TVGuy wrote:I don't know about you all, but I turned red when I read this article. Given, it's from the perspective of a professor at Oxford, but still.
What he perceives as an overreaction, I see as a resolve that we will not ever give in to challenges of our beliefs or way of life. He uses British/IRA hostilities as an explanation to why they didn't overreact to similar attacks. I'd argue they are fallible whimps and we stand strong for our beliefs and values.
Thoughts?
"The scale of the reaction — I would say overreaction — in the U.S. to the 9/11 atrocity, I think, was reflective of the fact that it was such a new experience for the U.S.," Richardson told the audience.
By contrast, she said, "the British population proved really quite resilient" to terror attacks, having lived through the Northern Ireland's "Troubles" from the 1960s and 1990s.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/dr-lo ... 9d99ffaea8
So the article referenced by the OP shows:
By contrast, she said, "the British population proved really quite resilient" to terror attacks, having lived through the Northern Ireland's "Troubles" from the 1960s and 1990s.
That period included a series of deadly bombings by the Irish Republican Army in mainland Britain.
The worst of these included an IRA bombing that killed 12 people in 1974 after it hit a bus carrying soldiers and their families on a freeway in Northern England. A wave of bombings attributed to the same militant group hit British pubs the same year and killed 28 people.
Just a bit of
Google-powered research on this 'terrorism expert' tells a lot:
Louise Richardson’s life reads like an implausible movie script. A Tramore convent girl with a righteous passion for the IRA grows into a glamorous, award-garlanded Harvard professor specialising in the field of international terrorism, before becoming the first female principal (president) of the third oldest university in the English-speaking world.
So...sure, she thinks the British population grew resilient, but that's only because she wasn't on the British side. She was on the Irish side!?! Sure, relax and get used to it works well, when you're on the side of the aggressor.
Read more...just in case you think her perspective is not just a bit biased:
The unlikely genesis of it all was the Walton’s radio show. Every Saturday, on the family car journeys from Tramore to visit a sibling in a Dublin hospital, the show was on Radio Éireann.
“As a result of that, there isn’t an Irish rebel song that I don’t know backwards and forwards . . . It’s extraordinary but music influenced me. I was a rabid Republican growing up as a child, which I didn’t get from my parents at all, but from the songs and probably from the nuns at the Ursulines [in Waterford, where her mother had gone before her].”
By the age of 14, she had become besotted by nationalism, leaving her parents completely bemused.
“I used to go to Ring every summer and wore the Fáinne and spoke Irish . . . I used to keep scrapbooks and read the Irish Times from cover to cover, following events in Northern Ireland, because then, in my childhood, it fitted in with all I had learned in our entirely one-sided history, which was all a matter of the poor, noble, weak Irish with the occasional betrayer in their midst and the evil English.”
Days after Derry’s Bloody Sunday, her mother, Julie, had to lock her in her room to stop her running off to Newry to join the protests.
Don't mistake this use of Republican (in the Irish sense) as meaning the same thing as Republican (in the US political sense). This refers to the
IRA (Irish Republican Army).
And Derry's Bloody Sunday referenced above was a day that a bunch of British paratroopers clashed with a bunch of IRA members in the city of Derry. Fourteen protesters died. There are lots of disagreements as to what happened. The Brits say that, "the paratroopers had reacted to gun and nail bomb attacks from suspected IRA members", but the locals say that the soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd. I don't know what happened here, but I do know that 'unarmed crowds', just like 'unarmed youths' here in the US are not always peaceful and easy-going (as so many national news stories have proven out for the past two years here). To the locals, this was a big event (like Goliad or the Alamo here), and was used to recruit more folks into the IRA (as she wanted to do herself, had her mom not locked her up).
And the benign reference to her love of reading the
Irish TImes...the political leanings of which are a bit left of center (to say the least).
What description is it that you use, TAM...harridan trollop? I have no use for the likes of her.
To paraphrase the words of the great 20th Century philosopher Vincent Laguardia Gambini, "I'm finished with this lady".
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=B761DvpHuBw[/youtube]
