LATEST | Petrol bombs thrown at media during dissident parade in Derry as involvement of children branded ‘reprehensible’
Many who lived through the republican riots of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, will know that the tactics the Hamas terrorist have used in Gaza in recent days are but those we saw almost daily in republican areas in Northern Ireland.
Sinn Fein/IRA have changed in tactics and placed an emphasis on political activity. They have been forced to do this because they were not winning ‘the war’. They have not renounced violence but demonstrate its intrinsic place in the Irish Republican’s thesis by celebrating the terrorist ‘exploits’ of recent years annually. There have been those disappointed republicans who wish to see terrorism continued and they cursed Sinn Fein and have tried to muster support for a restarting of the terror campaign.
At the ‘Dissident Republican’ annual celebration in Londonderry to mark the ‘Easter Rising’ in Dublin in 1916, the chief feature was petrol bombing by juveniles. This has ever been the standard manifestation of lawlessness and murder that is inherent in the spirit of Irish Republicanism. It also was but a display of the practice of the IRA and Hamas of sending youngsters forward to attack the security forces knowing that they will find it difficult to reply to these acts of terrorism by adolescents without becoming targets of the left-wing media pundits and their campaign to attack any resistance to lawlessness and anarchy as being an attempt to shoot unarmed and innocent juveniles!
Youths carrying crates of petrol bombs in the Creggan area of Derry after an illegal dissident republican parade
The tolerating of such lawless displays by the government and society generally and the cloaking of the insurgency by unscrupulous members of the press, is but confirmation that there is a manifesting around us of that prophesied in Psalm 2.
“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us,” verses 1-3.
The prophecy goes on to tell of the eventual response of God to this the ultimate rebellion of this age.
“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion,” verses 4-6.
The downfall and utter ruin of the rebel under the wrath of God and the enthronement of Christ upon Zion’s hill and “the earth . . . filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea,” Habakkuk 2:14.
Only the believing Christian has a knowledge of the conclusion of all the lawlessness we see all around us today!
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)
2nd April 2024