Morally Blame

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes:

More than three weeks later, the Boston bombing is still on the front pages. When I first heard the news I remembered Boylston Street, where the marathon finishes and the bombs went off, and where I used to visit the Atlantic Monthly in happier days when that famous magazine was still in Boston, and I still wrote for it. I also thought back to a small party at the Grand Hotel in Brighton at the 1984 Tory conference. Mrs Thatcher was chatting on a sofa not far from where I was talking to one or two people, Norman Tebbit among them.

Hours later an IRA bomb wrecked the hotel, missing the prime minister but killing five people and gravely injuring others, including Margaret Tebbit. Like Peter Oborne, who touched on this in the diary a fortnight ago, I couldn’t help also thinking that all the IRA bombings over the years had been paid for in part with money collected from Irish Americans in Boston. No, my affection for America isn’t entirely unqualified.

No politician has been louder in denouncing the Boston bombers than Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York and friend of Bush the Younger. He thinks all Muslims are potential terrorists who require constant surveillance, adding that ‘We can’t be bound by political correctness.’

King is himself Irish-American and a lifelong supporter of violent Irish republicanism, who says he ‘will not morally blame’ the IRA for any of its deeds. He calls it ‘the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland’. For years chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Homeland Security, he is now chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, and altogether a noisy cheerleader for the American ‘war on terror’. As they say around here, go figure.