Daniel Pipes questions the wisdom of journalists hob-nobbing with terrorists at a recent Beirut gathering–ostensibly for “dialogue.”
And his Conflicts Forum, dubbed by journalist Patrick Seale “a club of disaffected diplomats and intelligence officers,” engages in a pleasant form of personal diplomacy that diminishes the horror of Islamist terrorism.
Thus, at a Conflicts Forum meeting last month in Beirut with the leadership of four Islamist terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hizbullah, the mood and the food were too good to allow this inconvenient subject to intrude.
Stephen Grey, a journalist covering the event, later reflected on it: “Invited to dinner with the participants in the Beirut talks, and sharing jokes with the Hamas men over tiger prawns, avocado, pasta and cherry tomatoes, I wondered privately how one would explain all this intimacy to the mother of a child killed by a suicide bomber.”
We wonder too.
