IRA members on patrol.
When I was in high school in Minnesota in the 1970s, Mr. Manion, my friend’s father, used to brag about how he sent a portion of every paycheck to a strongly religious overseas terrorist organization.
Oddly enough, the only other thing I remember hearing him brag about was having met Sen. Joe McCarthy, the serial fabulist and anti-Communist crusader from Wisconsin. (“Kiss the hand that shook the hand,” Mr. Manion liked to say.)
Ed Kemmick
Anyone old enough to remember that era will have guessed how an admirer of a right-wing icon could also be a supporter of overseas terrorists: The organization he was sending money to was the Irish Republican Army, sometimes called the Provisional IRA. It was a Catholic paramilitary group that sought to separate Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom. It favored bombings and other acts of terror.
Mr. Manion was a querulous old Irishman, one of those people who liked to say outrageous things to see if he could get a rise out of people. But he was dead serious about his reverence for McCarthy and his support of the IRA.
I thought about him recently in the aftermath of the terror attacks in France. In the 1970, the IRA was condemned by most U.S. government officials, but there were many, many open supporters of the group in the United States. And yet I don’t recall ever hearing anyone advocate the persecution or intensive surveillance of all Catholics as a result of IRA activities.
As we all know, that same tolerance is not shown when terror is carried out in the name of Islam. Right here in Billings there is a strange website called the Montana News Association, which last week carried one of the most rabid anti-Islam tirades I’ve ever seen.
Over the years I’ve visited the Montana News Association mostly in search of articles to poke fun at, since the locally produced pieces look like they were written in a foreign language, then run through Google Translate and a meat grinder before being published.
But there are always opinion pieces there, too, stuff syndicated by various right-wing outfits and presumably given to the MNA free of charge. The piece in question was written by Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis for the American Family Association.
You can read the whole thing on the AFA website, but here are Fischer’s main points. First: “At an absolute minimum, if we’re not willing to shut down mosques altogether (which would be the path of wisdom), we must step up surveillance on them, including monitoring every imam in the land.”
It would be comforting to dismiss his particular brand of idiocy as something unlikely to influence anyone in a position to act on his advice, but as the host of a national radio show, Fischer actually wields considerable power. And it seems like we hear more of this kind of Neanderthal knee-jerk maddoggery with every new terror attack.
Unfortunately, there is no lack of people who really want this to be a war not on terror but on all of Islam. Some of this is owing to good old know-nothingism, a remnant of the hatred that homegrown bigots have always shown to the latest wave of immigrants.
Some of it is founded in a misguided attempt to advance a virulent strain of take-no-prisoners Christianity. These people are never quite happy with the peaceful religion of Jesus, but want to believe it is always at war—with other religions, with government, with “secular humanism,” or with (my own favorite) promoters of the “homosexual agenda.”
And of course, people who commit terrorism in the name of Islam would like nothing more in the world than to have all of the West, or all of Christianity, declare war on all of Islam. In this desire, people like the Charlie Hebdo attackers and Bryan Fischer engage in a symbiotic dance of death.
I suppose if you believe Armageddon is something to look forward to, why wouldn’t you do all you could to provoke it? The Bryan Fischers of the world see nothing ironic about standing up to close-minded fanaticism with more close-minded fanaticism.
If there is anything remotely hopeful in all of this, it is in the reflection that when Mr. Manion was sending his money to the IRA, “the troubles” in Northern Ireland seemed destined to grind on forever, with bodies piling up interminably. The troubles are not completely over, but Northern Ireland is now a mostly peaceful, normal place.
We won’t defeat terrorism by declaring war on Islam or by adopting the tactics of totalitarian regimes. But we’ll get through this, eventually, unless we decide to take on the forces of hatred by allowing ourselves to hate.
