many years before Blair made peace with the IRA, their leadership were not about liberating Northern Ireland. Like Hamas and the PLA they were run by crooks and thieves and muderers who had no life or financial prospects ahead of them except by running a kind of Mafia that was based around the "Cause." Robbing banks, extortion and drug running was their main activity with a few attacks against British targets to make them look legit. Now their leaders sit in Parliament on nice salaries and have become establishment, so for them "ze var really is over." And for us Brits -- well, we don't have to worry about bombs going off in our shopping centres or the Bank of England being blown up -- at least not by the IRA. Unfortunately Israel is not really in a position to offer the leaders of Hamas and the PLA a position in the Knesset, so the crooks that run these august institutions have nothing else to make a living from but extortion and drug and arms trade. They are no different. And because they make the lives of their people miserable, like pretty every Arab government in this part of the world, they need to make sure their captive audience is on side by from time to time having a war against the number one enemy. I have been thinking about this for some days now. I am livid at the waste of lives on both sides of the divide this