Alan Johnston and Hamas

A major defeat in the war to defend the free world

Melanie Phillips

01 August 2007

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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.

This strategy is lethally ill-judged. It fails to recognise that, despite all the splits between Islamist factions, they are united by a common project of Islamising the world. The most likely outcome of this suicidal Western approach will be the further radicalisation of Arab and Muslim society, the toppling by Islamists of secular Arab regimes and a strengthening of the global jihad. This most dangerous development has been given an enormous boost by the way the Johnston kidnap has been manipulated — no small thanks to the BBC itself.

Since Johnston’s release, the BBC seems to have turned itself into a vehicle for Hamas propaganda. Alastair Crooke has been given airtime granted to no other lobbyist, in interviews and one-off programmes giving him unprecedented opportunity to push his views.

This is the BBC whose other Gaza reporter Fayed abu Shamala reportedly told a Hamas rally in 2001 that the BBC was

‘waging the campaign of resistance/terror against Israel shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people’; and whose Middle East bureau editor, Simon Wilson, has acknowledged that he met Hamas leaders in Gaza and Damascus to discuss Johnston’s fate — meetings about which the Foreign Office was closely consulted.

Now that same BBC, along with a shadowy intelligence establishment and panicky politicians, is promoting ‘engagement’ with Hamas. But this is a terrorist outfit committed to the destruction of Israel and the Islamisation of the West. The Johnston kidnap represents a turning point in the war to defend the free world. It is not a turn in the direction of victory.

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist.