Separated at Birth?

What do Osama bin Laden and Gerry Adams have in common? Ruth Edwards has some ideas:

apart from their beards and their involvement in terrorism, what Osama and Gerry have in common is that they're obsessed with self-justification, they're losers who have to rewrite the past to fit in with present fantasies, they struggle to be thought modish and neither has the gift of the gab.
Of the two, Bin Laden was more interesting. First, there's the matter of his beard, which has gone from grey to black, thus causing the international intelligence community to indulge in orgies of speculation. Is it dyed? Is it false? Is it Bin Laden at all, at all? Personally, I go with the proponents of the Grecian 2000 view. Look, the guy was 50 six months ago, he's hiding in a cave Allah knows where and apart from the London bom bings in 2005, his operatives are failing to deliver spectaculars in Europe. How could he not be having a bit of a mid-life crisis?
It's similar for Adams. Since his humiliation in the Irish General Election, the invitations to exciting places have dried up. It's Martin McGuinness that gets to go to the sexy spots like Finland: Adams is reduced to hanging around with his dwindling band of admirers in West Belfast.

But each of them have memories to dwell on:

Still, there's some pleasure to be had for him on Memory Lane. Like Bin Laden, who did some predictable gloating about the great achievements of the 19 young murderers of 9/11, Gerry had a nostalgic moment about some of his, though because of his present peace-loving persona, he had to do a lot of equivocating.
The IRA (with which, it was implied, he had nothing to do) were justified in their campaign -- even if he completely failed to explain what they had achieved -- but he couldn't agree with some of their more embarrassing actions. Asked why he had described the Balcolmbe Street bombers as "our Nelson Mandelas", he explained that it was because they spent 24 years in jail. He admired them "as freedom fighters", while having a bit of awkwardness about their having murdered 16 people in London and Guildford with guns and bombs.

A terrorist is a terrorist.