The moral vacuity of centrist dads

Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell rush to condemn the IDF but are strangely silent about the butchery carried out by Jolani's thugs this week.

Alastair Campbell, left, and Rory Stewart, right, interview the ‘fighter turned President’ Jolani in February. They have since condemned the IDF, which is now the only force protecting Druze civilians from Jolani’s butchery

At the time of writing, Rory Stewart’s latest post on X advertises his most recent podcast episode. “If the UK Government are condemning the actions of the IDF, why are we still training their soldiers?” it asks.

In the accompanying clip, the former colonial governor of two provinces in southern Iraq accused Number Ten of “not standing up for our own lawyers” after the Americans sanctioned Karim Khan, the British prosecutor bringing the case against Benjamin Netanyahu, who stepped aside when accused of sexual misconduct.

Strangely, Stewart has been silent about the violence going on right now in southern Syria, where the IDF is protecting the Druze minority from the most appalling humiliation and butchery at the hands of the Jolani regime.

(For obvious reasons, I won’t post anything more graphic than the picture below, but much of it can be found on the X account of the Israeli minister Amichai Chikli.)

This omission is especially odd given Stewart’s recent intense interest in Syria. Would the Jolani in question be the same tyrant who featured in a breathless interview with him and Alastair Campbell back in February, conducted in the country itself?

Why, yes. Yes, it would.

Jolani’s jihadis drive a car over the body of a Druze civilian they have humiliated and murdered in southern Syria this week

I wrote about that peak moral vacuity at the time. Jolani, who had exchanged his combat fatigues for a golden tie and jacket for the occasion, was billed by a sycophantic Campbell as a “fighter turned President”. They even posed for a nauseating photograph.

“Why did our merry centrist dads gamble their reputations so recklessly on the whitewashing of a jihadi?” I wondered.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, the Stewart-Campbell infatuation with the former Al Qaeda and Islamic State “fighter” was already looking wobbly, as Jolani’s jihadis went on a characteristic rampage, rounding up Alawites, Christians and Druze civilians and subjecting them to humiliation, torture and execution.

Now they have gone a step further, carrying out operations against the Druze that are so gruesome that the videos are very difficult to watch.

This is especially the case since Stewart and Campbell are so preoccupied with condemning the IDF, the very same troops that the Druze desperately rely upon for protection.

Sucking up to the jihadi warlord whose thugs commit atrocities against civilians and disparaging the democratic army that is protecting them. Would it be too much of a cliché to point out that these centrist dads are very much on the wrong side of history?

It is all the more eye-popping given the fact that both Campbell and Stewart played important roles in the 2003 invasion of Iraq – which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilised the region for generations – and the subsequent occupation.

Jolani, then an Al Qaeda commander, played a prominent role in the guerrilla insurgency against coalition forces in Iraq and was captured and imprisoned for his troubles, spending five years in an American prison.

For one thing, it is astonishing that Stewart, who would have been personally at risk of Al Qaeda attacks while serving in Iraq, would so obsequiously fly to Syria to place Jolani on a pedestal and share this naïveté with his large audience.

(Knowing how the interview would have sanitised his reputation to thousands of listeners in the West, Jolani must have had a good laugh afterwards.)

But it is even more bewildering that these experienced political operators, who would have had much to do with jihadis and warlords in Iraq, either at first-hand or in the realms of analysis, did not know who they were dealing with.

Let’s not even bother focussing on the sheer brass neck of these two men, who poured so much energy into the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, which not only left hundreds of thousands dead but also plunged the region into chaos and created the conditions for the rise of Islamic State, but have the gall to criticise Israel.

What to make of all this? I suppose the main lesson is the danger of ideology. For Jolani and his fellow travellers, that is what leads them to commit such appalling atrocities. For Stewart and Campbell, who are slaves to another dogma, that is what leads them to whitewash it.