ANDREW NEIL: In what ethical universe can the arduous Left’s poster boy

Even battle-hardened struggle correspondents have winced and shed tears — I definitely did — watching the harrowing 43-minute video documenting the barbarism of Hamas on October 7.

It was spliced collectively by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) from Hamas’s personal bodycam, dashboard and mobile-phone footage, as they proudly recorded their atrocities.

Now there is a new video on YouTube about that day which, in a really totally different method, can also be tough to look at, although on this case it is extra prone to make you retch than cry.

It’s a 25-minute monologue (although it appears for much longer than that) by Owen Jones, a outstanding voice of the Guardian bourgeois arduous Left and on-off Corbynista, which addresses the contents of the IDF’s video.

While accepting — a number of occasions — that Hamas did certainly commit struggle crimes on that horrible first Saturday of October, Jones nonetheless proceeds to nitpick, undermine, query and sow seeds of suspicion in regards to the veracity of elements of the video. It is a worrying, disturbing, chilling, typically irrational efficiency which descends into incoherence because it reaches its weary finish.

Jones regards the IDF video as Israeli propaganda designed to justify the loss of life and struggling that it has since rained down on northern Gaza in retaliation for October 7.

If that’s its objective, then it has clearly failed. As the loss of life toll of civilians, together with 1000’s of ladies and youngsters, mounted whereas a lot of Gaza City was decreased to rubble, public opinion throughout the globe has turned towards Israel, because it at all times does when it responds to some terrorist atrocity.

Even America, the one ally that issues to Israel, is insisting that — with hostilities breaking out once more now hostage swaps are over — the IDF should be extra cautious, thought-about and proportionate in its efforts to wipe out Hamas.

Israel has indicated it’s listening and can behave in another way within the subsequent section of its struggle on Hamas. But Jones is mistaken. The actual objective of the video was to not pave the best way for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. It was to indicate the world precisely what Israel is up towards.

How are you able to negotiate with individuals able to such barbarism? What is the purpose when the Hamas management has already pledged to launch extra October 7s the second it has re-established the capability to take action.

Its intention is to not power Israel to the bargaining desk however to wipe it off the map. It revels in killing Jews just because they’re Jews. Exactly what sort of ‘peace deal’ are you able to do with individuals dedicated to your extermination?

Throughout his lengthy ramble, oddly chilly and calculating, Jones fails to confront or reply to any of those factors. Instead, he concentrates — curiously, even perhaps immorally — on making an attempt to determine that, although Hamas are certainly evil, maybe they aren’t fairly as evil because the Israelis are making out . . . and anyway there are many evil Israelis too.

It has lengthy been an outrageous conceit of the British arduous Left — and proof constructive of its ethical chapter — that Hamas, a bloodthirsty terrorist group, and the IDF, the army arm of a thriving, disputatious democracy below fixed risk, are two sides of the identical coin.

Jones is definitely eager to offer Hamas the advantage of the doubt and minimize its killers the kind of slack he would by no means grant the IDF. He accepts that Israeli girls and youngsters had been massacred however is unusually eager to level out that the IDF video offers no ‘conclusive proof’ that infants had been beheaded, girls raped and youngsters killed ‘deliberately’. What sort of weird mindset, what kind of ethical vacuum leads anyone to posit such loopy caveats?

‘If there was rape and sexual violence dedicated,’ he asserts, ‘we do not see this on the footage.’ It does not appear to have crossed his thoughts that even Hamas could be a bit cautious of recording rape or sexual assault.

Or that the IDF, if it has such footage, can be reluctant to indicate it, given the extreme anguish it could trigger households already struggling the incalculable ache of bereavement.

Nor does he confront the truth that there may be loads of different testimony that such assaults occurred. It’s arduous to not conclude that no regular particular person would suppose this manner.

What is the purpose of claiming that, although many kids died on October 7, the video does not at all times make it clear if it was the results of reckless firing or deliberate concentrating on?

That simply because we see a younger girl’s burnt corpse with no underwear and a pool of blood, it does not imply she was raped? I’m positive that is an incredible consolation to her household. It is true some Israelis had been sadly killed by the IDF because it rushed to defend its residents from Hamas, the kind of collateral injury that always tragically occurs within the chaos of struggle. But why does that in any method exculpate Hamas? They would not be lifeless if Hamas had not attacked.

Jones is just not detached to the struggling and carnage of October 7. He admits to being ‘ashen-faced, horrified, disgusted’ when he left the IDF screening.

He particulars one of many video’s worst scenes — a father in his underpants making an attempt to flee Hamas together with his two younger boys. They make it to their safety shelter however, earlier than they will shut the door, one in every of their attackers lobs in a grenade. The father is killed. The boys emerge injured and bloodied. One has misplaced a watch. Hamas does not kill them, Jones factors out.

Is he making an attempt to indicate they aren’t fairly the child-killers Israel would have us imagine. If so, it’s a contemptible place.

Jones is just not averse to propaganda of his personal.

He twice knocks down the concept that 40 infants had been beheaded by Hamas. But I’m not conscious of any official claims in that regard.

I’ve seen estimates that 40 kids had been killed on October 7 and a few infants may need been beheaded.

But why waste effort and time pulling down claims no credible particular person is making. Are we meant to look extra kindly on Hamas as a result of, although they undoubtedly killed toddlers, possibly they did not behead them?

The video covers two beheadings. There is footage of an Israeli soldier with no head. Jones additionally mentions footage of an ‘unsuccessful try’ to behead a ‘dying Thai migrant employee’.

Rather than pausing to absorb the hellish enormity of those photos, Jones ruminates that we won’t ensure in both case that beheading was the reason for loss of life or declare that this proves past doubt that Hamas used beheading as a ‘type of execution’.

I’m too baffled to know in what doable ethical universe this issues. Unless, in fact, you are attempting to determine that Hamas doesn’t equal Isis.

Jones definitely does not like Hamas being in comparison with Nazis. He states that explicitly — and unconvincingly. After all, what occurred on October 7 was a carbon copy of Nazi pogroms of the Jews, when Jewish communities had been slaughtered merely for the sin of being Jewish — which is, in fact, precisely the modus operandi of Hamas, now proudly answerable for the one greatest slaughter of Jews because the Nazis had been consigned to mud.

Jones finally ends up a tad deranged as his video involves its conclusion. In his willpower to undermine the affect of the IDF video he drags in, confusingly, the behaviour of Bosnian Serbs within the Nineteen Nineties and loudmouthed Israelis at the moment (shortly slapped down) calling for Hamas to be nuked — all the things, bar the kitchen sink.

He claims that atrocities will be carried out by peculiar individuals — identical to us — oblivious to the truth that Hamas rears its individuals on a relentless food plan of anti-Semitic hatred from an early age and it’s that indoctrination which gave us the horror of October 7.

It is honest to say Jones has skilled some pushback for his video nasty. He is threatening authorized motion towards unspecified critics, claiming they’ve unleashed a brand new wave of threats of loss of life and violence on him.

That is a shame and he deserves the total safety of the legislation, although when as soon as, in a TV studio, I counseled him on his fortitude towards thuggish detractors my reward was to be accused by him of promulgating Right-wing views which I didn’t fee, publish or assist.

The truth is, Jones, the hard-Left’s poster boy, is just too obsessive to be conciliatory and too ideological to construct bridges.