“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.