In the past few days, the BBC appears to have turned itself into a mouth­piece for Hamas. From a steady pro­ces­sion of talk­ing heads has issued a stream of Arab pro­pa­ganda, along the lines that what has hap­pened in Gaza is an inevitable out­come of the Israeli/western col­lec­tive pun­ish­ment of Pales­tin­ian vot­ers for demo­c­ra­t­i­cally choos­ing a party of which the west dis­ap­proves, along with the Israeli/western refusal to ‘engage’ with Hamas, a sit­u­a­tion which must now be reme­died forth­with. If we look a lit­tle more closely at these inter­vie­wees, how­ever, it seems that such a con­sis­tent line may not be alto­gether coin­ci­den­tal. The casual lis­tener and viewer has been led to assume that all these ‘experts’ are ran­dom, if well-informed, observers of the Mid­dle East scene. But a rather dif­fer­ent pic­ture emerges if one joins up some of the dots.

Guided by a cou­ple of eagle-eyed blog-posters, I have been doing just that. Dis­cussing events in Gaza on suc­ces­sive evenings last week, BBC TV News­night had on William Sieghart, Azzam Tamimi and Alas­tair Crooke.

Azzam Tamimi is a self-proclaimed Hamas sym­pa­thiser — who, inci­den­tally, once screamed at me on BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze that he was per­son­ally rewrit­ing the Hamas Char­ter to remove its endorse­ment of the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion (it’s still there), because even some Hamas types can see that this isn’t exactly great PR.

Alas­tair Crooke is a for­mer MI6 agent who con­tro­ver­sially acted between Israel and Hamas and Islamic Jihad as a go-between until MI6 recalled him, and who ever since has argued pub­licly for ‘engage­ment’ with Hamas. In 2004, he wrote about Islamists and the west in the Guardian:

We do diverge on a few val­ues, but the over­whelm­ing bulk of Islamists and Mus­lims sup­port elec­tions, good gov­er­nance and free­dom (more so than in some Euro­pean states, the polls show).

Explain­ing the think­ing behind the group he had just founded, Con­flicts Forum, he wrote:

We need to recog­nise the ‘other’ and acknowl­edge that Mus­lim val­ues do not pose a threat to the strate­gic val­ues of west­ern soci­ety. Mus­lims do not hate our val­ues. They hate our poli­cies. We need dia­logue at all levels.

William Sieghart, the founder of var­i­ous arts events, a home­less­ness char­ity and a gov­er­nor of the British Insti­tute of Human Rights, was instru­men­tal in invit­ing Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad to the Guardian Hay on Wye Book Fes­ti­val. Those who might won­der quite how the Chair­man of the Arts Foun­da­tion hap­pens to have the phone num­ber of the Hamas offi­cial spokesman in his Roladex might be enlight­ened to learn that Mr Sieghart also turns out to be chair­man of For­ward Thinking.

For­ward Think­ing is a char­ity founded in April 2004

to address the grow­ing social iso­la­tion of Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties in Britain and to pro­mote a more inclu­sive peace process in the Mid­dle East.

This is its team.

Oliver McTer­nan is co-founder and direc­tor of For­ward Think­ing. He was respon­si­ble for ini­ti­at­ing the first post-conflict talks between NATO and the for­mer Yugoslav gov­ern­ment. He was a Vis­it­ing Fel­low of the Weath­er­head Cen­ter for Inter­na­tional Affairs at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and is a Senior Asso­ciate Fel­low of the UK Defence Academy.

McTernan’s fel­low trustee is Chris Don­nelly. For­merly the senior polit­i­cal adviser to four suc­ces­sive Sec­re­tary Gen­er­als of NATO, he is direc­tor of the Insti­tute for State­craft & Gov­er­nance and the Senior Fel­low at the Defence Acad­emy. He worked for 20 years at the Royal Mil­i­tary Acad­emy, Sand­hurst, ini­tially as an instruc­tor in Russ­ian and Soviet stud­ies, and from 1973 as a mem­ber of the Soviet Stud­ies Research Cen­tre, which body he headed from 1979 until 1989.

