Hollywood—once a bastion of pro-Israel support—is now honeycombed with “anti-Zionist,” boycott advocacy front groups like Artists Against Apartheid and Artists Without Borders.

It’s nice to announce that the Creative Community For Peace—featuring some prominent personalities like Arnold Scharzenegger, actors Seth Rogan and Sylvester Stallone, comedians Bill Maher and Sarah Silverman, and director Ivan Reitman—have collected almost 200 entertainment industry signatures for a petition, running as an ad in a major newspapers, supporting Israel against Hamas terror.

See their web site at http://www.creativecommunityforpeace.com/

Between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War, many American liberals somehow forgot the reality of radical evil. Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Gulags in Vietnam and North Korea and to a lesser extent Cuba, punctuated by the Cambodian genocide and later genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda, were not enough really to jog their memories.

Of course, they remembered Hitler, but with an askew recollection that made possible the current bizarro equation of Israelis and Nazis. On the other hand, they remained largely oblivious or indifferent to the deep roots of the true ideological heir to Hitler—fusing the past and future of radical evil—that was long in the making: Islamofascism. Fascism has been popular in the Arab and Muslim world since Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti recruited for the Third Reich, and Nasser dabbled with it in Egypt and Saddam Hussein and the Assads did the same in the Baathist crucibles of Iraq and Syria. Yet the true ideological breakthrough was the fusion with Islam achieved by Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocrats in Iran. Jimmy Carter had to deal with Iran as a geopolitical challenge, but there was no corresponding ideological reassessment until after 9/11. Even then, Al Qaeda was reified as a terrorist menace—not a form of Sunni extremism rivaling Iran’s radical Shiite regime—while Islam in general continued to be fed to the general public as the pabulum of “the religion of peace.”

Among political elites and policymakers who didn’t fully swallow that pabulum, there still was an extreme reluctance to accept that Islamofacism, in all its competing variants, was as great a threat in its way as Europe’s fascist international had been in the thirties. Remember that back then the fascists also had fissures, with Mussolini and Hitler even threatening with each other over the other’s ambitions to dominate fascist Austria. The new mistaken conventional wisdom is that you can easily play off Islamofacists—picking between the “bad” and “not so bad”—which may be still the unstated premise of the Obama Administration’s continuing tilt toward the mullah’s so-to-be-nuclear-ready Iran.

And now, the distinction between “bad” and “not so bad” Islamofacists is manifesting itself in a new form: “bad” or “savage” or “barbarous” ISIS—words that have not be used in liberal journals like the “Nation” and “New Republic” for a long time—and “not so bad” Hamas. In Douglas A. Ollivant’s “The Barbaric Terrorists of the Islamic State Are a Threat to the U.S. Homeland” in the “New Republic,” Hamas is “not so bad” because, allegedly, it is not guilty of anything on the order of “crucifixions, mass executions, slave markets, children buried alive, and of course the beheading of journalists.”

Ollivant may or may not know much about ISIS, but he is either ignorant of or indifferent to the true nature of Hamas. He surely knows of their 1988 genocidal charter embracing “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as well as their ideological and organizational history as an offshoot of Egypt’s arch anti-Western and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, but fails to discuss. Here again, the Obama Administration—which still admires the Islamofacist “totalitarian democracy” of Turkey’s Erdogan—convinced itself for a while that the Muslim Brotherhood were also “not so bad” Islamofascists.

The truth is that tactical differences aside—Isis does indeed prefers infantry charges followed by beheadings, Hamas missile barrages and tunnel infiltration followed by hangings—there is scarcely any ideological or strategic differences between Isis and Hamas except that they are complementary variants of Sunni Islamofacism operating in different geographical theaters.

Sometimes, geopolitical survival dictates a temporary alliance with the devil: Stalin convinced himself that such an alliance with Hitler was necessary in 1939; Churchill and FDR convinced their countries that an alliance with Stalin was necessary in 1941. The difference between then and now is that, in 1941, Churchill and FDR were right that they could rely on Stalin, however evil he was, to help crush the greater evil of Hitler. In contrast, Hamas is not going to help us to crush—or even cheer on our efforts to crush—their Sunni soul brothers of ISIS.

Current liberal ideological effusions making Hamas look good at least compared to ISIS are bound to end badly. Not only are both of them radically evil; they essentially represent the same fundamental evil in the way that Hiterlism and Stalinism did not. We successfully played Nazi against Communist totalitarians during World War II so as not to have to fight both at the same time. In today’s Middle East, there is indeed real rivalry, but it’s not between “evil” ISIS and “not so evil” Hamas; it’s between Sunni and Shia Islamofascists. The trouble is that the Obama Administration—infatuated with building bridges to Iran—has failed abjectly to play them off against each other.

See Douglas A. Ollivant in the “New Republic” at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119193/isis-beheading-james-foley-open-eyes-islamic-states-terror