FROM GAZA

FORMER IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY personnel say that recent official Irish responses to the kidnapping of 5-year-old Emily Hand in Israel make them regret not having claimed to be Palestinian when they kidnapped supermarket executive Don Tidey back in 1983.

“If we had said we were Palestinian, then there would have been huge street marches in support of what we did,” says Padraig from Derry, who insists that he was not directly involved in the Tidey affair. “And the Dublin Government might have done a deal with us, and then claimed Tidey was lost and then found”.

Insurgency strategist Ulick Mayhem of the Our Freedom Fighters Good Your Terrorists Bad Institute in Beirut says that former activists around the globe are up in arms (not literally) at some western responses to Hamas’s kidnapping of men, women and children in Israel, when these same countries used to lambaste them for similar practices in previous decades. “Irony, you are dead,” he said on a bad telephone line.