Peter King's "freedom fighters" become terrorists and return to haunt....

“Scum” is an epithet thrown around too readily in the British blogosphere and in my opinion there are very, very few of our politicians who have done anything near despicable enough to earn the description.

There is one “Irish”-American politician, however, that I have no hesitation whatsoever in attaching that label to, the the U.S. Representative for New York's 3rd congressional district, Peter King. He’s the Republican who will head the House committee that oversees domestic security and is planning to open a Congressional inquiry into what he calls “the radicalization” of the Muslim community when his party takes over the House next year.

This is one of his most recent quotes on the subject:

It’s not just people who are involved with the terrorists and extremists,it is people who are in mainstream Islam, leaders of mosques, leaders of Muslim organizations who do not come forward and denounce, officially denounce, officially cooperate with the police against those extremists and terrorists. So, it goes beyond the terrorists and the extremists and also includes those in what others call mainstream Muslim leadership.

Peter King, Peter King, let me think,… yeah, here’s a mention of the very same Peter King:

In 1980, Mr. D'Amato, then the senator-elect, fulfilled a campaign pledge and went to Belfast on a fact-finding trip, taking Messrs. King and Dillon with him. It was the start of Mr. King's long entanglement with the IRA, and he took to it with the zeal of a convert.

He 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."

By the mid-1980s, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were openly hostile to Mr. King. On one occasion, a judge threw him out of a Belfast courtroom during the murder trial of IRA men because, in the judge's view, "he was an obvious collaborator with the IRA."

Fast forward to 2005:

As recently as 2005 King argued that "we shouldn't rush to be too sanctimonious" about the murder of Robert McCartney since this was just a "pub dispute" that could have happened anywhere. Apparently the cover-up and intimidation of witnesses didn't much matter either.

So….in summary, “Islamic” terrorism (eg Muslim cultural centres in New York)- bad, “Irish” “christian” “freedom-fighters” (eg Enniskillen, La Mon, Warrington)- good?

Alex Massie does a much more eloquent destruction on this piece of  bigotted trash
than I'll ever manage here.