CENTRE POINT
It's not that Americans excuse Mr Gerry Adams's violent past. They positively worship it
SIMON JENKINS
. Not all Americans are stupid. Some have judgment and a sense of proportion. Some Know when they are being conned. Some care whose hand they shake and where that hand might once have been. They would Share my view that Mr Adams's reception in the land of the free this past fortnight has been sickening almost beyond belief. The parallel drawn by the American media with Nelson Mandela is monstrous. Presi- dent Mandela is a democrat and majority leader. His concept of 'armed struggle' was limited and, in some measure, legitimate. Mr Adams was involved with one of the IRA's more murderous gangs and sur- rounds himself, including at his Hollywood parry, with convicted criminals. He is not a brave 'freedom fighter', though I grant him a. raw courage in his present argument within the IRA. He merely leads a faction Within a faction of the republican move- ment. His democratic credentials are based on some 1.0 per cent of a provincial elec- torate, far outstripped by the 'moderate' republican Social Democratic and Labour Party of John Hume.
Even as Mr Adams's limousine was cruis- ing the Hollywood boulevards, his col- leagues back home were not averse to showing who really pulls the peace strings. They broke a few more children's limbs with iron bars and baseball bats to teach them who is boss. IRA/Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness declared it laughable to make the
ceasefire permanent. No, he would not
ask the IRA (i.e., himself) to disband the murder units or hand in the IRA's armoury. To do that, as Mr Adams himself admitted in Boston, would be to risk the Present peace-loving duo being toppled and 'another IRA leadership' taking over in two or three years time.
The reason for Hollywood lionising Gerry Adams has nothing to do with his putative commitment to peace. There would have been no Hollywood birthday party for Mr Hume, who deserves the real credit. What gives Mr Adams his glamour is not his present link with peace but his past link with violence. That is what gave a thrilling tingle to 'Happy birthday, dear Gerry'. For those who make a living faking violence, a practitioner of the real thing has magnetism. Malcolm X and the Black Pan- thers enjoyed similar West Coast status. Gangsters, mafiosi and convicted murder- ers have, I am told, great sexual appeal to certain women. If Jack the Ripper were alive today, Hollywood would not just buy his story (we would all do that), but would want to meet him, embrace him, feel his physical proximity. Using violence as a dra- matic catharsis is one thing. Actors need an occasional first-hand encounter. I am sure Oliver Stone is even now working up a script 'Gerry Adams, the Movie', with guest footage of Mother Teresa, Steve Biko and Martin Luther King.
Sensible Americans plead that we should not read too much into these shenanigans. Political brain power has never been Holly- wood's strong suit. We would not be too upset if a group of Mandist fanatics or Thirteenth Day Adventists or Haitian voodoo dancers declared Gerry Adams their patron saint. Hollywood actors are no different. These people deal in graven images. They read no newspapers. To them, Adams is merely a traveller from an antique land, his violence sanitised by fame. In politically correct America, that is the nearest a white, European male can get to cult status. That is all Hollywood was fet- ing. So its apologists claim. I do not buy this patronising view of what is a sinister strain in American public life. When strolling players wander into politics the result may be unedifying but it is not inconsequential. Mr Adams's media cover- age directly affects his standing with the ever spineless Clinton administration. We know that Irish politics in America is a phe- nomenon distinct from Irish politics any- where in Ireland. It has a life and a ratio- nale of its own. Mayor Koch of New York once made the mistake of visiting Northern Ireland and returning home to remark that it was 'more complicated' than he had thought. This evinced such a violent reac- tion from the Irish-American lobby in New York that he eventually had to retract.
Yet Britons should not just sit back and sneer. We have benefited from America's macho selflessness in getting out of our own scrapes, not least a certain war in 1982.
1 am convinced that international securi- ty does on balance benefit from America's inclination to meddling interference. Some- times, as again last week in Kuwait, the world needs it. Often, as in Haiti and Somalia, the well-intentioned inanity beg- gars belief. The one requirement is that overall the helmsman should be steering, however unsteadily, in the right direction. Americans should end up on the right side.
This is not evidently the case in Ireland, which means that Britain should cast diplo- matic niceties aside and hit the roof. Mr Adams's reception by Senator Kennedy and his almost-reception by the White House were outrageous and unredeemed by so-called 'domestic electoral considera- tions'. America needs and uses Britain more than any other ally, most recently to flesh out its interventions in Haiti and the Gulf. The next time Mr Clinton asks Down- ing Street for help, his call might be rerout- ed to his friends in Sinn Fein. Perhaps they might care to send some 'active service units'. Americans paid for them, after all.
If that does not work, we might give Americans a taste of their own crassness. We could invite Haiti's General Cedras to a taco party on the British embassy lawn in Washington. We could offer Somalia's General Aidid an honorary knighthood. We could give the convicted fraudster Michael Milken the freedom of the City of London. To round off a passable imitation of Democratic policy on Northern Ireland, we could set up a 'Yanks out of Texas' par- liamentary group to revive Mexico's right- ful claims to that state. Then see how Mar- tin Sheen reacts.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times
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