The third trustee is Lord Hyl­ton, described on the web­site as hav­ing a ‘dis­tin­guished par­lia­men­tary career on mat­ters relat­ing to con­flict and civil rights’. Lord Hyl­ton is also a mem­ber of the Arab lobby, hav­ing been a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for the Advance­ment of Arab British Under­stand­ing since 1993.

This is how For­ward Think­ing describes its Mid­dle East initiative:

The objec­tive of the Ini­tia­tive is to focus on bring­ing lead­ers who have hith­erto been excluded from the ‘dia­logue com­mu­nity’ into a process of inter­nal exam­i­na­tion of con­tentious issues out­stand­ing between the sides, and to pro­vide them with the tools and knowl­edge to engage in a con­struc­tive bilat­eral process… Along­side its many achieve­ments, a main short­com­ing of the Oslo agree­ments was a stead­fast fail­ure to recog­nise the neces­sity of includ­ing reli­gious and ide­o­log­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives on both sides in the peace process… For­ward Thinking’s Mid­dle East Ini­tia­tive is based on our belief that as long as the voices of non-convinced con­stituen­cies are not included in the dia­logue process between the sides, no long-term and sus­tain­able solu­tion can be reached. The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, in which par­ties pre­vi­ously excluded from dia­logue processes – and specif­i­cally reli­giously moti­vated polit­i­cal lead­ers – are gain­ing power, rep­re­sents a unique oppor­tu­nity to engage with them and bring them into con­struc­tive dia­logue channels.

‘Reli­gious and ide­o­log­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives on both sides’ who have been excluded? But Israel’s gov­ern­ment is a coali­tion includ­ing the reli­gious par­ties. They have not been excluded from any­thing. The only excluded ‘reli­gious and ide­o­log­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives’ For­ward Think­ing are try­ing to include would appear to be… Hamas.

So to dis­cuss Hamas, the BBC put on in quick suc­ces­sion a) a Hamas sym­pa­thiser b) a for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cer pro­mot­ing the view of the For­eign Office and intel­li­gence world that Israel and the west must talk to Hamas; and c) the chair­man of a char­ity which pro­motes talk­ing to Hamas and whose direc­tor and fel­low trustee are asso­ci­ated with the mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence complex.

Now scroll for­ward to the BBC Radio Four Sun­day Pro­gramme yes­ter­day morn­ing. This fea­tured an inter­view with Bev­er­ley Mil­ton Edwards, described merely as a pro­fes­sor of Islamic stud­ies at Queen’s Uni­ver­sity, Belfast. Prof Mil­ton Edwards described Hamas in glow­ing terms as a ‘Mus­lim national move­ment’ which was try­ing to bring law and order in Gaza by crack­ing down on anti­so­cial and unIs­lamic men­aces like drug or alco­hol abuse, and which pro­moted the rights of Mus­lim women, includ­ing talk­ing about the dan­gers posed to them by the ‘Israeli occu­pa­tion’ (which is of course fin­ished in Gaza, but let that pass). The pro­gramme did not chal­lenge this account, nor did it have on any­one to point out that Hamas is not only com­mit­ted to the destruc­tion of Israel but imposes such tyranny upon the hap­less pop­u­la­tion under its con­trol that Pales­tini­ans are flee­ing into Israel to escape it.

What the pro­gramme also failed to tell us was that Prof Mil­ton Edwards was a co-founder and (for­mer) direc­tor of Con­flicts Forum — the organ­i­sa­tion set up by none other than the ubiq­ui­tous Alas­tair Crooke, and which boasts on its board of advis­ers none other than the equally ubiq­ui­tous Azzam Tamimi (whose most mem­o­rable pub­lic apercu was that he would con­sider becom­ing a ‘sui­cide bomber’). Its web­site reveals that it stands for rather more than merely ‘engag­ing’ with Islamists such as Hamas. It actu­ally pro­motes them as fine and upstand­ing people:

The over­whelm­ing major­ity of Islamists are striv­ing to cre­ate just soci­eties and bring about polit­i­cal reform in a region entrenched with inequity, that has long suf­fered t
he over­bear­ing influ­ence of for­eign pow­ers… Con­flicts Forum’s aim is to engage and lis­ten to Islamists, while chal­leng­ing West­ern mis­con­cep­tions and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the region’s lead­ing agents of change.

