McGuinness inspires home-grown jihadists
Iwouldn’t dream of crediting the murderer Adrian Ajao, also known as Khalid Masood, with a sense of irony, but his choice of last week for his horrific attack on the public, police and Parliament suggested he might have had one. Across the Irish Sea, as Ajao struck, another “depraved” terrorist (let’s use Mrs May’s entirely appropriate adjective), Martin McGuinness, was mouldering in his coffin, between a death Lord Tebbit described as making the world a sweeter place and a funeral at which the psychopathic IRA gangster and murderer was fawned on by some who deludedly consider themselves international exemplars of liberal decency.
How would one explain to an intelligent child, for example, this paradox: that some who, on news of McGuinness’s death, prostrated themselves before his memory for having been a “man of peace” were within 24 hours denouncing an act by Ajao identical to those McGuinness perpetrated or ordered: the slaying of innocent people in order to provoke feelings of terror and submission in the society under attack.
One could contend that McGuinness had become part of a “peace process”, whereas Ajao died an unrepentant enemy of those he targeted. Sadly, such a justification would not be true. Or one might cite
newspaper, which said “fate propelled” McGuinness into violence; and which therefore swallowed whole the murderer’s line that all the IRA’s wickedness was Britain’s fault.
Ignorant people have equated McGuinness with Nelson Mandela: but President Mandela, because he was a black man, was denied the right to participate in democracy. Growing up, McGuinness certainly witnessed anti-Catholic bigotry, but all his adult life he had the vote, and laws against sectarian discrimination changed Ulster. His idea of a Marxist united Ireland could not prevail democratically, so he chose murder instead – just like Ajao.
Speaking in the Commons on Thursday, the Prime Minister intoned that “our resolve will never waver in the face of terrorism”. What resolve, other than that to appease? A few hundred yards from where Mrs May spoke, some of McGuinness’s friends had, 38 years earlier almost to the day, murdered Airey Neave. That, in turn, was but a few steps from where Ajao murdered the heroic Pc Keith Palmer, having just slaughtered three other innocent people and injured many more. Those of us who remember Airey Neave’s murder recall solemn expressions by politicians of how, to coin a phrase, our resolve would never waver in the face of terrorism. Yet we have lived long enough to see McGuinness (thanks to institutional appeasement) become deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, to see our Queen forced to break bread with him, and to see a former president of the United States – albeit one of the sleaziest in history – pour treacle on him at his funeral.
McGuinness was believed to have committed several murders himself. He also, as an IRA commander, expanded the categories of those the IRA considered “legitimate targets”. One of his most notorious crimes was to order a man to drive a van packed with explosives to an Army base: and when the unfortunate man, whose “crime” had been to work there as a cleaner, tried to warn soldiers, the very fact of his opening the door detonated the explosives, killing him and five soldiers. The “human bomb” was but one of McGuinness’s grotesqueries, as well as killing soldiers and RUC officers, car bombings, kneecappings, punishment beatings and the rest of the IRA’s armoury of intimidation so attractive to psychotics such as him. He sat on the IRA Council that authorised the Brighton bomb in 1984 and the Enniskillen Remembrance Day atrocity in 1987, in which 11 people died. But worst of all, and despite the nauseating protestations of others to the contrary, McGuinness died, like Ajao, still believing violence was a legitimate political weapon.
If you were a young, disaffected Muslim undergoing radicalisation, what would McGuinness mean to you? Even if you and your fellow extremists only partly succeeded in your plan to Islamify Britain, would you not be exulted on your death – irrespective of how many police officers, soldiers, women and children you had killed in the process? Would you not feel you could pursue your cause by terrorist means – because memories are short, and you would, eventually, get away with it – as McGuinness did? Wouldn’t you examine a society whose politicians, past and present, praise a dead terrorist, having appeased him while he lived, even though he had engaged in acts that most rightthinking people consider wicked, criminal and heinous? And wouldn’t you consider it so weak-willed that you could, with impunity, just carry on murdering?
Ian Paisley Junior, son of the former Northern Ireland first minister, said in defence of McGuinness that it wasn’t how one began one’s life that mattered, it was how one ended it. McGuinness ended as a constitutional politician, apparently, but also as an unconvicted murderer who never admitted or apologised for his crimes. In his last broadcast interview he said he had no regrets. Morally, therefore, he was no different from Ajao. And those who would emulate Ajao see the victory of this IRA murderer, and feel empowered to carry on.
Norman Tebbit was right: McGuinness engaged in the so-called “peace process” because he had lost. In the Nineties, when McGuinness’s friend Bill Clinton was president, the IRA could still rely on American money to buy arms from Libya and from bazaars in eastern Europe. After 9/11, terrorism lost its glamour and appeal to most Americans, and the money dried up. The IRA, already suffering internal splits and badly damaged by the security forces, was on its knees.
The Blair government, however, ignored the IRA’s defeat. It had no need to thank McGuinness and others for calling off their dogs: the dogs were toothless. McGuinness’s choice, and that of other IRA murderers, was either to embrace the chance Tony Blair had given them to wipe the slate clean, or risk being prosecuted. The IRA was riddled with informers, and it could only be a matter of time before reality caught up with the likes of McGuinness.
This was the man whom Mr Blair praised for his “courage” and “determination”, and from whose life he felt we should “draw inspiration”. I am sure countless Islamists draw enormous inspiration from a mass murderer escaping justice, sitting down to dinner with the Queen and being eulogised by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. It inspires them to continue, for they see only a political class that, in the end, will appease them, however glorious its rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity. They see us as fundamentally decadent. And they are right.