Long-standing voice at the Guardian for the shameless section of the British left, Seumas Milne puts in a good word today for Hamas - this in connection with engaging, or not, with people who have links to the organization. It's delicately expressed:
As opinion polls show, most Muslims around the world are broadly sympathetic to Hamas as a movement resisting occupation of Palestinian land - and British Muslims are no exception.Now, you won't need to explain to him, because Milne will know, that widespread sympathy for a movement is not in itself a guarantee of political health or virtue. If this were sympathy for neo-Nazis or other racists of the ultra-right, he wouldn't be writing in such terms. So we must deduce that it is 'a movement resisting occupation of Palestinian land' that is doing the real work for him, rather than the fact of broad Muslim sympathy.
Yet there is something else Milne ought to know, given the particular political lineage in which he himself stands. He ought to know that giving your support and sympathy to a movement you identify as broadly 'progressive' in some way, while passing over some of its more unfortunate commitments or practices in silence, has not been a fruitful experience for the left: it produced decades of apologetics for political lying and criminality of the worst kind, and finally a tide of revulsion against the international movement willing to speak in favour of all that. Ought to know - but he doesn't. Milne tactfully passes over what Hamas's charter reveals about it: that it is a programmatically anti-Semitic organization which quotes from 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and promises the killing of Jews.
How is it thinkable that a Guardian journalist doesn't notice this or, if he does, discounts it? It's thinkable. In fact, it's getting to be an old story. Was a time when it was kind of shocking.