Mairead Maguire yesterday stated that Israel and only Israel should have its membership of the UN suspended, or revoked entirely, as a punishment for ignoring UN resolutions. Maguire’s pronouncements and activities regularly make the news because she was, along with Betty Williams, awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to build a grassroots anti-violence movement, known as the Peace People, in Northern Ireland.
Careful students of Irish history will note that though Maguire’s organization, in its early days, managed to get respectable numbers of people on to the streets for demonstrations, the agreement to end the conflict wasn’t signed until more than two decades after its foundation. While it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Peace People had some positive influence on attitudes to political violence in Northern Ireland, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Nobel committee might have acted a little hastily in awarding their Peace Prize to the founders of an organization which, with the best intentions in the world, seems to have had, at most, a marginal role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
As I’ve said more than once here before, peace negotiations became viable in Northern Ireland, when, and only when, the IRA had been finally been convinced by a long counter-insurgency campaign - a campaign that involved mass internment without trial, deniable targeted assassination of leading activists and the use of interrogation methods amounting to torture, something to bear in mind when you hear British politicians pontificating about human rights in faraway lands - that their only option was to sue for the most dignified peace terms that they could get.
Undaunted by the irrelevance of her activities to the development and conclusion of the Northern Ireland conflict and brandishing her Peace Prize as a token of her supposed moral perspicacity, Maguire has now taken to offering succor to a regime racist enough to make the Shankill Butchers blanch, and demanding that the UN expel the world’s only state for Jews from its ranks.
Blessed are the Peace Prize winners for they shall have their base prejudices indulged and applauded.
Eammon:
Hardly the first time the Nobel committee have made dubious awards, particularly for contributins to world peace, which includes such rogues as the late Yasser Arafat, Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter, who just happened to be US president when Anwar Sadat decided it was in Egypt’s best interest to enter into a peace agreement with Israel and gain the return of the Suez.
How about a world conference of Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize winners, including MacGuire, gathered under one roof, within striking missile range of a Kasam rocket attack or homicide bomber.
That would solve a number of pressing world questions all at the same time, wouldn’t it?
In fairness to the peace people Eamonn, they operated in very difficult circumstances, amidst an atmosphere of great hostility and threats from people attempting to exercise a fascistic control over the areas in which they lived. The mass demonstrations of the 1968-72 period had become impossible after Bloody Sunday, and the bombing and assassinations drove people off the streets. For all their faults, the peace people brought a message of hope, and gave a voice to people who had been silenced at an important time.
Though of course what she said was silly.
When Israel applied for and was granted membership in the UN it accepted its obligation to abide by UN resolutions. Since then Israel has cosistently and flagrantly violated UN resolutions, according to most accounts, 65 of them.