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The conflict that consumed Northern
Ireland for so many years following 1969 is often described as a war
between Catholic and Protestant Christians. Knowing no more
than this, many believe that religion was the point of contention,
and that Christians were actually killing each other over
theological differences in the same way that the Shiites and Sunnis
have been going at it for fourteen centuries (only minus the
fourteen centuries). Throw in the Crusades - sans historical
context - and suddenly Christianity looks a lot like Islam... at
least in theory.
Tellingly perhaps, such a comparison tends to delight Muslims, while
frustrating Christians.
But although Northern Ireland is used paradoxically by
multiculturalists (to denigrate Christianity) and by Muslims (to
improve the standing of Islam), it is not necessarily comparable to
Islamic terror simply on the cursory observation that the warring
parties were generally aligned into sectarian factions.
Even if we accepted all of the premises that are assumed in this
conclusion, there is still the obvious matter of degree. More
civilians are killed every three months by Islamic terrorists than
died in the entire 36 years of the Northern Ireland "Troubles."
In fact, 19 Muslim radicals killed far more innocent people in
just two hours on September 11th than the number of non-combatants
killed over Northern Ireland in three and a half decades.
As far as body counts from sectarian violence goes, the Muslim world
has far more to offer up than the mere ten to fifteen people who
were killed each month on average before the Belfast Agreement in
1998. Take the Iraq-Iran war, for example... or can we?
In fact, not all violence in the Islamic world is necessarily about
religion. Certainly Muslims wage Jihad to spread their
religion, and many die in true sectarian violence, but neither are
their leaders above starting conflicts for the same territorial and
political reasons that other countries do on occasion.
Likewise, the Northern Ireland conflict may not have been about
religion either.
Was it truly a sectarian war, in
the same way that Sunnis and Shiites violently bump heads for no
other reason? Or was religion largely incidental to
differences that were predominantly economic and political?
Northern Ireland has been a point of contention between England and
the Republic of Ireland since it was provisioned as a separate
territory in 1922. The confrontation turned habitually violent
in 1969 with the formation of the IRA (Irish Republican Army), a
terror group that was considered to be the armed wing of the Sinn
Fein political party, which supports Irish nationalism and Marxist
ideology. The violence abated in the mid-1990's with an
agreement between the sides.
Although it's popular to think of the conflict as Catholic versus
Protestant, this is also simplistic and misleading. Historians
and political scientists prefer to describe the two sides with words
like Nationalist, Republican, Ulster, Loyalist and Unionist.
Sectarian divisions often did not hold up. Protestants were
found on both sides of the conflict, for example, and there were
notable Catholics who remained loyal to England.
The IRA did not have a Biblical charter. In fact, they were a
Marxist-atheist organization. Neither did the British
government have religious motives, nor any of the other major
groups. There were some smaller, radical groups that used the
language of religious purity, but they were relatively obscure.
The issue for the "Catholic" factions was Irish nationalism, and for
the "Protestants" it was self-preservation and an end to the
violence. Only a very small minority of the citizens in
Northern Ireland actually participated in the conflict, although the
grief was spread among many.
Some victims were killed around churches, but these were targeted
assassinations that were incidental to the location. There
appears to be no concerted campaign against rival churches or
cathedrals, and few (if any) deadly bombings actually occurred in a
house of worship (see
cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/).
Church leaders on both sides routinely condemned the violence, and
the claims of responsibility for the bombings and assassinations did
not typically quote from the Bible or make reference to God.
(Muslim terrorists quote liberally from the Qur'an in their
statements, and are very explicit about their intentions to fight
"holy war" for the cause of Islam).
Neither was there any expressed interest on the part of either side
in the Northern Ireland conflict to convert infidels or spread
sectarian beliefs beyond the disputed area. Protestant clerics
in Ireland weren't targeted by Irish Catholics (for being clerics) and neither were
priests in England by English Protestants. Religious
affiliation was a loose marker of identity, but there were no
glaring theological differences between Protestants and Catholics on
which the conflict was specifically based. Rather it was
political in nature.
By contrast, the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s was a veritable tent
revival meeting. The Mullahs of Iran made no secret of wanting
to spread the Islamic Revolution across the Middle East, and
actively encouraged Shia resistance to Saddam Hussein for that
reason. In turn, Hussein used language that was meant to appeal to
Sunnis, some 85% of the Muslim world. Both sides referred to their
adversaries as infidels. Both had religious clerics that
issued fatwas and aroused the spiritual passions of the people.
Both sent their poorly trained people into combat with
government-issued Qur'ans.
Yet, the Iraq-Iran conflict of the 1980s was not fundamentally
religious, although the sectarian divisions were certainly exploited
by both sides. If Iran had been the one to begin the war then
we might think differently, but as it was, the conflict ensued from Saddam's quest for territory and power. More than a million
people were lost in the nine years that the two countries rallied
their martyrs against each other.
The toll from the 36 years of conflict in Northern Ireland is 3,323
total lives - a ridiculously small number by comparison. Only
a little over half of these were non-combatants, a casualty count
that is not much higher than the number of passengers lost in the
1912 sinking of the Titanic. Yet the length of the conflict
and its status as an anomaly has exaggerated our perception of it.
And this is particularly so for critics of Christianity, be they
self-righteous Westerners or equally self-righteous Muslims who try
and draw moral equivalence between Northern Ireland and Islamic
terror where there is simply no valid basis for comparison.
TheReligionofPeace.com
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