In his farewell address last night, President Bush boasted that he has promoted “human rights and human dignity” around the world. Also yesterday, Israel shelled a U.N. compound in Gaza, alleging that the compound was sheltering Hamas militants. The attacks set fire to “badly-needed aid” for local residents.

In today’s White House press briefing — the last of Bush’s tenure in office — Press Secretary Dana Perino indicated that Bush would not be condemning the attacks and claimed that Bush had shown “unending support for the Palestinians.” Perino said that she would “let the Israeli’s speak to it”:

Q Yes, I do. I wanted to know, considering the President’s undiluted support of Israel, what does he think of Israel bombing the U.N. buildings that became sanctuaries for Palestinians?

PERINO: Well, obviously — while the President has had support of Israel, he has also shown unending support for Palestinians, and especially because he is the first President ever to promote a two-state solution. … Now, on that particular incident, I’ll let the Israelis speak to it, but obviously they had to take great care to make sure that civilians are protected.

Q How can these bombs discriminate between people in such a highly –

PERINO: One of the problems is that Hamas, which is a terrorist organization, hides amongst innocent people and uses them as human shields.

Watch it:

The U.S. is looking increasingly isolated by shying away from condemning the strikes, defying what seems to be a growing international coalition. One of Bush’s strongest allies, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said that “no one could defend” the attack which, he said, showed that a ceasefire was “absolutely essential.’

The EU’s aid chief remarked, “I have made it very clear that all sides must respect international humanitarian law. It is unacceptable that the U.N. headquarters in Gaza has been struck by Israeli artillery fire.” Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and France have also condemned the attacks.

As Andrew Sullivan notes, Steven Walt’s counterfactual about Israel-Palestine — in which he imagined if the roles of Israelis and Palestinians had been reversed — has generated a lot of much needed discussion, both about the history of the conflict and about the U.S.’s relationship to it.

Daniel Larison has a good post discussing the way that political considerations often determine the perception of terrorist groups. Larison writes:

The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms.

One example that supports Larison’s argument is the U.S.’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras. For more contemporary evidence, there is the U.S.’s sheltering of the Mujahedin e-Khalq, and anti-Iran guerrilla organization formerly allied with Saddam Hussein. The MEK has been under U.S. protection in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, even though it is classified as as terrorist group by the State Department. (Putting the lie to their claims of “moral clarity,” some neoconservatives have advocated supporting the formerly Saddam-allied MEK in operations against Iran, something which has certainly not gone unnoticed by the Iranian regime.)

Ross Douthat writes that he can’t imagine “Americans mustering much sympathy for a Jewish group with views, tactics and goals similar to Hamas.”

And indeed I think that American Jewish groups – the same groups that Stephen Walt holds largely responsible for America’s anti-Palestinian bias in our non-counterfactual world – would, for the most part, be at great pains to distance themselves from their theocratic, terroristic co-religionists in the Gaza Strip.

But of course we’ll never know.

Actually, we do know. American Jewish groups such as the Hebron Fund openly support and raise American funds for extremist settlers in the West Bank. These settler groups have views and goals that very much mirror those of Hamas, and they regularly carry out acts of political violence against Palestinian civilians whose land they’d like to have. Though these settler groups aren’t classified by the U.S. as terrorist groups, some have suggested that they should be — other Jewish extremist groups have been in the past — as their actions clearly meet the definition of terrorism.

It’s true that most Jewish Americans (and Israelis) condemn settler violence, just as most Irish Americans condemned IRA violence and most Palestinian Americans condemn Hamas violence, but so far this hasn’t stopped the relative few who support settler extremism from holding big money fundraisers in swanky hotels, or persuaded the U.S. government to apply the same standard to organized Israeli paramilitary violence against Palestinians that it does to Palestinian violence against Israelis.