Alan Johnston and Hamas

A major defeat in the war to defend the free world

Melanie Phillips

01 August 2007

/article_images/articledir_138/69314/1_listing.png

Shortly after the release of Alan Johnston from Gaza the website of Conflicts Forum, a group advocating engagement with Islamists and which is run by the former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke, posted a fascinating transcript.

Crooke himself, the former Mid-East adviser to the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Javier Solana, has long been a pivotal figure in the dubious business of treating with Islamic terrorists. The Israelis captured in Gaza a transcript by Hamas of a secret meeting he had in 2002 with its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In this transcript — which Crooke has claimed is inaccurate — he drew a distinction between ‘terrorism’ and ‘resistance’, expressed his appreciation of Hamas for its welfare programmes and for being an ‘important political factor’ and said, ‘The main problem is the Israeli occupation.’

Behind Crooke lies in turn a swelling chorus, led by UK and US former intelligence officers, urging the West to ‘engage’ with the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is one branch) on the basis that since they are not all committed to violence they are a potential ally against al-Qa’eda.

This is absurd. While there are undoubt-edly differences between them, the Islamists form an unbroken continuum of fanatical religious war against the West. Their strategy involves both terrorism and non-violent cultural aggression — a fact the establishment, obsessed by its belief in ‘divide and rule’, refuses to grasp.

Moreover, the idea that the West has not ‘engaged’ with Hamas is a fantasy. The International Crisis Group reports that since 1991 there have been repeated unofficial contacts with Hamas by the EU and even the US. Yet these have failed to modify Hamas’s core aims of annihilating Israel and Islamising the region.

The real purpose behind bringing Hamas in from the cold lies in a fundamental shift in global strategy. In the US, gripped by despair over Iraq, ‘realist’ isolationism and appeasement are on the rise.

Secular Arab states, horrified by the collapse of nerve in the one power which might save them from the Islamists, are now looking for deals with radical Sunnis to counter the greater threat of Shiite Iran. The emerging EU/American strategy is to help that process, gambling that the Sunni Islamists will fight the Shiites rather than topple secular Arab governments. The wooing of Sunni Hamas is the West’s opening gambit.