“Politics in the Middle East is literally a life and death struggle”, not, foreign policy scholar Robert D. Kaplan observed, “the Kantian paradise of perpetual peace that has existed in Europe for more than three-quarters of a century until the Ukraine War”. Though, for Jews, ‘history’, as Bari Weiss has said, returned with a vengeance many years before Oct. 7th, 2023, mainstream media commentary on Hamas’s war has demonstrated that the false idol of the world’s inevitable arc towards justice dies hard.
Matthew Syed is a Times columnist and BBC Radio 4 presenter who fancies himself a sophisticated and outside the box observer of the Middle East, and even ‘pro-Israel’. However, in his latest column, he reveals himself to be wedded to one of the more conventional and flawed ideas of our time: that resisting jihadists who attack Jews, Israel and the West ‘only makes them stronger’, and that restraint, diplomacy, economic incentives and reason are the only means by which to defeat the scourge of Islamist extremism.
In “What we see in Gaza is rekindling jihad. Netanyahu must be stopped“, July 20, Syed deplores the brutal and bloody war that has raged in the region for the last twenty-one months, while placing most of the blame not on the pathological antisemitic ideologies of terror movements in Gaza, or their Iranian sponsors, but on Israel’s putatively ‘self-defeating’ and ‘disproportionate’ response. This response, he claims, will act as a recruiting tool for jihadist across the world.
As an example, Syed bizarrely suggests that Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran of Afghanistan who killed 14 people by ramming a truck into a crowd in New Orleans, and who previously pledged allegiance to ISIS and made recordings condemning music, drugs and alcohol, was radicalised by Gaza. In addition to the fact that this is unevidenced speculation, it also illustrates the Times columnist’s refusal to assign agency to those who engage in mass murder in the service of an extremist, Islamist ideology.
Call it ‘the Israel alibi’ for terror, whereby someone in the West who commits an act of violence after embracing a fanatical antisemitic ideology can receive at least some moral clemency if it can be argued that he was motivated by animus towards the Jewish state – so that the perpetrator’s embrace of an anti-Jewish movement effectively gets blamed on the actions – real or imagined – of Jews themselves.
Further, during the course of advancing this narrative, Syed demonises Israel’s prime minister, and not Yahya Sinwar, as a Caliban – the beast in Shakespeare’s The Tempest – who, he claims, is dragging “the whole world largely unwillingly, towards an ever darker future”.
So, what would a ‘proportionate’ response to the barbaric mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation of 1,200 men, women and children on Oct. 7th by an Islamist death cult which has characterized Palestinian civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices” look like? Syed doesn’t spend too much cognitive energy perusing over such prudential matters, but does offer up what he says is the “obvious” answer – namely a “more restrained” Israeli response, while failing, of course, to address what such a “restrained” military course of action would have looked like.
He then writes that “Securing the release of the hostages would, admittedly, have required releasing more fanatics from Israeli prisons, a stomach-clenching prospect but infinitely better than the legions being radicalised around the strip, the region, the world”. In other words, Syed would have preferred for Jerusalem to give in to the demands of the terrorists who butchered 1,200 people in southern Israel.
Though this simple logic somehow eludes the esteemed writer, a tepid Israeli military response to Oct. 7th, in conjunction with releasing thousands of terrorists in Israeli prisons, in itself represents the formula for radicalising more jihadists in the region and incentivising more terror, by sending a clear message to Hamas, Hezbollah and other malign actors in the region that launching murderous attacks on the Jewish state will pay dividends.
Fanaticism, Syed avers, can only be defeated by “Rationality. Reason. Trade. Peace. Growth“, a bingo card of vapid Western elite talking points about defeating terror that the heirs to Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar will no doubt share a good laugh over one day.
In the meantime, as Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz pointed out, in reference to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites but also more broadly, Jerusalem continues to do the West’s “dirty work” – thus ensuring that Matthew Syed and his fellow travelers can maintain their pristine moral status within the ‘community of the good’.
Another day, another misguided peace activist, and another fool blaming Israel for the goals, plans, and actions of its enemies. My counter argument: No, not with Hitler, you fool.