You're correct on the misquote - it wasn't (sigh). My comment on terrorists came in my previous post in that thread, which I thought was the one you'd linked to because that was the one where I first mentioned Washington:
Message 25052126
I haven't read enough in detail to know. I only know he was part of something called Lehi or the Stern gang. I would disagree with the Nazi collaborator part as I think he was in Palestine at the time.
I was going back to school lessons to recall the history of the Stern gang, I recalled they'd tried to *ally* with the Nazis, fighting the British in the ME. Which I thought fairly mind-boggling at the time.
Now, OK I am trusting Wikipedia for the detail, but:
en.wikipedia.org
When the Irgun split in 1940, Shamir sided with the most militant faction, Lehi, headed by Avraham Stern. This group has been described as a terrorist organization[1]. In secret contacts with German representatives at Beirut the group offered to open up a military front against the British in the Middle East in return for the expulsion (rather than extermination) of the Jewish population of Europe to Palestine.[2]
...
As one of Lehi's triumvirate, he authorized the assassination of the United Nations representative in the Middle East, Count Folke Bernadotte who was seen by Shamir and his collaborators as an anti-Zionist and "an obvious agent of the British enemy".[5] Regarding these actions, Shamir remarked that "neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat." [6]
My grandfather - also Jewish - loathed Shamir. He never would translate for me the Yiddish words he used to describe him.
Meanwhile, I was brought up at a time when evacuations of stations and shopping streets were commonplace, following IRA bomb warnings which might or might not be deliberately misleading. Read this: alerts were every week or more.
en.wikipedia.org
This murder was about 800 yards from where we lived: I was too young to know what the real trouble was at the time.
The Balcombe group later admitted responsibility also for ... the bombing of a pub in Woolwich, which killed another 2 people and injured 28.
Don't mouth off about liberals knowing nothing about terrorism, or coddling terrorists. We may understand what sparks such acts: it doesn't mean we like them, and plenty of us have experienced way more than most civilians in the West outside near-war zones like NI or Kosovo ever will.
And we also know that eventually most terrorists come back into society, and we have to tolerate and work with them. Especially the politicians, who for example get to shake hands with the charmers responsible for leaving their spouses in wheelchairs:
In 1984, in the Brighton hotel bombing, the IRA tried to assassinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. She survived, but five people ... were killed. Several others including Margaret Tebbit, wife of Norman Tebbit, were left permanently disabled.
So. Labelling some ineffectual radical a terrorist over-emphasises his importance: hence my analogy showing how the term is otherwise easily abused.
But if they're accepted generally in society, then later association with a "terrorist" of whatever stripe, for ordinary requirement such as serving on the same civic committees, or negotiating or signing the same agreements, still isn't any indication of any character problem... other than being a politician. Or Reagan (and Thatcher) are far more culpable than Obama ever was. Are you calling Ronald Reagan a traitor, palling around with terrorists? |
