Sir Jeremy Greenstock says Hamas is only about "resistance"

Says Hamas Charter is
just a "rhetorical statement"
We wish....

Half-listening the BBC world service radio, here in Hong Kong, when I thought I heard Tony Benn, the notorious leftie, come on to be interviewed.  Ears on, for you can always count on some delicious silliness from Tone, the lovely ol' "boiled rabbit of the Left" (Orwell, My Country Right or Left, 1946).  But it wasn't Tone; it was a sound-alike -- you know the "c"s and "t"s pronounced as "sh", as in "feroshus", or "descrucshun", which always strike me as being particularly ol-time English Public School -- a sound-alike then, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, ex UK Ambassador to the UN, Special Rep in Iraq and now businessman with oil interests in Iraq.
What caught my ear was his tossed-off line that we went into the Iraq war for "selfish" reasons.  "Selfish", I thought.  Huh?  You could have been for or agin the war.  But surely, even if against it, you wouldn't jump at the word "selfish".
That led me to Google him and came across the fascinating article of January 13th 2009, by Melanie Phillips when she was still with the Speccie, in which Sir Jeremy relieved himself of views right out of the leftist playbook that I'd just been reading about in the excellent "United in Hate".
I leave it to Mel, she says it best:

I was travelling yesterday, and so only caught up very late with the comments made on BBC Radio Four’sToday programme by the former UK ambassador to the UN and now head of the prestigious Ditchley Foundation,  Sir Jeremy Greenstock. Astoundingly, this ornament of the British Great and the Good made a propaganda pitch for Hamas.  The claims he made were so patently ludicrous it is hard to believe that any western person, let alone a former senior diplomat, could make them.

Read on....