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Hamas may have been whitewashed, but it is no cleaner than before

A news item entitled 'US Terror Blacklist Whitewashes Hamas, Enables Funding' just arrived in my e-mail a few minutes ago. According to its authors, the US Treasury has removed all the Hamas members previously blacklisted as terrorists, with the exception of Musa Abu Marzouk, the deputy chairman of the Hamas political bureau, from the black list that banks almost everywhere are obliged to use in order to block known terrorists from exploiting the financial system to finance their operations.

In practical terms, the Treasury's black list of names is a total waste of time: as it is a public document, everyone named in it knows that his name is there, and should he want to open a bank account somewhere, he will find a suitable way round the regulations, either by using a false passport or by using a third party to act on his behalf. And apart from that, the details of many entries in the black list document are simply not very accurate or practical: as a senior compliance executive of one of the biggest European banks told me a few years ago, "the black lists are lousy" as a way of preventing terror finance and money laundering.

Nevertheless, this news is absolutely alarming, not so much because of the symbolism of removing the names of known Hamas leaders and terrorists from the black lists, but because doing so will now allow the European Union to continue sending money to the Hamas-run regime of thugs in Gaza without needing to pretend that it is only financing humanitarian efforts, while boycotting the 'military' side of the government there. There is a genuine problem of how to ensure that genuine humanitarian aid continues to flow without helping Hamas -- most of whose victims are actually Palestinians living in Gaza, rather than the hated Israelis -- but this discussion is for another occasion.

There is something deeply ironic about this change, because both the United States and the EU make a great deal of fuss about their efforts to prevent the financing of terrorist activity, both through financial regulation and the gathering and analysis of financial intelligence. But deciding that Hamas should no longer be called 'terrorist' no more changes that organisation's ideology and strategic aims than the decision of the Obama administration to call the 'Global War on Terrorism' by the new politically correct term of  'Overseas Contigency Operations' means anything more than a spineless refusal to call a spade a spade. Hamas will continue to be a terrorist organisation until it actually stops importing weaponry, both by sea and through the tunnels under Gaza's border with Egypt, actively prevents the firing of rockets and mortar bombs at Israeli civilian targets, and returns the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, who remains in captivity in complete contravention of international law.  

What is even more ironic is that last summer, the European Commission published a call for proposals in its security research and development programme for 'innovative tools' to fight organised crime, money laundering and terror finance. This call for proposals wasn't something done at random: the EU has genuine and completely justified fears of the continued growth of organised crime and terrorist gangs, which are increasingly working together to rob, destabilise and harm European society; and key EU institutions such as Europol are doing real work in this field. I should also mention, in the interests of full disclosure of interests, that I recently coordinated a proposal, based on a Europe-wide consortium, in response to this call. I can't even say, as some commentators have done, that the EU doesn't care about terrorist activity directed against Israel, which is an associated state and firm ally of the EU, or outside Euroland in general: the problem is that the EU has such a vast bureaucracy, with different departments aligned to different political interests, that it frequently ends up supporting different combinations of mutually opposing interests.

Perhaps most ironic of all, I very strongly suspect that one set of banks will be ignoring the US Treasury's policy reversal: the banks under the control of the Palestinian Autonomy, which justifiably sees itself as threatened by Hamas, and which -- perhaps to some readers' surprise -- actually takes the sanctions regime against Hamas (and its even more extremist partners in Gaza) seriously.