Peter King

As he prepares to open Congressional hearings into the alleged ‘radicalization’ of American Muslims this week, Rep. Peter King has not been having it all his own way – in fact he’s been having a terrible time of it.

His problem is that the US media has finally caught up with his past as a cheerleader for the Provisional IRA back in the 1980’s and 1990’s when he and Noraid were inseparable and when he was on first name terms with and a house guest of many in the IRA’s national and Belfast leaderships.

And they are drawing a-pretty-hard-to-avoid conclusion – which is that with his background and history, the Republican Congressman for Long Island is pushing the definition of the word hypocrisy to new limits by pursuing others for their purported ambivalence towards terrorism.

Two of America’s premier newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times featured substantial pieces that led with and dwelt extensively on King’s past as an uncritical supporter of the IRA and advocate of armed struggle. As effective, and possibly more so, was a biting piece by Jon Stewart on Comedy Channel’s Daily Show. Here’s a link to the segment. Irish viewers will not be able to watch it unless they use a US proxy IP address. There is also this piece on MSNBC, a cable network popular amongst American liberals and progressives.

Also interesting to note is that some in the Irish-American community have protested at King’s plan. Particularly effective was this piece on the Irish Central website by Irish-American writer Brian Dooley who highlights the potential effect of Peter King’s Congressional hearings on the Muslim community in America, noting that the precedent was set amongst the Irish community in Britain during the 1970’s at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign – which is that they were all wrongly tarred with the IRA brush and suffered terribly for it. What Peter King would have roundly, and rightly in the view of many, condemned in Britain he now threatens to bring to America.

Islamophobia is at a new and scary peak in America, as the video below of a recent Tea Party protest at an Islamic function in California demonstrates, even though the 9/11 attacks happened a decade ago.

The reasons are not hard to fathom. First of all there’s an audience for it. This is a deeply and at time frighteningly racist country and in Muslims, White racists are able to indulge both their hatred for non-Whites and for non-Christians – the same engines that fueled and drove the Klu Klux Klan. The Tea Party is emerging as the leader in that field.

Second, a number of skilled and articulate rabble rousers have discovered that a lucrative living can be made whipping up these fears. Take a look at this recent piece in the New York Times and you’ll see what I mean. There’s now a small industry of hate-mongers who thrive off fear and distrust of Islam. To them Peter King’s hearings mean money in the bank.

Third, there’s a political dividend. Politics in America have, historically, often been characterised by the exploitation of ignorance, bigotry and fear, especially in White middle America – and particularly in that big bit in the middle between the East and West coasts. Blacks, Irish, immigrants, Jews, anarchists, socialists, communists, Russians, Chinese and Mexicans have all been at one time or another the focus of an invariably ill-founded, irrational but powerful phobia. Since 9/11 the Muslims have gone to the top of the list and replaced the Red Tide and the Yellow Peril as the biggest imagined threat facing America.

Invariably it has been the Right, that is the Republican Party, that has cranked this engine and the electoral payoff can be substantial. It is why GOP leaders have refused to condemn those who say that Barack Obama is a Muslim or that he was really born in Kenya and therefore not entitled to be in the White House. It’s ugly stuff but since one in five Americans believe this nonsense, the GOP does nothing to discourage it. And it is why Peter King is holding his hearings. Liberals will denounce him, the media will mock him but he knows that out there in the boondocks they are cheering him on.

Nonetheless, the re-emergence of these old links to the IRA are embarrassing to Peter King and his response has been both utterly predictable and supremely dishonest – he has wrapped the peace process around himself as protection and justification for what he did. This is what he told the Washington Post:

‘ “I [wanted] a peace agreement, a working agreement, where the nationalist community would feel their rights would be respected,” King said in an interview at his Capitol Hill office. “I felt that the IRA, in the context of Irish history, and Sinn Fein were a legitimate force that had to be recognized and you wouldn’t have peace without them. Listen, I think I’m one of the people who brought about peace in Ireland.” ’

The facts, sadly for him, do not support any of this. He first came to Belfast in 1980 just when the first hunger strike, the one led by Brendan Hughes, was reaching a climax and was radicalised by what he saw and experienced. He came back for the second hunger strike and it was then he met the family of Bobby Sands family, in particular his sister Bernadette and her then partner, now husband Micky McKevitt. He would visit them on every trip he made and often stayed in their home in Louth. When he was elected to Congress virtually the first thing he did was to jump on a plane to Ireland to host a celebratory dinner with Bernadette and Micky – and this was all at a time when McKevitt was masterminding the smuggling of Col Gaddafi’s Semtex and AK-47’s from Tripoli. In Belfast, King’s best friends were Anto’ Murray and his wife, the formidable Lucy. McKevitt was the IRA’s QMG and Anto Murray was Belfast Operations Officer.

The point of this story is that King’s closest contacts in the IRA in these years were the military men, people who had never been nor would ever want be in Sinn Fein, activists who would have little truck either with the peace process. King told me himself that he didn’t meet Gerry Adams, the architect of the peace process, until 1984, four years after his love affair with the Provos began.

By the time the process got seriously underway in secret, circa 1987/1988, King had been supporting the IRA for seven or eight years and if his real ambition during these years was to contrive a peace agreement he did a remarkably successful job disguising it. By the time the process became public in 1992, his liaison was a dozen years old. When the US got officially involved, King’s role was fairly minor, ferrying the odd message from Adams to Clinton. In fact he probably gained more than he contributed, as it enabled him to refresh a rather soiled image. As he told me back in 2005: “Gerry Adams made me respectable.” I’m afraid Peter King’s re-writing of his own history just doesn’t wash.

Nonetheless, his hearings will go ahead amid fears that they could whip up a McCarthyite-style hysteria against American Muslims. There is one group of people whose silence during all of this build up has been pronounced. Peter King owes the Provos a lot; in fact it is no exaggeration to say that his political career would have been stillborn and he wouldn’t now be a Congressman, much less the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security without their support back in 1985 when he was chosen to lead the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York city, an event that gave him sufficient profile for higher office.

Peter King with friends in Belfast. So far Gerry Adams has stayed silent on his planned Congressional hearings on Muslim extremism

If they were to speak out their words would have an effect. But so far they have stayed silent. Until they break that silence we can only believe that Peter King’s plans cause them no problems even if their former ally helps to foment a campaign of hate against American Muslims every bit as toxic and harmful as that which engulfed the Irish in Britain some thirty years ago.