To All that this concerns:
Yet again, this small country we live in, finds itself at a significant and desperate crossroads….
We turned to our varying media sources this weekend to once again be horrified and outraged by the news of the murder of two British soldiers in Antrim.
I was horrified that the threat of the ulitmate sacrifice these boys faced in Afghanistan (where they were due to be deployed this morning) was not enough for the ‘dissidents’ who wanted them dead.
I was outraged and truly sickened that delivering a pizza is considered grounds for being a ‘collaborator’.
The deployment of Special Forces had grabbed the headlines earlier in the week; a cause for further fury. To those politicians who stood on their Republican soapbox to bemoan the presence of an ‘occupying force’ : I ask how they want the government to protect their obviously endangered citizens?The loud and powerful voices of Republicanism need to condemn this atrocity; and call for justice for the dead; they need to rid their society of this murderous threat; for the preservation of all their peoples.
That Unionists politicians used the news of Special Forces as a taunt against their political enemies; the men and women they entrust much of the running of their country to; is too insulting to draw any further attention to.
Despite my paid up membership of Amnesty International: I believe that the Special Forces should have been deployed in silence; their job is one we can’t begin to understand the complexities of. I don’t at any juncture believe that to face the terrorist threat we need to erode the civil liberties so central to our democracy. But I think that the greater threat to our society lies in the hands of wannabe terrorists; and we need the men and women who infiltrate these groups and stand between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and bullets they fire.
We are once again living in a powder keg; afraid of the next spark. We have to, at all costs, avoid the inclination to retreat to entrenched, polarised positions of the past. We have to instead remember that there has already been too many casualties as we all crawled with trepidation and fear across No Man’s Land. Remember that we reached a place of democratic agreement. We were the architects of a fragile peace and we cannot let a cowardly act destroy what those two soldiers were willing to die to protect.
Yours in hope