The Islam scholar Daniel Pipes has this dev­as­tat­ing account of Crooke’s atti­tudes and the activ­i­ties of Con­flicts Forum on his web­site:

Con­flicts Forum has sev­eral advan­tages, start­ing with the fact that what it terms the ‘pre­vail­ing West­ern ortho­doxy’ is – as noted above – quite soft. The group’s founder and leader, Alas­tair Crooke, 55, was a rank­ing fig­ure in both British intel­li­gence and Euro­pean Union diplo­macy, some­one who hob­nobs with insid­ers, gives upbeat speeches at pre­mier venues (‘It is Essen­tial to Nego­ti­ate with Ter­ror­ists’ at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics,’ ‘Can Hamas Be A Polit­i­cal Part­ner?’ at the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions), and enjoys a fawn­ing press. But Crooke’s true iden­tity came out in a clan­des­tine meet­ing he held with the Hamas lead­er­ship in June 2002, at a time when he still rep­re­sented the Euro­pean Union. We have an account of the meet­ing pre­pared by Hamas (which Crooke claims is inac­cu­rate). It deserves read­ing in full for an insight into Crooke’s amoral, craven, appeas­ing, and dhimmi-like mentality.

•He recounts to Hamas hav­ing insisted to two high-ranking Euro­pean politi­cians that ‘the sta­tus of Europe in the eyes of the Pales­tini­ans has started to dete­ri­o­rate’ because Europe did not ade­quately sup­port the Pales­tini­ans.
•’The main prob­lem [in the Mid­dle East] is the Israeli occu­pa­tion,’ which is music to Hamas ears.
•‘As for ter­ror­ism, I hate that word,’ he tells lead­ers of a lead­ing ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion, going on to imply that he instead sees Hamas oper­a­tives as ‘free­dom fighters.’

This last fits Crooke’s rou­tine pub­lic dis­missal of ter­ror­ism as a threat. The West, he says, faces not ‘ter­ror­ism’ (his quote marks) but a dis­tinctly less nasty ‘sophis­ti­cated, asym­met­ri­cal, broad-based and irreg­u­lar insur­gency.’ And his Con­flicts Forum, dubbed by jour­nal­ist Patrick Seale ‘a club of dis­af­fected diplo­mats and intel­li­gence offi­cers,’ engages in a pleas­ant form of per­sonal diplo­macy that dimin­ishes the hor­ror of Islamist terrorism.

Thus, at a Con­flicts Forum meet­ing last month in Beirut with the lead­er­ship of four Islamist ter­ror­ist groups, includ­ing Hamas and Hizbul­lah, the mood and the food were too good to allow this incon­ve­nient sub­ject to intrude. Stephen Grey, a jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing the event, later reflected on it: ‘Invited to din­ner with the par­tic­i­pants in the Beirut talks, and shar­ing jokes with the Hamas men over tiger prawns, avo­cado, pasta and cherry toma­toes, I won­dered pri­vately how one would explain all this inti­macy to the mother of a child killed by a sui­cide bomber.’

I gather that Prof Mil­ton Edwards is no longer asso­ci­ated with Con­flicts Forum. The fact remains that she helped found it, that var­i­ous arti­cles she wrote with Alas­tair Crooke remain on its web­site, and that she believes there is a ‘com­mon plat­form’ between the west and Islamists bent on its destruc­tion. In 2005, this web­site noted:

An Al Jazeera news seg­ment Tues­day reported on reported on an ‘unprece­dented meet­ing’ in Beirut between lead­ers of the two ter­ror­ist groups and a new U.K.-based con­sult­ing firm, Con­flicts Forum. Par­tic­i­pants were said to include ‘Amer­i­can per­sons close to Amer­i­can decision-makers.’ The Forum’s co-founder and direc­tor, Bev­er­ley Milton-Edwards, speak­ing in Eng­lish, had this to say to Al Jazeera:

I think the impor­tance of this meet­ing, as the speaker from Hezbol­lah pointed out this after­noon, is that this isn’t actu­ally about enmity between the peo­ple from Islam and Mus­lims and those in the West. In fact, the idea here is to end this disconnection–for peo­ple to under­stand that there is a com­mon plat­form between the peo­ples of Islam and the West. So this is a unique oppor­tu­nity for opin­ion for­m­ers in North Amer­ica and Europe to hear that enmity is not on the table.

