I picked up a copy of your magazine in a local coffee shop
and found many of the articles to be outstanding. Keep up
the good work.
However, I was more than nonplussed to see Irish Northern
Aid listed in your "Organize" section, and as a PEACE GROUP
nonetheless. Perhaps it is your magazine's policy to accept
any listings (though I doubt you would accept a listing from
a neo-nazi organization). Perhaps the editors took Irish
Northern Aids claims to be a peace group at face value.
You should know that Irish Northern Aid's activities have
little to do with promoting peace. The professed objective
of their fundraising is to support the families of Irish
Republican prisoners. This goal might legitimately be
considered a "humanitarian" one, but there is plenty of
evidence that over the last quarter century, Irish Northern
Aid has used charitable donations to purchase weapons for
the IRA. The IRA are also known as the PROVOS, and you
might note that the contact email provided for your Irish
Northern Aid listing is "
provo@columbus.rr.com." There is
little attempt to hide this.
Since the late 1960s, Catholic and Protestant terror groups
have conflated religious identity with ethnic identity, and
together they have taken several thousand lives. On the
Catholic side, the Provisional IRA (i.e. Provos) has been
responsible for hundreds of these murders. The IRA's murder
victims have committed such crimes as stopping for a drink
at a Protestant bar, or dating a Protestant. If you'd like
to learn some of the details, take a look at a book produced
by four journalists (both Catholic and Protestant) from
Northern Ireland a few years ago, called "Lost Lives." It
tells the story of the 3,000 plus--both Catholic and
Protestant--who have lost their lives in "the Troubles."
The stories of many of those who died at the hands of the
Provos will turn your stomach.
In recent years the Provos have suspended their bombing and
terror campaign, and have made an attempt to engage in the
political process. They have not, however, disarmed.
While it is a positive sign to see them suspend their terror
campaign, this hardly makes them and the organizations that
funnel money to them a "peace group."
Irish Northern Aid is an Irish Nationalist group. This
means that they have as their goal the unification of
Ireland. There are lots of legitimate points of view on
whether Irish unification is a worthy goal. But to call
Irish Northern Aid a "peace group" is to make the phrase
"peace group" meaningless.
If your policy is to accept listings from any organizations,
and to allow those organizations to define themselves in any
way they like, you might consider printing a statement about
that policy at the beginning of the Organize section, so
that they might be forewarned.
Thank you.
