From Kathryn’s Q&A with Rep. Peter King on today’s NRO:

“Rep. King: I have known Gerry Adams for more than 20 years. I became

convinced during the 1980s that he was committed to a peaceful settlement in

Northern Ireland and that he could deliver his community. I think events

have proven me right. Certainly the American government and the British

government believe he has kept his word. As Vale of Tears

makes

clear, however, once the political process was put in place in 1994, there

was no rationale for any further IRA violence.”

So, then there WAS a rationale for IRA violence prior to 1994? That

certainly seems to have been Rep. King’s point of view at the time. When

the IRA, of which Gerry Adams was a senior executive, was murdering

policemen (both Northern Protestant ones and also Southern Catholic ones

), and

setting off bombs in public places to kill civilians, Rep. King was their

leading shill in the U.S. I recall seeing him on TV comparing Gerry Adams

to George Washington.

But… If it is OK to blow the arms and legs off old ladies at bus-stops in

order to bring the British government round to your way of thinking, why is

it wrong to fly planes into office towers to bring America round to your way

of thinking?

And if “the American government and the British government believe [Adams]

has kept his word,” they are bigger fools than I take them for. Everybody

in Northern Ireland, and in London and Washington too, believed at the time

of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that the IRA had forsworn violence and

would decommission its arsenals of guns and explosives. They have not done

so. Why not, Rep. King?

Terrorism is one thing, indivisible; a gross violation of the most basic

morality, a war on all civilized values. That was just as true in London or

Belfast twenty years ago as it is in America today. I was saying so at the

time — so were many others (NR’s John O’Sullivan, for instance). What was

Peter King saying back then?