At the very least, the Sun­day Pro­gramme should have told its lis­ten­ers that Prof Mil­ton Edwards had a his­tory of pro­mot­ing the inter­ests of Islamist ter­ror­ists. The fact that it did not does not sug­gest a BBC con­spir­acy, any more than the dis­grace­ful pro­ces­sion of Hamas apol­o­gists being inter­viewed on TV with­out any kind of chal­lenge or health warn­ing sug­gests such a thing either. The much more likely expla­na­tion is scarcely less dis­turb­ing. It is that a group of peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing both Hamas and its west­ern apol­o­gists in the British mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence world have been push­ing them­selves for­ward to the BBC as informed and dis­pas­sion­ate com­men­ta­tors on events in Gaza — and the BBC edi­tors and pro­duc­ers have not seen ft to check them out because of a com­bi­na­tion of igno­rance, slop­pi­ness and — most lethal of all — the fact that they mainly agree with the appease­ment of geno­ci­dal ter­ror that these pro­pa­gan­dists are promoting.

Just to remind you: this is (in part) what the Hamas Char­ter says:

For our strug­gle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be fol­lowed by fur­ther steps and rein­forced by suc­ces­sive bat­tal­ions from the mul­ti­far­i­ous Arab and Islamic world, until the ene­mies are defeated and Allah’s vic­tory pre­vails. …The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Mus­lims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Mus­lim! there is a Jew hid­ing behind me, come on and kill him!

The ene­mies have been schem­ing for a long time, and they have con­sol­i­dated their schemes, in order to achieve what they have achieved. They took advan­tage of key ele­ments in unfold­ing events, and accu­mu­lated a huge and influ­en­tial mate­r­ial wealth which they put to the ser­vice of imple­ment­ing their dream. This wealth [per­mit­ted them to] take over con­trol of the world media such as news agen­cies, the press, pub­li­ca­tion houses, broad­cast­ing and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir rev­o­lu­tions in var­i­ous parts of the globe in order to ful­fill their inter­ests and pick the fruits. They stood behind the French and the Com­mu­nist Rev­o­lu­tions and behind most of the rev­o­lu­tions we hear about here and there.

They also used the money to estab­lish clan­des­tine orga­ni­za­tions which are spread­ing around the world, in order to destroy soci­eties and carry out Zion­ist inter­ests. Such orga­ni­za­tions are: the Freema­sons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destruc­tive spy­ing orga­ni­za­tions. They also used the money to take over con­trol of the Impe­ri­al­ist states and made them col­o­nize many coun­tries in order to exploit the wealth of those coun­tries and spread their cor­rup­tion therein. As regards local and world wars, it has come to pass and no one objects, that they stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate. They col­lected mate­r­ial gains and took con­trol of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Bal­four Dec­la­ra­tion and estab­lished the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that orga­ni­za­tion. They also stood behind World War II, where they col­lected immense ben­e­fits from trad­ing with war mate­ri­als and pre­pared for the estab­lish­ment of their state. They inspired the estab­lish­ment of the United Nations and the Secu­rity Coun­cil to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their inter­me­di­ary. There was no war that broke out any­where with­out their fin­ger­prints on it…

Their scheme has been laid out in the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [con­duct] i
s the best proof of what is said there… Within the cir­cle of the con­flict with world Zion­ism, the Hamas regards itself the spear­head and the avant-garde. It joins its efforts to all those who are active on the Pales­tin­ian scene, but more steps need to be taken by the Arab and Islamic peo­ples and Islamic asso­ci­a­tions through­out the Arab and Islamic world in order to make pos­si­ble the next round with the Jews, the mer­chants of war.

This is the demented and geno­ci­dal creed of the peo­ple with whom our military/intelligence estab­lish­ment is now telling us we must ‘engage’ and whose inter­ests it is ruth­lessly push­ing, cour­tesy of an intel­lec­tu­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally bank­rupt BBC. If the British Par­lia­ment still counts for any­thing at all, it should call time on this mon­strous appease­ment of evil.