Ed Miliband fulminates about a criminal in Downing St – he supported one living there for years.

183 Egyptian political prisoners sentenced to death: international silence. One Australian reporter given prison sentence: international outrage.

Nobody wants to see the Al Jazeera journalists freed more than I do, but the western hypocrisy over the conduct of the CIA and Israel backed military dictatorship, which toppled Egypt’s only democratically elected government, is absolutely stinking. In the same week the Al Jazeera journalists were jailed, the United States resumed military supplies to its Egyptian puppet regime.

The BBC has been compounding the stinking hypocrisy by constantly broadcasting reports implicitly arguing that the Australian journalist should be released while the Egyptian journalists kept in prison. They have repeatedly broadcast the assertion that there is a difference between Al Jazeera’s English and Arabic output. The latter, the BBC say, was indeed biased to the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt’s only democratically elected government) whereas the English language service, for which Peter Greste worked, was not.

The BBC thus seeks to square the circle of supporting the release of Peter Greste and at the same time taking the British government line of supporting the Egyptian dictatorship’s elimination of its political opponents.

The truth is that Peter Greste is only superficially the victim of an Egyptian dictator. At root he is the victim of a western foreign policy that believes the interests of Israel outweigh all other interests in the Middle East.