The reassuring stupidity of John Kerry

The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to Islam, using the gently persuasive techniques we have come to associate with this dynamic and expanding religion.

‘Allahu Akbar! Either you will convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,’ rebels allegedly told some villagers. Other residents were simply shot dead without all the onerous conversion palaver. It is said that the accents of the rebel soldiers were many things — Chechen, Tunisian, Moroccan, etc — but certainly not Syrian. It was further reported that, once again, the rebels were drawn from one or another al-Qa’eda franchise; as John O’Sullivan wrote here last week, we are backing the losing side of the losing side in Syria. Have you heard anything from the moderate Syrian rebels? What exactly is their disposition? Are they consensual centre-left democrats, people who don’t wish to nationalise the top 200 companies but feel a little bit iffy about the bedroom tax? Nobody seems to know.

As it happens, the enforced conversions in the village of Maaloula may be a cause for optimism. It might just be that the jihadis are becoming slightly more civilised — because at least this time they didn’t try to eat their victims. Or perhaps this is deluding and a false dawn, and it’s simply that on this occasion they were not very hungry.

Either way one can only imagine their delight at being told they had John Kerry right alongside them as an ally. The West, still in thrall to Blairite notions of aggressive liberal evangelism, despite all the abject misery and deaths this ideology has spawned, becomes ever more absurd in its tin sabre-rattling, and of course for absurdity, nobody has come close to Mr Kerry.