White Terrorists vs. Brown Terrorists

I don't think I'm old enough to really remember the heydey of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, but this article got me thinking.

The strange, compelling saga of three Irishmen in a Colombian court dates back to August 2001, when Martin McCauley, James Monaghan and Niall Connolly were arrested in the Colombian capital of Bogota as they stepped off a plane arriving from a region of the country held by FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Colombian prosecutors accuse the three middle-aged men of training FARC rebels in the use of explosives and terrorist tactics. They are also accused of holding false papers. If convicted, they could get up to 20 years in a Colombian jail.

The three Irishmen, for their part, have vigorously denied the charges, saying they were in the South American nation to study the peace talks between FARC and Colombian government officials, which have since ceased. They have also expressed concerns over the fairness of the Colombian justice system.

I know next to nothing about this particular situation, and am ready to share the concerns over the fairness of the Columbian justice system, but really the article got one big fat question stuck in my head.

"The Troubles" are a conflict that has roots in British Colonialism. The opposing sides are divided by religions that, from an Athiest's point of view, are more similar than not. An oppressed minority on one side of the dispute used terrorisim to attack a better-off majority on the other side. Innocents die. There are even financial ties to Islamic dictatorships.

At the height of the Troubles, one of the key supporters of the IRA was Libyan President Col. Muammar Qaddafi, who assisted the organization with cash, arms and training in camps across the North African nation.

"It was Qaddafi's way of getting back at Britain," says Eunan O'Halpin, professor of modern history at the Dublin-based Trinity College. "There were, for example, large consignments of Semtex [explosives] shipped from Libya to the U.K. and around 1987, French customs intercepted a hundreds of tons of arms bound for the IRA."

It reminds me alot of a conflict all the way on the other side of the world.

So why isn't the IRA considered a "Catholic Terrorist Group"? Why don't people like Ann Coulter use the IRA as an example of the inherent violence of Catholocism? Are the Irish considered fundamentally incompatible with peaceful democracy? Et cetera?

Is it because the violent acts of the IRA have nothing, I repeat, nothing to do with the teachings of Catholocism?

Is it because the IRA just happen to be Catholic? If they were Hindu would they not object to their current situation?

Do many of the xenophobes here in America find it easy to see that "The Troubles" are really about power and not religion or culture because the people involved have peaches-and-cream complexions and not olive ones? If you can see a different reason, please, spell it out to me.

I feel like I've been trying to make a similar point since 9/11/2001. I'm sure it's getting tiresome by now.

**ADDENDUM** Thanks to Jeanne for the link. Read her story about her own experience trying to get through customs, and check the comments section for spirited debate between Tacitus and myself.