Hair-splitting as an art form

The following from the second leader in today's Times sets the bar very high indeed. The editorial is about the murdering bastard James Chesney, a Roman Catholic priest we let walk back in 1972 even though we knew he was responsible for a daisy-chain of car bombs that killed nine people in the village of Claudy.

Claudy's sole "offence" in the eyes of the Provisional IRA, the fascist* organization created by Chesney and other Catholic priests with the backing of future Irish premier Charles Haughey, was that Protestants and Catholics lived there peacefully side-by-side. Five of the dead were Catholic, the other four Protestant.

Anyway, here's the hair-split:

The temptation to draw parallels between Father Chesney and more recent preachers of Islamic terror is strong, but should be resisted. There is no suggestion that Father Chesney was a religious terrorist. Rather it is thought that he was a political sectarian terrorist who happened to be a priest.

How can anyone write such drivel?

*I am using the word with historical accuracy. PIRA was an ultra-nationalist, religious sectarian movement formed in opposition to the Official IRA, which was Marxist and secular. Haughey was the most corrupt Irish politician since De Valera, who made independent Ireland a Roman Catholic theocracy.