WayOfTheBern

Excerpt:

Here is a very strange thing. For years, western media outlets and politicians have been recklessly indifferent to the fact that Hamas is not a jihadist movement, like al-Qaeda or Islamic State, but a specifically Palestinian national resistance movement – if one underpinned by an Islamist ideology that distinguishes it from secular Palestinian national movements like Fatah.

But Hamas, unlike al-Qaeda and Islamic State, is not seeking to recreate a caliphate embracing all Muslims wherever they live, indifferent to national borders. It wants to create a Palestinian state in Palestine.

Hamas does not demand strict adherence to religious law, and it does not prioritise Islam over Palestinian national identity.

It is not, as Israel and its apologists in the West try to persuade us, part of some Islamic crusade, waging a global war against the values of a supposed Judeo-Christian “civilisation”.

Hamas does not oppress Christians (a Christian community existed quite peacefully in Gaza until Israel started bombing their churches), or force women to wear the veil.

I raise this matter not to praise Hamas (see the legal disclaimer below) but to highlight the current, outrageous hypocrisy of the entire western media corps.

We now have an al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria, rebranded as HTS. And western journalists, led as ever by the BBC, are falling over themselves to explain how the group has transformed itself overnight from head-chopping jihadism into a moderate, "diversity-friendly" Syrian national resistance movement.

The point is: the western media is quite capable of understanding the difference between jihadists and Islamic nationalists when they want to. But they only want to when the British and US national security states tell them to.

That is the behaviour of what we are told is a “free press”.