‘Death of a Terrorist’

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 20

‘Death of a Terrorist’

Sir, — In her less than sympathetic review of a television documentary, "Death of a Terrorist” (August 25), Ruth Zanker’s judgment seems to be clouded by her pro-British sympathies against violence — violence by the I.R.A. One looks in her review for any condemnation of British imperialist violence, to which I.R.A. violence is a natural, inevitable, human response. The distinction between the violence of a would-be conqueror and the responding violence of a resisting people, presented as “law and order” versus "terrorism,” must be clearly drawn. Violence accoutred in the full panoply of a State military uniform, commanded by a Government stubbornly and savagely bent on wreaking its will, is more reprehensible than the response that it evokes. Is Gibraltar “Britain’s last colony”? Surely, the occupied rump of Ireland’s Ulster province has prior claim to that dubious distinction. The inference from Ruth Zanker’s last sentence appears to be gratitude and relief for British Government policy of pre-emptive execution. — Yours, etc. M. CREEL, x August 26, 1989.

[Ruth Zanker replies: “My main intention in writing my review was to comment on how the documentary presented the facts. M. Creel expected a statement on the morality of the British presence in Ireland. Should a reviewer refrain from condemning flaws of presentation in a documentary just because of one reader's private ukase? Again, even if my review was “less than sympathetic,” what thinking person could logically conclude that my stance is, therefore, necessarily pro-Brit-

ish? In fact, I made a special point of observing that an American production on Ireland threw into relief how used we have become to the British bias in reporting on events in Ireland.”]