Cast your mind back to January of this year. Remember all those slogans and banners saying: “We are all Hamas now”? Remember all those BBC reports whose subtext was always that Operation Cast Lead could only succeed in stirring up the hornets’ nest? It’s the familiar narrative, of course: radicalisation is the product of oppression and occupation; the siege can only produce a siege mentality; Hamas can only benefit from Israel’s attempts to root them out. Talks not bombs are the solution.

Well, it doesn’t seem to have quite panned out that way. Hamas announced yesterday that it would forbid the people of Gaza from participating in elections announced for January in the Palestinian territories by Mahmoud Abbas. It seems that popular support for the Islamist terror group has collapsed since Cast Lead to the extent that Hamas would face a rout if elections were held any time soon. That doesn’t quite fit with the narrative, does it?

In reality, opinion polls (barely reported in the western media of course) have been showing for some time that ordinary Palestinians in the Gaza strip are somewhat less forgiving of Hamas than many of its western apologists.

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Amnesty International has today released yet another blatantly one-sided attack on Israel, this time alleging that the Jewish state is “denying water to Palestinians”. Last week, I alerted readers to the fact that the UK branch of Amnesty plans to roadshow its latest report at a meeting on October 28 featuring the militantly anti-Zionist Ben White as its guest speaker. Amnesty is promoting White’s recently published book, “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide” on its website.

Since Amnesty is now implicitly endorsing the notion of Israel as an apartheid state, it should come as no surprise that the report adopts the Palestinian narrative of the wider conflict in its entirety.

Amnesty’s allegations centre on the amount of water available to Palestinians on the West Bank as compared to settlers. According to the Jerusalem Post, Amnesty did not even take the trouble to consult the Israeli Water Authority, something which in itself gives a clear impression of the agenda that underlies the latest report.

But impressions and suppositions are no longer necessary with Amnesty International, as the wording of the statement flagging up the report makes clear:

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In a landmark moment in modern British political history, the anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic British National Party (BNP) was last night given a platform on the BBC’s flagship political debating programme Question Time. The immensely controversial decision to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto the programme was based on recent electoral successes in which the BNP secured the election of two of its candidates to the European Parliament.

On balance, I believe that the BBC made the right decision: racists, anti-Semites and fascists are far better exposed for what they are so that decent people know precisely why they must be defeated.

As it turned out, Griffin was in any case subjected to a drubbing by members of the audience, fellow panelists and a moderator who rarely dropped the ball in exposing him to ridicule and shame. Questioned about his Holocaust denial Griffin was reduced to barely coherent mumblings. “I can’t tell you the extent I changed my mind,” he said in an apparent attempt to hide his real views behind fake concerns that he could face prosecution under European law because countries such as Germany make Holocaust denial a crime. Griffin emerged looking like a fool. A job well done by the BBC.

But if only the BBC’s opposition to fascism and Holocaust denial were applied more widely. For when it comes to the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, it is all to often prepared to engage in a whitewash.

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Readers outside the UK will be well aware of the Guardian newspaper and its well earned reputation as the prime repository of anti-Israeli bigotry in western Europe. Some, however, may not yet be aware of a new monitoring group which analyses and dissects anti-Zionist bigotry on the paper’s flagship, online comment service, Comment is Free (Cif).

The group is called Cif Watch (see link below) and it provides a methodical, indeed forensic, breakdown of articles and the comment threads which follow them. I draw attention to Cif Watch in this entry in part because such a worthwhile endeavour deserves our support, but also because its latest posting provides a particularly revealing insight into the kind of people who are attracted to the anti-Israeli agenda.

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I’m not going to waste everyone’s time with a detailed breakdown of Friday’s farce at the United Nations in which the laughably named “Human Rights Council” passed a resolution against Israel and affirmed the notoriously skewed and distorted Goldstone Report on Gaza. Israel bashing is what it is. We’ve seen it all before and we’ll see it again.

What interests me today is less the “what”? and the “why”? than the “who”? For we know that sickness and depravity over Israel is par for the course these days at the United Nations. What matters more is who participates in it, who turns a blind eye and who has the courage to stand up and confront it.

So let’s see how countries supporting the resolution, opposing it, abstaining from it or not voting stand up on a group by group basis when compared to their freedom rankings by Freedom House. The countries which voted in favour of the resolution were as follows.

Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia.

The countries which voted against are as follows:

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