This is a guest post by a Harrys Place Reader
Last night I was at the meeting in the British Parliament where Khalid Meshaal, Chief of the Political Bureau of Hamas, was supposed to speak by videolink.
But the link to Damascus did not work, so we never ‘met’ Meshaal
However while we were waiting for the link to be set up, there were some extraordinary attempts by the Parliamentarians there to rewrite history and rebrand Hamas into a ‘resistance’ movement. Apparently everything you read about Hamas is propaganda and you need to go there and talk to them.
Lord Alderdice (the chairman) inevitably made the Ireland comparison. “We made peace in Ireland by talking to the IRA so why not talk to Hamas?” Answer: because as Lord Trimble pointed out, talking to terrorists before they renounce violence can be catastrophic. Remember “Bloody Friday” which followed the 1972 talks with Whitelaw.
When this point was made to him, Alderdice’s answer was breathtaking: “Ah but Lord Trimble has revised his views” (no he has not) “and anyway I was there.”
Then we had MPs Clare Short and Lyn Jones and Baroness Jenny Tonge telling us about their visits to talk to Hamas : “they (Hamas) told us that you can’t believe what you read about Hamas and that Charter is 20 years old, they told us that when the Palestinian State is set up it will have its own constitution and the Charter will be irrelevant.”
So why – when asked if Hamas would give up the Charter – does Meshaal say “Not a chance”?
(A man in the room read out choice bits of the Charter and Short was heard to tell Alderdice not to bother with him).
As for hating women – the response from Short was that Hamas has women MPs and not all women in Gaza are veiled.
Nothing about the ‘justice’ meted out in Gaza by Hamas during Operation Cast Lead, of course …
