One of my favourites lies in the past. The old USSR was one of the most racially bigoted societies in existence. Ask anyone from the Caucasus who lived and worked in Moscow, let alone any Black African students who attended the Lumumba University, in Soviet Days. Yet it used (quite rightly) to denounce racial bigotry in the Southern States of the USA.

You still meet veteran American Communists who boast (truthfully) that they were among the early campaigners for civil rights in the South. Good for them. Alas, they were also defending or ignoring Stalin's racialist mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans (and indeed his anti-Jewish frenzy after World War Two). So I tend to dismiss their concerns as selective, self-serving, opportunist and without moral force.

Another of my favourite Leftist inconsistencies is the tangle they get themselves in over Islam and Israel. In their universe Islam is good where it challenges the conservative Christian monoculture of Britain and the USA. Islam is bad when it denounces homosexuality and demands the veiling of women, and generally opposes the sexual revolution which is the main concern and aim of the modern left. Islam is good when it pursues its unrelenting war against Israel. It's bad when, in the mythical form of 'Al Qaeda' or the more tangible form of the Taliban, it 'hates our way of life' and opposes the education of women, etc etc.

Islam's attack on Israel (in the Islamic world) often takes rather unpleasant forms. Muslim clerics say things there that would get them drummed out of civilised society here. But Israel is the country everyone in Europe loves to hate - while making it clear that this loathing has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. Good heavens no. The very idea. How could you even think such a thing? Anti-Semite? Me? Etc etc. Well, no doubt these protestations are true, which is why I try to popularise the word 'Judophobic' instead. Call someone an anti-Semite and he will instantly and huffily say that he's of course not Adolf Eichmann or that bad man in 'Schindler's List'. So he can't be against Jews, let alone an anti-Semite. The very idea.

And yet, and yet, the persistent question buzzes round my head, why is it that other countries can and constantly do horrible things, and there's not one tenth of the fuss there is if Israel does the same? And that Arabs can be massacred, tortured , imprisoned, you name it, and if it's done by other Arabs, nobody seems to mind.

But is there another reason?

I also heard one Arab 'activist' refer to to a Israeli prison as 'notorious'. I've no doubt it's not much fun. Prisons, what can you do? But by comparison with the standard prison in the Arab world, all of which qualify for at least five stars for notoriety (especially the beatings with electric cables in windowless cellars) I would imagine it is pretty soft. What do these people think would happen to a bunch of Israeli activists who turned up in a boat off (say) the Syrian coast, with a cargo of humanitarian aid for the hostage Jews of Damascus (whose passports are stamped helpfully with the word 'Jew' - remind you of anywhere?). My advice? Don't even think about it.

Then there's the general question of Gaza. I was interested to see the Egyptians opening up their border with Gaza, just for a few days. Normally it's rather more officially shut than the border (thorough which much aid does in fact penetrate) with Israel - though there are so many smuggler's tunnels underneath it that weapons and quite large cargoes constantly make it through. Why is this, since the Gazans are the Arab and Muslim brothers of the Egyptians? Surely they should welcome them with open arms and open borders. Yet they don't. And nobody asks why.

Indeed, Egypt (illegally, but to the protests of nobody) annexed Gaza after it captured it in the failed 1948 Arab war on the nascent state of Israel. And it held on to it without anyone much fussing about its squalor and deprivation, until 1967, when Israel captured it and illegally occupied it, a misdeed that (by contrast) the Jewish state has never been allowed to forget. For me, Israel would have been a lot better off if it had withdrawn from Gaza the moment the war ended in 1967. But that's hindsight. It is and always has been an important invasion corridor.

But I have a nagging suspicion that those who now adopt the cause of Gaza (and have swallowed whole the propaganda narrative of the 'Aid Convoy' versus the 'Wicked Zionists') are much, much more interested in undermining Israel's long-term right to exist than they are in the undoubted plight of the Gazans. And why, exactly is that? What is the reason for this selective outrage against one nation among dozens, by no means perfect but also by no means the most oppressive or violent or ill-run state in the world, let alone the Middle East? You tell me.

I believe the subsequent deaths aboard the Mavi Marmara are largely the result of failure of intelligence and planning, leading to panic and wild shooting. Israel had good reason to halt the ships when they ignored the instructions of its Navy, as any sovereign nation would do in parallel circumstances. I'd like to see what the Turkish Navy would do to a pro-Kurdish 'humanitarian convoy' heading for its coast, if they ignored instructions to halt. I suspect it wouldn't be pretty.

It emerges that these ships were not entirely peopled by pacifist vegetarian idealists from the Isle of Wight. For instance, one of these 'activists' is a lawyer who once represented a terrorist for free (his client was the interesting Kozo Okamoto, still in the Middle East and anxious not to return to his native Japan). Mr Okamoto took part in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 25 innocents were massacred.

Aboard were others who are active supporters of Hamas, the despotic and murderous Islamist rulers of Gaza. Hamas hurled their Fatah opponents to their deaths from the tops of high buildings when they took over, and recently imprisoned in disgraceful circumstances a British freelance journalist, Paul Martin (look it up) to a chorus of almost total silence from the British media and left-wing intelligentsia.

One of these legislators is reported to have said at a March 2010 conference, ‘A nation that excels at dying will be blessed by Allah with a life of dignity and with eternal paradise.’ He also said that his movement ‘will never recognize Israel and will never abandon the resistance,’ and that ‘resistance is the only road map that can save Jerusalem, restore the Arab honour, and prevent Palestine from becoming a second Andalusia.’

This is a most interesting statement. Andalusia, as Muslims call Spain, is the only territory Islam has ever permanently lost. The reference underlines the fact that the real issue in this conflict is not what everyone thinks it is. This has nothing to do with the 'rights' or 'freedoms' of the 'Palestinians', who would be oppressed and neglected by whatever Arab state (probably a Greater Syria) that arose on the ruins of Israel (and probably Lebanon and Jordan too). It is the Muslim belief that no territory, however small, should be conceded by Islam to be ruled by non-Muslims. Read the full article by Peter Hitchens here...