Jonathan Sacerdoti is a broadcaster and writer covering politics, culture and religion
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The news that Shahid Butt, a man convicted of terrorism who served five years for conspiring to bomb the British consulate in Yemen, is standing as a pro-Gaza candidate for Birmingham City Council has shocked many. Butt was jailed in 1999 as part of a terror plot linked to Abu Hamza, yet now seeks public
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The European Union has finally done what it long argued it could not. Yesterday, the bloc formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, placing it in the same legal category as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The decision was framed by Europe’s foreign ministers as a response to mass repression, extrajudicial killings
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Life expectancy across Europe is 81 years. An 81-year-old European dying today would have been born on the day Auschwitz was liberated. It has taken one average European lifetime for us to forget the lessons of the Shoah. How many Jews do you think there are in the world? Out of 8.1 billion people alive
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On 25 October 2023, speaking as Israel prepared to expand its ground campaign in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly and unambiguously set out Israel’s two central war aims: the destruction of Hamas and the return of all the hostages the Palestinians had taken into Gaza. It was the first time he set out
Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with
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The Middle East has entered a phase where events no longer necessarily resolve into outcomes. They pause, harden, and then reappear elsewhere. Ceasefires freeze wars without settling them. New councils are announced before their purpose is fully explored or revealed. Violence recedes in one arena and resurfaces in another. What looks like diplomacy is often
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The Middle East has long been organised around two competing logics: pragmatic alignment and ideological alignment. Before the 7 October war, these logics produced two regional blocs that structured most political, diplomatic and security behaviour. The Palestinian attack and invasion that triggered the war ruptured both systems. Incentives shifted, alliances frayed, and assumptions collapsed. What
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The escalation that emerged overnight in southern Yemen did not originate on the battlefield but in a relatively quiet logistical operation. It began with the arrival of two ships carrying weapons and military vehicles from the United Arab Emirates, docking at the port of Mukalla in Hadramawt. The cargo was unloaded without coordination with the
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I did not come to Islam through theology. I came to it through fear, threat and hatred directed at me and the world I live in. I think the first time I became aware of something called Islam was in 1989, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ for writing his
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Apparently it has been a “top priority” for Keir Starmer and his government, since the moment they came to office, to return Alaa Abd el-Fattah to the United Kingdom. A man granted British citizenship only in December 2021. A man who had previously described Britons as “british dogs and monkeys”, who wrote that he “rejoice[s]
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When Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Florida at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in a few days’ time, near the top of his agenda will be a sober accounting of Iranian military activity and what it may yet presage. He will brief the President on a sustained sequence of Iranian ballistic-missile drills conducted across multiple regions, the
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Protesters chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ will now be arrested, according to the heads of Greater Manchester Police and the Metropolitan Police. The announcement has been framed as a response to a ‘changed context’. But what it actually represents is an admission, belated and heavy, that the authorities spent years refusing to see what was directly
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Bondi Beach is not occupied territory. Yet a Jewish celebration there ended in blood. It is not within a military zone, not contested land, not an ‘open air prison’, but still, among civilians, on a day marked for celebration, Jews were once again slaughtered, picked off by a Muslim father and son who were motivated
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The attack at Bondi beach during a Hanukkah celebration, killing nine, has sent a fresh wave of horror through the Jewish diaspora. What might once have been regarded as unthinkable – a targeted assault on a Jewish gathering in the heart of a peaceful, democratic society – has now become grimly recognisable. It must be
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When Michael Gove introduced me to Piers Morgan last week at the Spectator Christmas reception, Morgan seized my hand and beamed, ‘I know Jonathan. We’re old friends.’ This was generous of him, not least because it isn’t true. We’d met once before, briefly. But some months earlier I had written a critique of his YouTube show
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The BBC has unveiled its compulsory training course for all staff on how not to be racist to Jews. I completed the online module and found it laughable, feeble and entirely beside the point. This isn’t education. It’s parody. A cartoonish exercise in HR-driven pseudo-virtue, dressed up as moral instruction. I have written before that
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Some scoffed when Donald Trump thought to tap Tony Blair’s decades of involvement in the Middle East for his future plans in Gaza. Perhaps they were right to. But not to worry: the global search for strategic wisdom has now been resolved. The path to peace lies not through seasoned statesmen or regional experts, but
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The allegations concerning Nigel Farage’s conduct as a schoolboy have returned with unusual force, not because the country is suddenly preoccupied with the internal sociology of Dulwich College, but because Farage now leads a party that sits at the centre of the national debate. Any claim about his past, however old and recycled, is inevitably
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The Israeli hostages recently freed from Gaza have begun to speak, and among the new revelations is that some were subjected to sexual assault and degradation, including male hostages. They describe being stripped, groped, violated, and threatened at gunpoint. The scale and cruelty of what they endured should have triggered sustained, front-page attention in the
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In 1929, René Magritte painted a picture that has since become iconic in both art and philosophy. The Treachery of Images depicts a finely detailed tobacco pipe with a caption beneath: Ceci n’est pas une pipe – ‘This is not a pipe’. Magritte’s point is subtle and enduring. It is indeed not a pipe, but an
