Biased Killings

choi

Katrin Bennhold, Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate; A former IRA assassin reflects on slaughter in Africa and the Mideast. New York Times, Oct 13, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/1 ... otency-of-hate.html

Quote:

(a)  "From a comfortable couch in his London living room, Sean O’Callaghan had been watching the shaky televised images of terrified people running from militants in an upscale mall in Kenya. Some of those inside had been asked their religion. Muslims were spared, non-Muslims executed.

“'God, this is one tough lot of jihadis,' said a friend, a fellow Irishman, shaking his head.

“'But we used to do the same thing,' Mr O’Callaghan replied.

"There was the 1976 Kingsmill massacre. Catholic gunmen stopped a van with 12 workmen in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, freed the one Catholic among them and lined up the 11 Protestants and shot them one by one.

(b) "On a sunny August day in 1974, he [O'Callahan at 19] walked into a bar in Omagh, Northern Ireland, drew a short-barreled pistol and shot a man bent over the racing pages at the end of the counter, a man he had been told was a notorious traitor to the Irish Catholic cause. * * *

"Years later he learned that Peter Flanagan was not the monster that the I.R.A. had made him out to be. Mr. Flanagan had been unarmed, had testified against British police officers at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg

My comment:
(a) The report is OK, but if you do not have time, there is no need to read the rest.
(b) The former assassin talked about one of his kill. I do'nt know, but it sounds sentimental. In July we in Boston had a federal criminal trial against Whitey Bulger, an aging Irish crime boss. His assassins testified about killings (sometimes of wrong targets or innocent bystanders), showing they (assassins) were casual, indifferent and oftentimes absurd (like they killed people without bothering to acertain the identities of those who they were going to kill: not at a close range or asking their names). Once one of the assassins just walked up to a car owned and driven by a target in a blizzard after the restaurant was closed at night, saw three shadows and shot. Two waiters--co-workers of the target, a young man and a teenage girl--were also killed while the three huddled in the car against the cold. Bostonians both were mesmerized and shook their heads. Incidentally, the assassins had made a (separate) deal with the US for leniency (lighter sentence for one, avoiding death penalty for the other--Massachusetts does not have death penalty but some killings were in southern states, which have).
(c) Kingsmill massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsmill_massacre
(took place on Jan 5, 1976 near the village of Kingsmill in County Armagh, Northern Ireland; One of the shot men survived, despite having been shot 18 times)
(d) Omagh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh
(Irish meaning "the virgin plain;" is the county town of County Tyrone)
(e) Christopher R Browning, Ordinary Men; Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1993.
(f) "Japanese invaders referred to their Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre as 'chancorro,' or 'subhuman.'”

Of course, we know "chancorro" (usually spelled "chancoro") does not mean "subhuman." It merely WAS (no longer is) Japanese way of saying "Chink," which Americans of all races still occassionally use.