Our experience of terrorism shows it’s crucial we have respect for others
THE Global Terrorism Database stated that almost two-thirds of terrorist attacks in the US in 2017 were tied to right-wing extremism.
This statistic, which was garnered from media information, leaves us in no doubt that extremism isn’t just confined to far eastern or Asian countries.
It is something that is very much on our doorstep.
Dangerous rhetoric is what we have heard this past number of years.
It has not been helped by the President of the US, Donald Trump, who tries to put the blame for an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue on the fact there was no armed guard to repel the attacker, and not on the fact that his acidic vitriol and rhetoric has assisted some right-wing supporters and extremists to use it as an excuse to carry out their deadly deeds.
Instead of President Michael D’s “hope over division and fear” speech, in America sadly the opposite has become a reality.
We should not be complacent when we saw how well former presidential candidate Peter Casey did when he touched a raw nerve in the Irish psyche when he spoke about “ethnicity” and “welfare” in both very loose and, to some, inflammatory terms.
Hopefully, we will never see any of the attacks as we saw in Charlottesville or in Pittsburgh come to our island.
Thirty years of terrorism in Northern Ireland should tell us that “hate and division will never succeed in healing wounds, only respect for each other’s point of view”. Christy Galligan Letterkenny, Co Donegal