On June 25, Anshel Pfeffer presciently and shrewdly wrote this in the Jerusalem Post about the deposed Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas:

Haniyeh’s hope is that by delivering Johnston safely, he will achieve a degree of legitimacy from the Western governments currently supporting Abu Mazen’s new government in Ramallah and also secure the friendship of one of the world’s major media organizations. Last week, Hamas was poised to attack the Dughmush compound but backed off when it realized that a dead Johnston would only make things much worse. But Haniyeh joining the ‘Free Alan’ campaign has already paid off for Hamas in the form o f unofficial contacts with the British government… Hamas is competing with Fatah for the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people, and trying to win approval from its Iranian paymasters, while simultaneously appealing for recognition from the ‘moderate’ Arab states. Without appearing to give in, it is trying to engage Israel and stop the Western nations from boosting Abu Mazen at its expense.

Today, Haniyeh must be rejoicing. Hamas has pulled off a propaganda coup which has worked out exactly as it intended, thanks in large measure to the willingness of the BBC to be thus used. Of course, the release of the BBC’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston from his four-month captivity at the hands of the Army of Islam is a great relief. But it comes with a terrible price tag — the strengthening of an organisation committed to the extermination of Israel, the mass murder of Jews and the overthrow and Islamisation of the free world. Only a few weeks ago, Hamas were the people binding the hands and feet of fellow Palestinians and hurling them off the tops of tall buildings. But today, by managing to extricate Johnston from the Army of Islam, they are posing as saviours of kidnap victims, honest brokers against the men of violence — people with whom the world may now think it can therefore do business. Thus Haniyeh exulted today that Johnston’s release

‘confirms [Hamas] is serious in imposing security and stability and maintaining law and order in this very dear part of our homeland’.

And Johnston has duly warmly praised Hamas for getting him out. On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0810) there was — all too predictably — virtually no questioning of this repositioning of Hamas as the good guys. There were a few references here and there to the propaganda game Hamas was playing, and a few delicately phrased references to the, ahem, conditions that would still have to be met before they could be admitted to the councils of the civilised world; but their record of murder and savagery was not mentioned, nor was their savagery of the past few weeks, nor was their agenda of extermination and Islamisation. And most notable of all in these particular circumstances, no mention whatsoever of the fact that Hamas, the rescuers of the kidnapped Alan Johnston, are themselves the kidnappers of Gilad Shalit, the 19 year-old Israeli soldier who was kidnapped from Israel a year ago and who, in a recent video, has said his health is deteriorating. The BBC has not even seen fit to mention him. Hamas says it can deliver law and order in Gaza. Oh yes? So when will these law-and-order enforcers release Gilad Shalit, whom they have unlawfully kidnapped and imprisoned? When will they stop trying to kill innocent Israelis through bombarding southern Israel with rockets?

The Hamas strategy is shrewd and clever, because it has correctly assessed that the decadent west will only too eagerly embrace its lies. It knows that the BBC is only too willing to be its friend. Already, TV and radio shows are ringing round to find studio guests who will ‘argue against the view that we should now recognise Hamas’. Appeasement is now well and truly out of the closet. Those who believe that fascism should be fought and defeated are now on the back foot.

And this Hamas coup is in turn but one part of a broader strategy. Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. All over the world, the Brotherhood is behind the pincer movement of jihad through terrorism and jihad through cultural capture. And manipulation is the name of the game it plays. It creates terrorist or insurrectionary pressure; it then poses as the ‘honest broker’ peacemaker; it thus turns its victims into its supplicants and can then turn the ratchet still further. It played this game in France, when the French government implored the Brotherhood imams to restore order in the wake of the Muslim riots in the banlieues (riots that it said were ‘nothing to do with Islam’). It has played it over Alan Johnston. And it is playing it in Britain and the US, where its proxies have been pushing hard for ‘engagement’ with the Brotherhood as an antidote to al Qaeda — and where, with the British and American political elite now in such moral, intellectual and political disarray, it is now succeeding.

We are losing.