American civil rights movement? Let's hear the story about Catholic Emancipation again. But from where did Martin Luther King draw his inspiration? If you said Ghandi, you'd be only partially corrent: the true source of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and all boycotts for that matter, was the Irish Land League in 1880. Peasants in county Mayo organized a protest against Charles Boycott, the landlord's agent, for refusing to lower rents. Everyone refused to deal with the man: no one would work the fields, shopkeepers refused to sell to him, servants left the house. Boycott soon entered the English lexicon. Affirmative action, in his mind, has a direct relation to the positive discrimination practiced to bring more Catholics into the police and other government bodies in Northern Ireland after peace.
My father has also been insisting on creating a Palestinian-Israeli peace along the lines of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland (though wouldn't this create one state? Perish the thought!). No fan of colonalization, he laments the injustice of hundreds of years of English occupation, and was delighted when I pointed him to Edward Said's work on analyzing Irish literature with post-colonial theory.
And now, even Lebanon can be Ireland. Joshua Landis, who runs the awesome blog Syria Comment has written some commentary on a WSJ editorial on Hezbollah. In countering the ed's author, he writes that Hezbollah is a reasonable organization, "not much different from the IRA."
Futher:
The US very intelligently refused to treat the IRA as a terrorist
organization despite British insistence that it be proscribed as an
evil criminal gang. Fortunately, the the US insisted on viewing the Irish
Catholic struggle as political and not criminal. The result was successful
diplomacy that helped resolve the dispute and transformed Ireland into one
of the happier countries in the world with one of its zippiest
economies. There is no reason Lebanon can not follow suit.
Yes! It all does come back to Ireland! Unfortunately I doubt that many in Washington are going to see Hezbollah as more similar to the IRA than to al-Qaeda, as all logic vanishes in the face of the supposed monolith of "Islamic Terrorism". al-Qaeda in the unspoken word in all American pronouncements on Hezbollah (and Hamas), referenced with the all-emcompassing "Islamic Terror" or, what are they calling it? "Islamofascism". Whenever these terms are invoked, the average American sees Osama Bin Ladin, never mind that sect differences, or that Hezbollah is at heart nationalist, or that Hezbollah's beef ain't directly with the US.
But the bigger question is, if Hezbollah is IRA, when are they going to get a Sinn Féin? Both Gerry Adams and Nasrallah do have beards and kindly, grandfatherly smiles.
