Selling Hamas

Here, yet once more, is the Guardian's Jonathan Steele:

It seemed bizarre at first, in the wake of the London attacks, to sit down with men whose organisation has sent hundreds of suicide bombers into Israeli cities. But it was a valuable reminder that the use of political violence on civilians, however brutal, always has a specific context. To respond by declaring a generalised "war on terror" or condemning "this assault on civilised values" obscures the problem and makes the search for solutions harder.

Most people know the aphorism 'To understand is to forgive'. Steele has evidently patented his own adaptation: 'To condemn is to fail to understand'. I would say this isn't necessarily so, or historians of Nazi Germany, the USSR, Pol Pot's Cambodia, would be in severe difficulty. Still, let's run with it; let's give Steele the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he does just want to refrain from condemning, in order to understand - in the interest of informational, non-partisan reporting. Except that, lo and behold, from the paragraphs imediately following what we get from him is not just non-condemnation of Hamas - his topic - but essentially a plug for its point of view:

Hamas... denounced the London bombs within the first hours. They give both moral and pragmatic reasons. The victims were not legitimate targets - too remote to bear any responsibility for the crimes the bombers were avenging.

"One of our aims is to have good relations with Europe and all peoples of the world," says Salah al-Bardawil, chief columnist for al-Risala, the Hamas weekly. "There is a big difference between our attitude towards Israel and our view of Europe. Hamas decided 15 years ago not to transfer the struggle outside Palestine."

The target of his anger stares him in the face daily. The high concrete walls of the Gush Katif settlement, with its gun towers and mine-strewn death strip, is less than 200 yards from his book-lined study. These are not random commuters at King's Cross but armed occupiers who had no hesitation in supporting their own government's use of violence against civilians, and only rebelled when Sharon chose to close the Gaza settlements.
.....
Al-Bardawil talks of the "logic of war, which Israel imposed on us, forcing Palestinians to do the same". And he says: "When I see a bombing in Tel Aviv on TV, I sometimes cry. We have not lost our humanity."

Not a single word of critical distance, but on the contrary elisions helpful to Hamas terrorism every step of the way: their target not random commuters far away, but high concrete walls, armed occupiers; therefore logic of war, and imposed on them. But then there are those civilians in Tel Aviv (or Jerusalem or Natanya). Not far enough away evidently, and somehow the randomness consideration from just a few lines up has now been lost sight of. All the peoples of the world but one. And (don't you know?) the guy sometimes cries at the bombing of Jews, out of humanity. Yes, well that's nice, but it's still murder and still a crime against humanity.

This is what Steele means by 'context', by not-condemning in order to 'understand'. He means selling the point of view of Hamas to the Guardian's readership.