Alastair Crooke is the former MI6 officer who repeatedly calls for Hamas and Hezbollah to be brought in from the cold. Last Thursday, he was at it again in the Guardian where he boasted that he had been taking part in meetings to bring Americans and Europeans together to promote engagement with Hezbollah and Hamas. Calls for such groups to renounce violence as a precondition of their being treated as interlocutors for peace were, he scolded, ‘a misunderstanding of the psychology of groups engaged in conflict’ because, apparently,

‘conflict and the experience of trauma and humiliation generate intense feelings that can be overwhelming… During the last Palestinian intifada it was possible to see an entire community presenting the symptoms of trauma: an inability to sleep, deep depression, lack of motivation and loss of appetite. Psychologists tell us that humiliation and trauma typically generate feelings of violence that endure for years even among those living in stable societies. Most of us have little experience of armed conflict, and so we do not appreciate how hard it is to make transitions under the bitter weight of anger and irreparable personal loss.’

Decent people with un-warped thinking processes might think that the those who have suffered the real trauma and might find it hard to bear ‘the bitter weight of anger and irreparable personal loss' are in fact the Israeli victims of Palestinian terror, who unfortunately have had extensive ‘experience of armed conflict’ by being vapourised by the human bombs manufactured by the death cult that Crooke is so anxious to sanitise and sympathise with.

But Crooke has a great deal of form in such appeasement of genocidal terror. Until he was suddenly — and inexplicably — recalled to London, he was apparently being used by the British government to open a dialogue with Hamas. As this article in the Jerusalem Post bitterly observed last month:

‘In order to reduce Arab-Muslim criticism of Britain's campaign against terrorism and terrorist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Blair's government has always tried to pay in Israeli coin. Blair's personal envoy, a former MI6 officer, Alistair Crooke, visited the heads of Hamas in Gaza and Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. He believed that Israel must accept Hamas as a partner for negotiations. On Blair's behalf, Crooke wandered around the corridors of the GSS, the Ministry of Defense and the IDF to improve the image of this terrorist organization. He even endeavored to have Israeli journalists help brainwash Israeli citizens. More than any other, the Blair government tried to appease Hamas, at Israel's expense. Israel succeeded in killing, if somewhat belatedly, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the men behind Hamas terror, evoking criticism from Crooke.’

As another article observes, Crooke’s name seems to crop up whenever Britain or the EU are trying to confer respectability on the jihad. So not only did he help organise this meeting in Beirut in March:

‘The rare meeting took place on Monday and Tuesday and included leaders of Hamas and American notables close to decision-making circles. The report said a former officer in the British intelligence forces arranged the meeting, attended by Hamas leaders as well as representatives from the Lebanese Hizbullah terrorist organization, and Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and in Pakistan’

but three years earlier, the Jerusalem Post reported:

'Given Egypt's leading role as an inciter of hatred against Israel and the Jewish people, it was also not surprising that Cairo hosted this week's Palestinian terror conference between Fatah and Hamas. ... Slightly more surprising is that the European Union sponsored the conference. Alistair Crook, EU Middle East envoy Miguel Moratinos's security adviser, was in Cairo. According to Javier Sancho, Moratinos's spokesman, the EU's role was "to facilitate" the dialogue as "part of its ongoing efforts to stop terrorism.'

So where is Crooke coming from — apart from a past (and possibly, a present) in the half-world of espionage? According to the Guardian, Crooke is

‘a director of Conflicts Forum, a UK and US-based non-profit organisation working for dialogue with Islamists’.

This is what the US scholar Daniel Pipes has to say about Conflicts Forum, which was founded last year:

‘It has the immodest goal of not just changing policy toward radical Islamic terrorist groups, but changing how Westerners see radical Islam itself. Conflicts Forum wants to challenge "the prevailing western orthodoxy that perceives Islamism as an ideology that is hostile to the agenda for global democracy and good governance."

‘Conflicts Forum has several advantages, starting with the fact that what it terms the "prevailing Western orthodoxy" is – as noted above – quite soft. The group's founder and leader, Alastair Crooke, 55, was a ranking figure in both British intelligence and European Union diplomacy, someone who hobnobs with insiders, gives upbeat speeches at premier venues ("It is Essential to Negotiate with Terrorists" at the London School of Economics," "Can Hamas Be A Political Partner?" at the Council on Foreign Relations), and enjoys a fawning press.

