Cliff May is rather awful.
In 1978, I was a young foreign correspondent assigned to cover “the Troubles,” the conflict in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, between those loyal to the British Crown and those determined to make Ireland a united and independent nation. There were “paramilitaries” on both sides. Terrorism — bombings, assassinations, and other forms of violence targeting civilians for political ends — was among the principal weapons employed. But in at least one way, terrorism was different then: Although I sometimes worried that I might end up on the wrong Belfast street at the wrong time, I was confident that no one saw me as a target. Journalists were neutrals. “Loyalists” and “Republicans” alike were eager to tell me their stories, and have me retell those stories to distant audiences. Without fear, I would sit down with hard men and ask tough questions.
I have a passing acquaintance with the literature of the quotation marks Troubles, and to my dismay I have missed the prominent contributions of May, Cliff. My bad, assuredly. Whatever.
At some point over the years since, new technologies and ideologies brought changes that became obvious when the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl took his notebook and pen to a 2002 meeting with terrorists in Karachi. They had a different approach to shaping the narrative — one that would entail beheading Pearl on camera and posting the video on the Internet.
Sickening.
But wait, what? Are we now having some sort of competition in "the years since" between the Shankill Butchers and the Kingsmill gang?
There was never, in Ireland, a Noble Not-Shoot-the-Journalist-Pact.
Nobody in Northern Ireland shot Cliff May because it didn't pay to do so in terms of publicity, the wider political situation, and propaganda. If they had run the math differently, they would have shot him.
The Troubles wracked Northern Ireland for almost 30 years. More than 1,500 people were killed. In those days, that was a serious number. But early in the new century, nearly twice as many innocent people would be killed on a single day in New York, Pennsylvania, and Arlington, Va. Meanwhile, in Syria over the past year, a conflict with ethno-religious-political undercurrents has taken some 20,000 lives. Perceiving this as an inflationary trend does not inspire optimism.
This is really fucking weird. The concept of "per capita" is not recondite.
But here is where May starts pissing me off.
On a brief return to Northern Ireland this week, it was apparent that there are still tensions, still segregated neighborhoods, still pubs where Protestants and Catholics do not mix. But the Troubles ended when most people on both sides accepted the idea of an imperfect peace, when they came to see compromise as preferable to more killing and dying, and when they tired of the poverty and degradation that chronic carnage brings in its wake.
Fun.
Should that give us hope that peace in the Middle East also is possible and perhaps even imminent? Absolutely not.
Why?
At its worst, the IRA never sought the destruction of Britain and never vowed to wipe Protestants off the Irish map.
Uh... so?
The most extreme Protestant paramilitaries did not argue that southern Catholics had no right to self-determination.
No, they just did that Shankill Butcher shit... where is this headed?
These days, it is fashionably multicultural and politically correct to assign blame in roughly equal measure to Israelis and Palestinians. It also is patently false. Time and again, Israelis have demonstrated their willingness to compromise in order to achieve an imperfect peace with their neighbors, not least those in Gaza and the West Bank.
Oh, I get it.
The lesson of Irish Violence is "it is always the other guy's fault."
Right.