PETER HITCHENS: Don’t be surprised if one day soon you see Hamas leaders feted at the White House

It is not true that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. In almost all cases, terrorists are terrorists, whether you approve of their objectives or not. They do disgusting things, with disgusting results, in the false belief that the rightness of their cause justifies the crime.

The same is often true of nations, which over the past century have become quite willing to excuse the most fearful acts because their cause is just.

But it is true that one man's terrorist often becomes the same man's negotiating partner. The Olympic champion in this kind of hypocrisy is the United States of America.

During my short stint as a Washington DC correspondent, I saw it with my own eyes twice and I can't forget it.

Within days of beginning my assignment in that most beautiful of capitals, I found myself on the South Lawn of the White House when Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah, was coaxed into a gruesome handshake with Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin.

Neither of them really wanted to participate, but President Bill Clinton persuaded them to do so. The gesture was ultimately meaningless. Rabin would die violently at the hands of a murderer just over two years later. In my opinion, it was never really the intention of the anti-Semite Arafat to reach a peace agreement. He had made such specific statements as: 'I have nothing to do with Jews. They are and remain Jews', and 'Peace for us means the destruction of Israel'.

If he had ever made a final deal, he would probably have been killed by his own side. But Clinton wanted it and he used all his power to achieve it. That makes it very funny to look in my archives and find a sleek red manual from my days as a defense reporter, published by the Pentagon in November 1988. It's called Terrorist Group Profiles. It devotes three pages to Arafat's outfit.

These include a long list of the various murders and other atrocities the country has committed. There is also a nice description of the cynical shifts in self-whitewashing policies.

In a foreword, future President George Bush (senior) rejects attempts to equate terrorists with freedom fighters. He says: 'Allowing this distinction to blur is playing into the hands of the terrorists.' And he proclaims, “The American public must understand terrorism, what it is and is not, and how the U.S. government is taking action against the terrorist threat.”

Less than five years later, Arafat was a guest in the White House. I saw it with my own eyes. It happened. But that was just the beginning. On December 7, 1994, Gerry Adams, leader of the Provisional IRA's political arm, Sinn Fein, was also welcomed to the White House. On this occasion the southern lawn was not used. Reporters had to hang out in the winter cold on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The same thing happened a few months later when Adams was invited to a St. Patrick's Day reception at the presidential mansion.

But six years earlier, the Provisionals had been given five whole pages in the Pentagon manual, three of which were filled with an illustrated list of assassinations, bombings and assassinations since 1972.

The document named Gerry Adams (who to this day denies any terrorist involvement) and the late Martin McGuinness as leaders of the organization. It said: 'The PIRA has focused its energy from the start on creating as many victims as possible. The more than a thousand victims killed, and a much greater number injured, are grim evidence of the PIRA's determination to 'wash the British out of Ireland in a wave of blood'.

The Clinton White House's utterly cynical decision to welcome Adams was one of the most shocking and abrupt political betrayals I have seen in my life. The huge British embassy in Washington was suddenly cut off from the usual privileged treatment. The stammering protests were coldly ignored. His status was publicly and humiliatingly reduced. 'Special relationship' indeed.

Well, Israel might take note. President Biden's apparently solid public support for the Jewish state may seem reassuring.

But Biden's Democratic Party, which has long been committed to supporting Israel, is finding many of its voters changing their minds on this issue.

This process has been accelerated by Israel's ill-advised bombardment of Gaza, with its attendant horrific civilian deaths.

Don't be particularly surprised if in a few years the leaders of Hamas will also be in the White House.

Of course it is unthinkable. But so were the welcomes once given to Arafat and Adams in the same place.

Make jokes at my funeral and I will haunt you forever

In Forty Years On, Alan Bennett's best play, he summarizes modern Britain in two bleak sentences. It is a country where 'a butterfly is an event' and where 'death is a call from the doctor'.

As we live our lives more hectic, intense and individual, we find death not so much frightening as unthinkable. We don't want to think about the death of those we love, or our own. And a study by the think tank Theos last week showed, among other things, that we are giving up funerals. Amazingly (to me anyway) it was reported that 'less than half of our respondents said they wanted a funeral at all'. A procedure known as “direct cremation,” a simple disposal of the remains, is becoming popular

Well, I'm against this trend. I understand that the costs are great for many. I don't care if I'm carried to my long house in a cardboard coffin, as long as the handles are strong enough to bear the load, and the material sturdy enough to withstand the heavy rain that will undoubtedly fall. But death must be properly marked, otherwise we are no longer truly human. And I have indicated in my will which beautiful and thoughtful ceremony I want to have.

Every Englishman has a right to it, as it is the funeral service given in the 1662 Church of England Prayer Book that is underused. It's pretty tough in spirit. It dares to mention worms and soil, and contains the words: 'The man born of woman has but a short time to live and is full of misery. He comes up and is cut off like a flower; he flees, as it were a shadow, and never continues at once.'

These sentences, spoken at a graveside, are almost unbearably powerful and do not attempt to suppress or avoid the grief we must endure. I should note here that I absolutely do not want the edges of my grave to be hidden by ghastly green fake grass, and that if someone tells a joke in church I will do my utmost to haunt him for the rest of his days.

The Upstart is surpassed by the Empress

Despite deliberately not drinking for a while before seeing the big new film Napoleon, I still found myself wishing that the Prussian Marshal Blucher would hurry up and arrive at, er, Waterloo – knowing from history that the film wasn't until he did , could come. possible end.

I would say two other things. Vanessa Kirby, as Empress Josephine, is utterly captivating (as she was as Princess Margaret in The Crown).

And maybe someone could make a film about the Duke of Wellington, in my opinion a bigger and smarter man than the Corsican upstart.