World View/Rory Miller: You just know it's happening, don't you? At the same time as EU leaders are publicly telling Hamas, the radical Islamist victors in the recent Palestinian elections, that it needs to recognise Israel's right to exist and hang up its suicide belts before the Union will deal with it, legions of civil servants, political advisers and security officials across the EU are desperately racking their brains to find a way around this ultimatum.
No doubt our own political class don't know what all the fuss is about and are probably thinking "sure, haven't we been dealing with Palestinian terrorist groups as legitimate political partners for almost three decades".
Alas they have, out of a deeply misguided belief that Palestinian terror, even against civilian targets, is part of the legitimate struggle for self-determination, when in truth much of this violence - by the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently by Hamas and Islamic Jihad - has not been about gaining a Palestinian state, but about destroying a Jewish one.
This explains why in February 1980, Ireland became the first EEC member to call publicly for the inclusion of the PLO in the political process at a time when Arafat's group not only refused to recognise Israel's right to exist (that would come grudgingly in 1988), but was engaged in a relentless campaign of terror against Israeli and Jewish targets across the globe.
More astonishing, successive governments have even been prepared to overlook Palestinian terrorism that directly challenged Irish interests. From 1969, when the matter was first raised in the Dáil, it has been widely assumed that the PLO was co-operating, even training, various IRA factions. During the 1980s the PLO was responsible for numerous attacks on Irish troops serving in Lebanon with the UN.
As such, it is unlikely that the straightforward argument that those who seek to embrace Hamas before it renounces violence only provide the group with little incentive to give up their military struggle, will have much support. This, despite the fact that we are engaged in our own peace process that demanded a cessation of all violence and a decommissioning of all weapons.
So here's another argument.
Contrary to what most Irish people assume, Hamas, which is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, does not view the battle for Palestine as a struggle for national self-determination by an indigenous population against a foreign occupier.
Rather, it sees Palestine as but one battle in a worldwide holy war to prevent the fall of a part of the House of Islam to infidels.
Hamas's constitution - perhaps the most outlandish and vile political manifesto currently in existence - not only promises to "obliterate" Israel but incites anti-Semitic murder, arguing that "the Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'"
There's more. According to its constitution, Hamas was established not merely to wipe out Jews but to pursue the far loftier goals of spreading Allah's holy message: "The Islamic Resistance Movement will spare no effort to implement the truth and abolish evil, in speech and in fact, both here and in any other location where it can reach out and exert influence."
For those who want to dismiss the constitution, written in 1988, as an out-of-date document that does not do justice to a more moderate Hamas, well here's the view of Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 3rd: "Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination, but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Our nation is moving forwards . . . When it reaches the leadership of the world . . . you will regret it."
Not something I would want to hear if I was a journalist, woman, gay, practising Christian or even Guinness drinker in any place Hamas got influence.
All this just doesn't have the same appeal as the freedom fighter slogans and anti-colonial language of Arafat and the PLO that has made generations of Irish weak at the knees - but this is what Hamas is about and we dare not forget it.
Dr Rory Miller teaches on the Middle East at the University of London and is the author of Ireland and the Palestine Question, 1948-2004