Denis Maceoin makes some powerful points in this column for the
Jerusalem Post: Marching for Hamas.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...e%2FS howFull

In a bizarre reversal of all their commitment to human rights and the
struggle of men and women for independence and self-determination, the
European Left has chosen again and again to side with the bullies and to
condemn a small nation struggling to survive in a hostile neighborhood.
It is all self-contradictory: The Left supports gay rights, yet attacks
the only country in the Middle East where gay rights are enshrined in
law. Hamas makes death the punishment for being gay, but “we are all
Hamas now.” Iran hangs gays, but it is praised as an agent of
anti-imperialism, and allowed to get on with its job of stoning women
and executing dissidents and members of religious minorities. If UK
Premier Gordon Brown swore to wipe France from the face of the earth, he
would become a pariah among nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to do
that to Israel and is invited to speak to the UN General Assembly.

Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab
alike, but it is dubbed “an apartheid state”; Hamas, ever the bully,
kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we
march on behalf of Hamas. The Left prefers the bully because the bully
represents a finger in the face of the establishment? Almost no one on
the Left has any understanding of militant Islam. Their politics is a
politics of gesture, where wearing a keffiyeh is cool but understanding
its symbolism is too much effort even for intellectuals.