From the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy (IMED):

“How come Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, is under threat of being arrested in the UK while Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, roams London free of concern?” asks Alan Dershowitz.

We note that hypocrisy has always existed and will continue to do so. After all, such tenacious efforts are made by the public here to impede the vile sermons from naively depraved groups such as the BNP. But some of the same people who would help stop such people appearing on a public platform are regularly involved with genocidal persons who advocate the same destruction of liberty that the BNP do.

An example is Hezbollah’s Ibrahim Mousawi, whom Stop the War coalition invited to Britain a few years back. This is a man who, when working for Hezbollah’s TV station Al-Manar, serialised the infamous forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and broadcast such odious anti-semitism that the television station was banned in most Western countries. Stop the War did not invite an Israeli representative because, according to their spokesperson, “[Israel is] not interested in peace.”

Even if you discount the huge number of Israeli pro-Palestinian groups, Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem and the frequent rallies in support of peace held across Israel that are attended by people of all religious and political viewpoints; it would appear that the insinuation is that Israeli Politicians are not interested in peace.

And so how bizarre, how ironic, how cruel and how unjust! – that as Dershowitz says: Mashaal may visit Britain without worry, despite his personal involvement with countless murders, including the slaughter of Holocaust survivors, while Barak faces the prospect of arrest.

This is the same Barak that in 2001 at Tabla, offered the Palestinians 97% of the West Bank with border adjustments for the remaining 3%, the entire of the Gaza Strip and a shared capital of Jerusalem – the very set of demands that the Palestinians had laid out.

Needless to say, Arafat refused the deal. And so one must ask, where is the justice for Israel, a country that does proffer peace and compromise, the country that has made steps toward an end to violence? It simply does not make sense that these Israeli leaders should face arrest while nihilistic murderers of Hamas might walk freely around the streets of London – it is not rational, it is not moral and it does not portend the advent of peace.

It is the same politically charged emotion that has allowed so many depraved men to perpetuate their depravities, while the innocent suffer on all sides; be they politicians or public – the emotional idealism of so many in the West has ensured – we concede mostly unintentionally – that the misery of all is maintained.