by Kevin Meagher
Yesterday a man appeared in court charged with murdering four soldiers in the IRA’s Hyde Park bombing three decades ago.
Hours later, in the same city, another British soldier met his death at the hands of those pursuing a markedly different political cause.
The comparison with the Provisional IRA is instructive in making sense of what happened in Woolwich yesterday afternoon.
The cause, (if not its modus operandi), of Irish republicans is a rational one, rooted in the Enlightenment and with a realisable end goal, namely a united Ireland. It can be negotiated with and is capable of compromise. It can, and largely has, rechanneled its efforts along peaceful, democratic lines.
What we saw yesterday afternoon in Woolwich was the opposite of this in almost every regard.
It is still early days, but it appears two young men, adhering to a radicalised version of Islam, were prepared to murder a random stranger by running him down in a car before decapitating him in broad daylight. Rather than flee the scene, they hung around, keen for some form of martyrdom, or at least notoriety, courtesy of YouTube.
It is now customary to say the perpetrators of these attacks have been ‘radicalised’. This is the nebulous term always used to describe the process of indoctrination that drives young muslims to these fanatical extremes.
