| Apparently the other day when I was mentioning Peter King's list of transgressions (xenophobia, torture, racial profiling) I forgot a fairly major one: supporting terrorism.
Somebody helpfully reminded me today that King had a decades-long apologist relationship with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, even going against his fellow Republicans who wanted him to stop publicly defending the group that was banned as a terrorist organization in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. From an old article in the New York Sun:
The politician once called the IRA "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland," he was banned from the BBC by British censors for his pro-IRA views, and he refused to denounce the IRA when one of its mortar bombs killed nine Northern Irish police officers.
Of course apparently, while bombing police stations, and throwing around heavy weapons in civilian areas isn't enough to get you on the outs with Peter King, not being sufficiently pro-Bush is. He stopped talking up the Provisional IRA in 2002. Not because he suddenly had concerns about terrorism in the wake of 9/11, though.
Conceding that he has "cooled on Ireland," Mr. King blames an epidemic of what he calls "knee-jerk anti-Americanism" that swept through Ireland after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I don't buy that it's just anti-Bush. There's a certain unpleasant trait that the Irish have, and it's begrudgery ... and resentment towards the Americans," he said in a recent interview in his Washington office.
Wait, Irish bashing? On top of calling Italian Americans mobsters, and saying that there's too many mosques in America? Did this guy just walk straight out of the 1940s? Is he running for the Senate in New York, or Alabama? He makes Daniel Day-Lewis' character in Gangs of New York look grounded and tolerant. |
