<boggles>I can direct you to any number of similar statements by the English over the centuries, you know, with regards to Ireland.

The Irish, notably, tended to accept their defeats and stop fighting after being defeated.

David Flood
Only in preparation for the *next* rising. Did you know that a splinter group of Fenians (acting on their own initiative) carried on a 'Dynamite' campaign in England after the unsuccessful rebellions in the mid-nineteenth century, even though it had no discernible chance of achieving *anything*?

Comparing the IRA to the Palestinians groups is like comparing apples and oranges. While the IRA has committed terrorist acts, it is far from their modus operandi as it is among Palestinians groups (a notable statistic is

that

percentage wise, the IRA killed less civilians than the RUC and British

Army.

Oh, come on. Let's be adults here, and call a spade a spade - the IRA, the PLO, FARC, the ANC, the East Timorese FLA - they're all cut from the same revolutionary cloth.

'Guerilla warfare' is the only resort against a more powerful nation which has occupied your own homeland, making it impossible for you to raise and train conventional forces to do something about it.

I'm going to make an important distinction here, between a genuine revolutionary movement with identifiable political aims and grievances, and religious/racist/fundamentalist psychopaths who can *never* be reasoned with, and who intend nothing less than the utter annihilation of anyone they perceive as offending their sensibilities.

You can verify this stastic at the CAIN (Univ. of Ulster) website).

Moreover,

unlike the Palestinians, among Irish nationalists, IRA attacks that unreasonably caused civilian deaths were largely not supported by the

civilian

population. A terrorist attack by the IRA (by that I mean at attack that intended civilians deaths) was always followed by condemnation from the

larger

nationalist community. In fact, while the IRA was 'fighting' the majority

of

nationalists supported the non-violent SDLP party. That contrasts

strongly

with the 75+% of Palestinians that support homicode bombings. The examples

of

the IRA crossing the line are so rare that one can name them almost immediately. On the other hand, Palestinian acts directed against

civilians

are virtually a daily occurence.

While people may have abhorred the Provos' methods (and some of their stated intentions) utterly, they could understand *why* they had gotten caught up in an endless, dirty little war with the Brits (and I'm purposely including their Loyalist proxies here), even though they made a point of shunning them as pariahs.