Eoghan Harris (Independent)

The political class and media class in Ireland and Europe take the side of fundamentalist Islamic groups like Hamas, who want to return to Sharia law, that is the law of the barbarian, against the democratically elected Government of Israel. This will have huge and most likely lethal strategic consequences, not only for the prospect of peace in the Middle East, but for how we in Europe define ourselves and our core values in the face of the challenge from Islam.

Against the background of the isolation of Israel by the European left, the propaganda campaign against Israel following the Gaza operation is one more polluted stream flowing into a large river of anti-Israel propaganda. These campaigns are provably different in depth and volume from campaigns conducted against states such as Darfur, Zimbabwe and North Korea. We are told we cannot call this obsessive interest with Israel, the single focus and monomania about Israel on the part of the Irish left, anti-Semitism. However, if a political passion is directed exclusively at the only Jewish state on earth, what are we to call it? If this peculiar passion is not to be called anti-Semitism, and so focused are the European and Irish left on Israel that it deserves a special name, what name shall we call this obsession with the Israeli state?

What are we to call the benign face that the European left turns towards Hamas? Senators should go to the library, find the Yale Law Journal and look up what Hamas's charter states. Article 13 states: "Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement" and "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad".

These are not just words and I do not take documents as definitive. Gangsterism rules Hamas and Hamas shows its gangsterism in its actions. After taking over Gaza it went on a rampage that killed more than 600 Palestinians, mostly supporters of Fatah. A few weeks ago, it determined to introduce Islamic punishments to the Strip, including amputations, stonings and crucifixions. It used its poor people as fodder for their fanatical ideology much as the Border provos used young men and suborned them into various factions of the IRA with the same cult of death and martyrdom.

As some of my fellow Senators and politicians from both Houses seem to imagine, Hamas is not some kind of benign Sinn Féin branch with a peace process in the background, it is a client of a larger radical, Islamic conspiracy, with Iran in the background and with large militant European minorities prepared to do the footwork within Europe.

How did it happen that the European liberal left turned its face away from the state of Israel under pressure and turned a benign face towards Hamas? The sad answer is that it is the result of what Julian Benda called "la trahison des clercs", the treason of the intellectuals. In recent years, the campaign was led mostly by academic leftists and their supporters in the mass media who managed to shift the entire focus of the debate using television images of the previous two wars. These images of dead children were available also during the Second World War. I am no more stony-hearted than anybody else, but the images of dead German children did not deflect the Soviets, Americans or British from their sustained campaign to reduce Germany's civilian population to its knees to end the barbarism of Nazism.

The television images in the past two wars — the Lebanon war and the recent incursion — have been used by the anti-Israeli left in Europe to move the debate away from the legitimate right of Israel to exist towards neutral ground where Hamas is seen as some kind of branch of Sinn Féin or a legitimate organisation. That is a profound shift in public discourse and not a good shift. It is the beginning of the kind of appeasement we saw in the 1930s. Goebbels and the Germans would not have got away with shifting blame from the Nazis by pointing to the so-called lack of proportionality in the conduct of the Second World War. In fact, the Germans suffered ten times as many casualties as the British — 600,000 Germans against 60,000 British civilians, some of whom were from Derry. Goebbels and the Germans would not have been able to persuade Americans to boycott Britain because of alleged war crimes committed in the bombing of Hamburg, Dresden or Berlin. However, that is precisely what has happened in the Israel-Hamas propaganda war.

War is being waged all right. However, it is being waged not just in Israel and the Middle East but also in Europe, including Ireland, not just by means of suicide bombing but also by gross propaganda. To stand up against this propaganda, as I am doing today, is not simply about defending the tiny, democratic, open, law-based society of Israel, it is also about standing up for the common values we cherish in Ireland and across the European Union. It is about standing up against the trahison des clercs, the tenured radicals in our universities with permanent and pensionable jobs who betrayed their high calling to the truth by allowing and applauding the pressure on a democratic state and the rise of a gangster faction in Gaza.

What is going on? What is the special animus against Israel? Why are so many academics so filled with bile and bigotry? The answer is that Israel is only the canary in the mine showing a deeper and more profound crisis in western values and western democracy, a crisis which sees the grandsons and granddaughters of those who put 6 million Jews to death return to the sins of their fathers.

How would one feel if one were a French, Italian or Venezuelan Jew? I ask the Senators, who live in the city of Leopold Bloom, to engage in an act of moral empathy, not just with the people of Palestine but with Jews across the world. How would a British Jew feel going to bed at night if he knew prominent Jews got death threats every day? The students at the University of Oxford want to make it a Jew-free zone. How would one feel as a Jew if one lived in a European city? A Swedish school has refused to accept Jewish students. In France, synagogues are attacked and bombed. How would one feel if one were a Jew in a Latin American country after the onslaught against the Venezuelan Jewish community by left-wing President Hugo Chavez? I cannot understand how Senators can be so insensitive to the isolation not only of Israel but also of Israeli Jews.

This isolation is not good. The left that surrendered to Hitler is doing another disservice by isolating Israel morally and politically. When one isolates Israel, the iron enters its soul. The Israelis have little to lose. For 2,000 years we persecuted them and tried to finish them off. They will die standing and would be right to do so rather than give in. We, as Members of a democratic Parliament, should be standing with that democracy and not with our gangster enemies.