ninme

The Times – Hamas won the propaganda war this week<br/> Our columnist says freeing Alan Johnston was no good deed, by Gerard Baker

Try as they may the nutters will never really win what Gordon Brown calls the battle for hearts and minds. True, they’ll get a good hearing from the assorted crowd of self-loathing media panjandrums and Labour MPs who will evenhandedly say: “It’s quite wrong to blow up women in London nightclubs, but we shouldn’t forget about the suffering of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.” True, they’ll also get treated with kid gloves by the politically correct lobby, who will insist that, however else we describe them, we must never call them Muslims, since they’re not the face of that peaceable religion.

But fortunately most British people aren’t sophisticated enough to buy this sort of casuistry. They think they know a homicidal maniac when they see one. The philosophy they adhere to was best captured by the magnificent John Smeaton, the BAA baggage handler turned have-a-go hero in Scotland, who, when asked by a TV interviewer what message he had for the terrorists, said: “This is Glasgow – we’ll just set about you.”

With Hamas, however, whose worldview and geopolitical ambitions are exactly the same as those fireball physicians, it’s all very different. Thanks to their efforts in the past few months, they are the stabilisers, the people who have brought peace to Gaza. Their transformation into popular heroes was completed this week when they pulled off the release of a kidnapped BBC man. The whole world now loves them.

Doop doop, don’t know why I bother…

This is a nice distinction we make in the West that means nothing to the followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a member and to which al-Qaeda is affiliated. They see removing America, Israel and Britain from the Middle East as the necessary first step towards global Islamic theocracy. But let’s indulge it, at least for a while and ask, do they have a point?

On Iraq, I’ve no doubt that the American excesses of Abu Ghraib and the occasional lethal clumsiness of US forces have fuelled resentment. But that is largely because it is these peripheral facts on which we in the West focus so much of our attention, and they distract us from the central narrative.

Which is this: the Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with the aim of stopping one bunch of Muslims from killing another. They are still there in both countries today performing precisely this mission.

Now it may be that history will judge this an epically stupid thing to have done; that, in the end, the great claims some of us made that the Middle East could be dragged out of its medievalist obscurantism were pie in the sky. But we really have to stop indulging the Islamists’ propaganda that today’s carnage in Iraq is the result of American aggression. It isn’t – it is the result of Islamist aggression.

Sigh.