Seumas Milne, writing in the liberal and antiracist newspaper The Guardian, regrets the fact that no mainstream politician (except, he says, for the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes) was prepared, in the end, to participate in IslamExpo.

Milne offers a reason: it was because of the "...real or imagined links of some of the organisers with Hamas...."

Milne is a journalist, so you'd think he'd be able to find out whether the links were real or imagined, wouldn't you? In fact, as he more or less admits by using this formulation, they were real.

Ed Hussain, he says, compared this rally, organized by Hamas supporters in the UK, to a British National Party rally. Milne belittles this analogy by labelling Hussain an "...increasingly extreme anti-Islamist". Perhaps he's also an extreme opponent of the BNP but Milne doesn't comment.

Milne goes on to say that the pretext given for withdrawal by some of the other "anti-Islamist crusaders" was the fact that one of the Hamas supporters organizing the event was suing the Harry's Place website. Having already made use of the triger words 'extremist' and 'crusaders' Milne goes on desperately to describe Harry's Place as 'neocon'. More seriously he seems to offer support to the Hamas supporter Mohammad Sawalha in his suit against the "neocons" at Harry's Place.

Milne's punchline comes in his final paragraph where he claims that organisers of IslamExpo, some of whom he has already admitted have links to Hamas, are not only committed to pluralism but have also "shown themselves to be committed to pluralism".

For more from Milne, and his belief that the Jew-haters of Hamas are "committed to pluralism" click here.

For more on the pluralism of Hamas click here.

For Hamas' attitude to trade union rights, click here.

For how Hamas deals with political opponents in a 'pluralist' way, click here.