The West is extremely selective about which enemies of freedom it opposes and which it supports, to the extent that it is a necessary conclusion that liberty is not a real factor in western foreign polcy. As part of the western world, it is the hypocrisy of my own wider community that most troubles me.

But equally, the enemies of freedom may themselves be pro or anti-western, or vacillate for personal advantage. Karimov and Gadaffi are among the latter and arguably Putin. Ahmadinejad is the mirror of Obama in the hypocrisy of his calls for freedom. Assad is proving as adept as his father in killing those striving to be free. But I want to focus in particular on Hamas who are using open violence against the young educated population of Gaza and against journalists, and whose reign of terror in Gaza is shamefully ignored by much of the British left.

Those who have known Palestinians and followed their cause for as many decades as I, understand that it took colossal forces to warp Palestine’s impressive civil society until it could produce an ugly excrescence like Hamas. Those forces were produced by the vast pressure of the Israeli crushing of the population of Gaza in a long, slow but relentless and very deliberate genocide. But understanding how it happened does not make Hamas any more acceptable. If the young people of Palestine are ever to know freedom, they have to throw off not only the vicious Israeli deathlock, but also the violent, narrow, religious nutters of Hamas and the perjured, fat, corrupt sell-outs of Fatah.

The only good news is that a significant proportion of young Palestinians do seem to know that.