When righteous anger goes wrong

00:00 07:37

Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.

From abroad I’ve returned to a country where, in language to which the word ‘shrill’ hardly does justice, fellow British commentators have been letting fly on both sides of the argument about Gaza and how Israel should or should not respond to Hamas’s unspeakable attacks on 7 October.

There’s just one thing both sides – the British Muslim banner-wavers and those who bay for a war of attrition in Gaza – seem to agree upon: that whatever the answer might be, it is, in the most important sense of the word, simple. It is not simple. Things so rarely are. The simple bit is who – in the immediate – is right and who wrong, and few of us need reminding of the answer here. But it’s the hard bit that matters: can a remedy be found by the means proposed?

I’m a columnist who believes that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. That’s why it seemed to me as a youth that the United States should desist from trying to napalm communists out of Vietnam; why as an adult I argued against intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. I understood very well the moral argument for cleansing these places of foolish, dangerous or wicked forces, but doubted the practicalities. For me, if the practical proposition fails, the moral argument falls at the last fence; and all talk of what justice demands, however heartfelt, becomes useless.

Worse than useless, in fact. It can be dangerously counterproductive. You will search hard to find a commentator more scathing than me about the alliance between parts of the Labour left, anti-Semites, and vicious, bigoted and militant elements among pro-Palestinian Muslims. These are a dark shadow in our country.