Pete King: from IRA friend to scourge of jihadists

There are not many politicians more familiar with the maxim that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" than Washington's new chairman of the House Committee for Homeland Security. After all, he began his career as a shill for the IRA.

US Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, took over the 'war on terror' committee in January, following last year's midterm elections, and has lost no time in making headlines about the threat of "homegrown" terrorism from America's Muslims.

Tomorrow, he will chair hearings to investigate whether America's mosques are actually recruiting centres for jihadists. He personally believes 85 per cent of the nation's mosques are "radical".

Muslims have rallied in Times Square to protest against stigmatisation, while President Obama has sent his deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonaugh, to a mosque in Virginia to say: "In the United States of America, we don't practice guilt by association."

King, now 66, should know the turf. For the first 20 years of his political career, he was notorious for his support of the IRA's "armed struggle". He drank in IRA pubs in Belfast, and worked with NORAID, the US organisation accused of funneling money and guns to Northern Ireland.

A Belfast judge once threw him out of his court as "an obvious collaborator of the IRA", the FBI intercepted his letters from Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, and the Secret Service listed him as a "threat" when President Reagan visited King's patch in the New York suburbs of Long Island.

King's move from poacher to gamekeeper appears to stem from a combination of short political memory, astute grass-roots politics, and the kind of luck that every politician needs.

His family came from Limerick and Galway, his father a New York cop. A great-uncle had been an IRA man back in the 1920s. King discovered there were votes to be won for local office with sympathy for the cause.

Visiting Belfast in 1980, he made friends with Michael McKevitt, the Quarter Master of the IRA, and Anto Murray, Belfast Operations Officer. He met Gerry Adams in 1984.

At a NORAID rally King said: "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who at this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry." The IRA was the "legitimate voice of occupied Ireland".

King's big break came in 1985 when the IRA prison hunger strikes gained mainstream sympathy for the rebel cause. He rode the wave to his seat in Congress in Washington, and even teamed with President Clinton as a useful contact during the Washington-sponsored peace process.

Then came 9/11. Suddenly his constituents switched their votes from freedom fighters to the fighters of terrorists. King, who had once called Dubya Bush "an anti-Catholic bigot", stood by the new President in the rubble, calling for nuclear bombs to be dropped on Afghanistan.

Earning a seat on the committee he now chairs, King announced that he had "cooled on Ireland".

Today he says: "Jihadis are being recruited from the Muslim community just like the Mafia came from the Italian community, the Westies [the criminal gang of New York's Hell's Kitchen district] from the Irish community."

He doesn't mention the IRA, or its Irish-American sympathisers. ·