Look: I know that Hamas does and says some terrible things.  I’m not in any way trying to deny that or excuse it.  But it also provides valuable services and can be viewed by pragmatists as a means of brokering peace in the region.  So connections to them shouldn’t be seen as evil.  Support of suicide bombings?  That’s different.  But I’m not sure there’s any evidence that Obama’s pray-er, Ingrid Mattson, supports terrorism.  I was hoping that, post-Bush, we would drop the Manichean “we won’t talk to you unless you’re our best friend” politics.  Read more here:

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is one of many religious leaders scheduled to speak at the prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral.

Mattson has been the guest of honor at State Department dinners and has met with senior Pentagon officials during the Bush administration. She also spoke at a prayer service at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

But in 2007 and as recently as last July, federal prosecutors in Dallas filed court documents linking the Hartford, Conn.-based Islamic society to the group Hamas, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

Neither Mattson nor her organization have been charged. But prosecutors wrote in July that they had “a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking” the group to Hamas and other radical groups.