Jonathan Sacerdoti

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 a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian.

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 just deferral or distraction. Europe remained vocally engaged on Gaza, conspicuously restrained on Iran, strategically vague on Syria, and angrily petulant on Greenland Gaza is the clearest illustration. The ceasefire ended active fighting while leaving the logic of the war intact.

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 followed has not been the emergence of a calmer order, but a reconfiguration in which ideology has returned in new forms and pragmatism has narrowed, and hardened, requiring deliberate encouragement and support to survive. For more than a decade, regional politics moved along these two tracks. Pragmatic alliances rested on interests that could be negotiated, measured and enforced.

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 novel, The Satanic Verses. Images of furious men immolating books spread around the world and seared themselves into my childhood mind, fixing fear and confusion to something I did not yet know how to name. My father, a bookseller, insisted on continuing to sell the book, but decided, soberly, that it would have to be kept behind the checkout desk, available only if a customer asked for it by name.

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 visible movement of missile units, launchers and support infrastructure by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Israel’s assessment that these actions serve a dual purpose. They resemble routine exercises in form, yet replicate with unnerving fidelity the preparations that would precede an actual strike.

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 to kill as if it were their God-given right. The images from Bondi are now etched into public memory, but the political reaction now taking shape confirms how little our leaders understand the nature of what they are facing. The war has not ended. It has migrated. The images coming out of Bondi as the horrors unfolded were a field report from a war already underway. It is a war without formal declarations, which does not depend on tanks or treaties.

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 for The Spectator which, to judge by his response, he did not enjoy. He called me a ‘disingenuous twerp’ on X and blocked me there. He then wrote a piece in the magazine entitled, ‘In defence of Piers Morgan, by Piers Morgan’. I mention this not to litigate any grievance, but in the interest of full disclosure. Fuentes thrives on provocation. His method is not to win the argument but to distort its shape.

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 if one were writing a sitcom about the modern BBC, and wanted to script a scene satirising its institutional absurdities, one might invent a plotline in which a woke producer commissions a documentary about the children of Gaza and secretly casts the 13-year-old son of a Hamas minister as its narrator. As we know, that’s exactly what the BBC did.

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 through the collective judgment of Delia Smith, Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch, and naturally, Gary Lineker. They are joined by Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Simon Pegg and a list of figures known for their contributions to film, fiction, and light entertainment: people with no background or expertise in jihadist Islamic terror movements, counter-extremism, Middle Eastern politics, or international law.

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 refracted through the lens of present politics. The BBC reports, the Guardian testimonies, and Farage’s own responses raise a set of questions that extend far beyond the details of adolescent behaviour. They touch on character, trust, political identity and the delicate task facing any new political movement seeking broad public legitimacy.

The resignations at the top of the BBC mark a critical juncture for an institution long seen as a pillar of British public life. Yet their departures, while welcome, are insufficient. The BBC’s failure is not confined to the mistakes of individual executives. It is institutional, entrenched, and long overdue for a reckoning. The BBC has repeatedly blurred moral lines on Israel and antisemitism Unlike privately funded media outlets, be it GB News, Talk, The Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, the BBC is funded by coercion. Britons are compelled by law to finance its operations if they own a television, regardless of whether they watch or endorse its content.