Skeptic Validated Poster
Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 485
|
Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 9:16 am Post subject: Sept 11 attacks not as bad as IRA, says Lessing |
|
|
Sept 11 attacks not as bad as IRA, says Lessing
http://www.underthecarpet.co.uk/Pages/NewsArticle.php?num=3266
Quote: | Guardian / 24-10-2007
Doris Lessing, who this month became a Nobel laureate for her prolific and visionary fiction, is not one to mince her words; nor, at 88, can age be said to have mellowed her. In the past she has laid into feminists and into Tony Blair. Now she has asserted that the September 11 attacks were "not as terrible" as the Americans think. Nor, she said, were they as serious as the terrorism campaign of the IRA.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El PaĆs, she said: "September 11 was terrible, but if you reprise the history of the IRA, that of the Americans wasn't so terrible. Any American would think I was mad. Many people died, two high-profile buildings came down, but it wasn't as terrible or as extraordinary as they think. [The Americans] are a very naive people; or they pretend to be."
She added: "You know what people forget? That the IRA launched bomb attacks against our government which killed several people who were attending a Conservative party conference, at which prime minister Margaret Thatcher was present."
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks. More than 3,700 died and tens of thousands of people were injured in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.
Lessing reserved some ire for an old enemy, Tony Blair. "I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning," she said. "Many of us hated Tony Blair, I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years. I said it when he was elected: 'This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems', and he did.
"As for Bush, he's a world calamity. Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."
Of Iran - where she was born - she said: "I hate Iran and I hate the Iranian government, it's an evil and cruel government."
Last week another literary prizewinner, Man Booker winner Anne Enright, caused a stir with a piece for the London Review of Books, in which she aired her "dislike" of Kate and Gerry McCann, parents of the missing child Madeleine. |
_________________ UK-based alternative news site:
http://www.underthecarpet.co.uk
HipHop:
http://www.myspace.com/skepticandjidsames |
|