Owen Jones is still desperately trying to defend Hamas.

There is a video doing the rounds related to Hamas’s barbaric pogrom of 7 October that is difficult to watch. It is making viewers wince and recoil. It shows the madness that can flourish when people retreat from reason. I am speaking, of course, about Owen Jones’s reaction vid to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities; that arch Guardianista’s 25-minute YouTube musing over what he saw Hamas do. It is a disturbing watch. It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks.

And it doesn’t help that it’s Owen Jones doing it – the scruffy middle aged man who appears to identify as barely out of his teens and adorable. It palls. The little boy hair, the perpetual T shirt, the dreadful high-speed gabble – the whole schtick – it palls.

Israel felt compelled to put out this gross footage of anti-Semitic mass murder because there has been so much 7 October doubt in influential circles in the West. It was the atrocity denialism of unhinged Israelophobes that forced Israel to say: ‘Okay, here are the atrocities.’ They showed the film in London last week and Mr Jones was in attendance.

To be clear, Jones does not deny that Hamas committed ‘grave war crimes’ on 7 October. He is not an October denialist as some on the viscerally anti-Israel left are. And yet his reaction to the footage is chilling nonetheless. He casts doubt on many of the claims about 7 October. He sows seeds of suspicion. It is a masterclass in moral obfuscation. Yes, Hamas did wicked things, he says, but where’s the evidence for the really wicked things it is said to have done? The beheaded babies. Raped women. Children killed ‘intentionally’. There’s no ‘conclusive evidence’ for that, he says. I am trying my best to understand the mind that can see images of the corpses of Jewish children and wonder, ‘But were they killed intentionally?’.

Well, Owen, Hamas didn’t trip over something and accidentally kill children.

Even in this era of virtual narcissism, even with the fashion for filming oneself saying and doing all sorts of self-abasing things, Jones’s video stands out for its creepiness.

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When the well-to-do journalist Kate Maltby said she received sexual advances from a Tory MP, Jones raged against our ‘culture that fails women who speak out’. Yet when the IDF shows him an image of a stripped, brutalised young woman he essentially says, was she raped though? That poor woman can’t be ‘listened to and believed’, of course, because she was murdered by medieval reactionaries.

But look here, maybe he’s just doing good journalism, good critical thinking, asking for more or better evidence. Maybe he’s just trying to nail the story so firmly it can’t be pried up.

I find it hard to believe Jones has had a Damascene conversion to the old-fashioned journalistic task of always asking for evidence. This is a man up to his neck in identitarian bollocks and trans mysticism. If a 6”5 bloke called Dave were to identify as a lesbian, Jones would believe him instantly. He would say Dave is literally a woman, and literally a lesbian, and only a bigot would say otherwise. Yet when he sees a real woman murdered and burnt and denuded of her underwear, suddenly he wants evidence. ‘Show the rape.’ 

He wants to watch.