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GERRY AND OSAMA: BLOODY TOGETHER

September 27, 2001 -- THERE'S an old joke that someone with roots in Counties Galway and Fermanagh should be able to get away with in these humor-challenged times, and it goes like this:

Why aren't Irishmen particularly good at golf?

Because we've never truly mastered swinging a club underhand.

Subtlety and understatement may be characteristic of Irish literature and the fine arts, but it isn't much to be found in politics and military affairs.

Not on the Four Green Fields.

And not here in America.

Not often, anyway.

If it were otherwise, Gerry Adams - himself just a wink and a nod removed from the mad bombers of the Irish Republican Army - wouldn't be coming to town to headline a fund-raiser for the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attack.

Adams' current cover is the presidency of Sinn Fein, the "political wing" of the IRA. He's been a regular visitor to the White House ever since the Clinton Administration elevated him from international pariah to patron saint of the Irish peace process.

That's the same peace process that's now at death's door over the IRA's refusal to turn in its weapons - a reflection on Adams' inability, or refusal, simply to give peace a chance.

The alternative being a return to the terror that has rendered Northern Ireland a bloodstained madhouse for more than 30 years- to no particular good purpose.

So now Adams proposes to transform a previously scheduled Nov. 1 Sinn Fein fund-raiser here in New York into what's being described as "a benefit for the families of construction workers killed in the World Trade Center attack."

Here's an idea.

How about al Qaeda hosting a do for the victims of the 1997 bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland - 28 dismembered men, women and children, and more than 200 wounded, at the hands of the IRA?

Osama bin Laden could preside.

Nuts?

Only because bin Laden remains on active duty with the forces of international terror and Adams, allegedly retired from blood-letting, has been granted elder-statesman status.

The former is unambiguously homicidal; the latter, in his current incarnation, exudes sweet reason.

But there's a critical link between the two.

The IRA's unapologetic refusal to disable its weapons is a principal stumbling block to peace in Northern Ireland.

But what weapons?

All manner of automatic rifles; maybe an operable Stinger anti-aircraft missile or two; quantities of small-arms ammunition - and hundreds of pounds of Semtex, a sophisticated plastic explosive.

Whence these munitions?

From the megalomaniacal Moammar Khadafy, back in April, 1986.

Margaret Thatcher, a rock in the war on terrorism, had allowed the U.S. Air Force to fly from British bases to punish Libya for a terror bombing that killed American servicemen in Germany.

So it was payback time - a weapons transfer from a state sponsor of terror to operatives in the field, so to speak.

Khadafy sent four trawlers stuffed with death and destruction; one got through - and its contents have been complicating matters in Northern Ireland ever since.

Now, of course, the only truly reliable ally America has in the wake of Sept. 11 is - Britain.

This has always been true, even as a cadre of misguided Irish-Americans has labored to split the two nations.

Will Gerry Adams be able to keep a straight face as he speaks on behalf of the victims of Islamic fundamentalist terror?That would require true subtlety.

But he's managed to scrub sufficient blood from his hands to make himself a regular at the White House.

So anything is possible.

-- Anonymous, September 27, 2001