The BBC reported a genuine scoop on the Today programme (0732) this morning. In the wake of last month's victory by Hamas in the local election, reporter James Reynolds went to see the new acting mayor -- only to bump into two medium-ranking British diplomats leaving a meeting with said Hamas apparatchik. Thus the BBC stumbled across Britain's dirty little secret -- that despite the fact that it has declared Hamas to be a proscribed terrorist organisation, it has quietly started to treat it as a legitimate political party and deal with its representatives.

It is Britain, along with France, that is apparently behind the decision by the Bush administration to abandon the Bush doctrine and talk to Hamas. Later on the programme (0810) Foreign Secretary Jack Straw produced a set of ludicrous justifications for the fact that British diplomats had now had two such meetings with Hamas mayors. Having first waxed eloquent about the lengths to which he personally had gone to proscribe Hamas until and unless it foreswore both its violence and its charter committed to the annihilation of Israel, Straw than said it was 'de rigueur' for diplomats to make contact with elected mayors -- but on both occasions, these diplomats had made clear to the Hamas men with whom they were demonstrably dealing that they would not deal with the Hamas organisation until it had foresworn its charter, violence etc.

In other words, these Hamas mayors are somehow not connected to the Hamas terror factory. This is clearly beyond risible. Hamas is a terrorist organisation. Even the EU has accepted that it is an indivisible terrorist entity, and that any pretence that its terrorist activities are somehow nothing to do with its infrastructure of social support for Palestinians is wholly spurious. After all, that infastructure sustains and nurtures the infrastructure of terror -- the indoctrination, the fund-raising, the mad Islamist sermons preaching holy war against the west, the recruitment of jihadi bombers, and so on. Hamas is a jihadi terror organisation, period. The decision by Britain and the US to treat with it is spineless and shameful and wholly counter-productive for the defence of the civilised world.

The report by James Reynolds made the ostensibly reasonable point that the Hamas election victories had created a 'dilemma'for the outside world. Nevertheless, he did nothing to challenge -- and even appeared to endorse -- the notion that the delivery of services such as sewage or electricity somehow divides these Hamas men from the Hamas men carrying out the carnage against Israelis. To repeat -- if people vote for men whose ideology is all about promoting jihad terror, then those people too have to be regarded as a terrorist entity. Not to do so is to accept the corrupted terms of discourse employed by the terrorists precisely to achieve what Britain and the US now seem set on allowing them to achieve -- the international legitimisation of terror through the most hypocritical of blind eyes.

For once, the Israelis managed to put up a competent, reasonable, articulate spokesman to make the very proper case that the core problem was that Palestinian society had not been democratised. As he said, given a choice between the corrupt and venal Palestinian authority and the Islamists, it was not surprising that Palestinian voters had plumped for the Islamists. What was needed was a proper democratic choice ofering them a party that stood for proper democratic institutions and the rule of law.

The BBC's ineffable prejudice finally burst through, however, when the Today presenter claimed that Sheikh Yassin, Hamas's 'spiritual leader' who, she said with her voice rising to an outraged crescendo, 'you assassinated', had said he would recognise Israel within the 1967 borders 'which is what Israel wants'. Oh dear. As the Israeli spokesman replied, the full transcript of Yassin's remarks showed that he had graciously said he would accept Israel's existence 'until 2007' and then even more graciously 'until 2017', after which it would be genocide as usual.

But hey, they've been elected now, so we can all ignore the genocide and concentrate on the sewage instead.