Today in Britain we have our own army of useful idiots, made up of those self-styled progressives whose obsessive hatred of Israel leads them to collude with the vicious excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement.
In the twisted narrative of the anti-Israeli brigade, the Hamas rulers of Gaza are battling for their oppressed people against the brutal, racist military regime run by Binyamin Netanyahu.
But this is a complete moral inversion of reality. In truth, Israel is a bulwark of democracy forced by the lethal forces of anti-Semitic Islamism to fight for survival.
Far from representing liberation and progress, as many progressives absurdly claim, Hamas is a brutal organisation that aims to impose totalitarian Islamic rule.
Along with other jihadist out-fits like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, it forms part of a monstrous theocratic death cult that wants to destroy our civilisation.
Genocidal aggression towards the non-believer is a key element of this cult.
Visceral loathing for the Jewish state is the central impetus behind Hamas, reflected in its relentless barrage of indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel.
What is extraordinary is that western progressives, who love to prattle about their devotion to human rights, social justice and tolerance, should have ended up giving their support to extreme bigotry.
They eagerly march in their thousands against Israel, accusing the Jewish state of genocide, yet remain silent in the face of the lethal oppression practised on an epic scale by Islamists.
This was a point powerfully made by Israel's finance minister Yair Lapid in a brilliant speech at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin last week: "In Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Nigeria more children are killed in a week than die in Gaza in a decade.
Every week women are raped, homosexuals are hanged and Christians are beheaded.
The world watches, offers its polite condemnation and returns obsessively to condemning Israel for fighting for our lives."
Drawing lessons from the Second World War, Yair Lapid also argued that most Jewish people in Nazi Germany had failed to fight back, even when they were being rounded up on the trains for the concentration camps, because they failed to recognise "the totality of evil" with which they were confronted.
But now, faced by fundamentalist Islam, they would not make the same mistake.
"We will not board the train again," he concluded.
Sadly that kind of resolute language is often ignored in modern Britain.
"Never again" is meant to be one of the themes of our civic life in the wake of the Holocaust, yet anti-Semitism is now a growing force in our society, fuelled by the political fixation on the Left with Israel.
Masquerading as pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism, this prejudice is openly expressed by Muslim hardliners and their progressive sympathisers.
So recently a Birmingham supermarket was attacked by a mob for stocking "Israeli" products, while the manager of another store in London took kosher food off the shelves to avoid the fury of the pro-Palestinian bigots.
In the same vein a London theatre withdrew backing for a Jewish film festival because the event was partly funded by the Israeli embassy.
The aim of the pro-Palestinians is to turn Israel into a pariah state, like apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
Tragically this campaign is succeeding.
But it is Hamas, in all its Islamist addiction to persecution, violence, misogyny and racial hatred, that should be the real pariah.
At the weekend, in another display of its barbaric methods, it cold-bloodedly murdered 21 of its own citizens who were said to be informers for Israel.
These killings, dressed up as summary "executions", make a mockery of all the wailings from Hamas supporters about the loss of civilian life in the conflict with Israel.
Eleven murders, carried out by a firing squad in front of Gaza's main mosque, were given religious sanction by the local imam.
"We have to protect our mujahideen and back them, not let the Zionist occupiers easily target them," he said.
That just shows the profound anti-Semitic spirit that lies at the heart of Hamas.
Indeed the organisation's founding charter of 1987 states that "the Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them".
Like the butchery of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the murder of civilians provides a terrifying insight into the mentality of Hamas.
Since taking over the governance of Gaza in 2006, the sinister group has created a climate of fear and repression in this land.
The penal code has been reformulated to permit public lashings, severing of limbs and execution by stoning.
Schoolgirls are forced to wear the hijab, gays are denied any civil rights.
Meanwhile, the war against Israel is carried on with a pitiless lack of compassion, such as the use of their own civilians as human shields.
Similarly, the pro-Palestinian campaigners like to ignore the fact that 160 children from Gaza aged between 12 and 13 have died in the construction of underground tunnels to be used by Hamas militants against Israel.
There will never be peace in this region until the Palestinians and their allies recognise Israel's right to exist.
Until then, Israel has an absolute right to defend herself.
The alternative is the terrible dark of Islamist theocracy.