‘But Crooke's true identity came out in a clandestine meeting he held with the Hamas leadership in June 2002, at a time when he still represented the European Union. We have an account of the meeting prepared by Hamas (which Crooke claims is inaccurate). It deserves reading in full for an insight into Crooke's amoral, craven, appeasing, and dhimmi-like, mentality.

• He recounts to Hamas having insisted to two high-ranking European politicians that "the status of Europe in the eyes of the Palestinians has started to deteriorate" because Europe did not adequately support the Palestinians.
• "The main problem [in the Middle East] is the Israeli occupation," which is music to Hamas ears.
• "As for terrorism, I hate that word," he tells leaders of a leading terrorist organization, going on to imply that he instead sees Hamas operatives as "freedom fighters."

‘This last fits Crooke's routine public dismissal of terrorism as a threat. The West, he says, faces not "terrorism" (his quote marks) but a distinctly less nasty "sophisticated, asymmetrical, broad-based and irregular insurgency." And his Conflicts Forum, dubbed by journalist Patrick Seale "a club of disaffected diplomats and intelligence officers," engages in a pleasant form of personal diplomacy that diminishes the horror of Islamist terrorism.

‘Thus, at a Conflicts Forum meeting last month in Beirut with the leadership of four Islamist terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hizbullah, the mood and the food were too good to allow this inconvenient subject to intrude. Stephen Grey, a journalist covering the event, later reflected on it: "Invited to dinner with the participants in the Beirut talks, and sharing jokes with the Hamas men over tiger prawns, avocado, pasta and cherry tomatoes, I wondered privately how one would explain all this intimacy to the mother of a child killed by a suicide bomber."

‘Conflicts Forum offers a seductive alternative to the hard business of waging and winning a war. Unfortunately, its wrong-headed, defeatist, and doomed approach amounts to preemptively losing the war. Its counsel deserves a round rejection.’

And here is part of the official response to this by CF’s director Mark Perry, which Pipes published on his website:

‘The simple truth is that while the U.S. lists Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization, the group has never -- not once -- attacked or killed any Americans. Has the organization attacked and killed Israelis? Yes, unfortunately it has. And many of their operations have been reprehensible, killing and maiming innocent people. But as the directors of our organization, who have spent years working on the ground in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel will confirm, there is certainly enough blood to go around, including that of innocent Palestinians needlessly caught in the crossfire of a complex conflict.’

So although Perry presents CF’s aims in talking to Hamas as a pragmatic move towards attaining peace, the dirty truth is – as the paragraph above reveals -- that it draws a moral equivalence between the murdered and maimed of Israel, attacked in pursuit of Hamas’s genocidal objective to kill the Jews, and those ‘innocent’ Palestinians who are killed inadvertently by Israel in its attempt at self-defence as it pursues those who deliberately murder its people. And no mention at all of the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians killed by Israel are not innocent at all, but are actual and would-be mass murderers of Jews.

The disturbing thing is that Crooke’s approach appears to be making inroads even in the US where, despite the 'Bush doctrine', American representatives took part in Crooke’s Beirut meeting and are flirting with recognising Hamas. The Brits, of course, seem gung-ho for such a relationship -- but then, what’s new? Perfidy over Israel and the betrayal of the Jewish innocents is part of the British DNA.

And one only has to look at the current rush by HMG to embrace the self-styled ex-terrorists of the IRA (who we now know did not, after all, renounce the IRA as a condition of taking part in the Good Friday agreement and thus have demonstrated conclusively not only that anything they say cannot be believed but also that HMG is an all-too willing terrorists’ patsy) and to dismantle the last vestiges of the defence of democracy against terror in Northern Ireland on the assumption that the terrorists’ word is their bond, to see how -- for the Brits -- any ‘peace process’ is an appeasement process, and their willingness to betray the victims of terror and the defence of democracy and human life to the perpetrators of mass slaughter is truly bottomless.

And then they wonder why there are suicide bombs in London. Cynical, amoral – and stupid.

Posted by melanie at August 1, 2005