claimed he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York and still his supporters would support him. This is how it now feels each and every time someone says anything at all against Jewish people. We should be allowed to say that, you know what, what you are doing is a war crime, you have to stop and not be afraid of the consequences of that.
Ironically, the motivation, so he says, of Putin (Russia) is to get rid of undesirables on their border and to create a buffer zone around Russia so that NATO cannot threaten them. Sound familiar?
Hamas can only be defeated by killing every Muslim, there is no other way. Every civilian killed has a family member left behind now ready to join the fight against Israel.
My personal view is, Israel needs to be taken out of this conflict, they’re too close. Let them mourn their losses, let the rest of the world, NATO, the United Nations, the Muslim League satisfy the future of the Muslims living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Maybe, it is high time the lines, the borders are redrawn to include a new nation of Palestine giving to the Muslims a fair and equal share of the natural resources of the land for agriculture and industry to thrive with an international peace force. Israel should make her defences solid, impossible to be overcome and remain firmly within their own borders.
It is in neither the teachings of Allah or the words within the Bible which sanction the taking of innocent lives but rather, the interpretations of blood thirsty groups seeking their own agenda.