The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

The phrase “a new world of counterhistory” was popularized by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. He uses it to describe an era where ideological rigidness causes people to reject both past and present factual truths if those facts conflict with their chosen political or cultural orthodoxy. The Nature of Counterhistory involves:

• A Rejection of Facts: Both historical data and current events are dismissed when they fail to support specific ideological narratives.
• An Ideological Surrender: People hand over their independent moral and factual judgment to rigid dogmas.
• A Selective Outrage: Global institutions and groups ignore major human tragedies or human rights abuses depending on whether acknowledging them fits their political alignment.

Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute, recently interviewed Montefiore for the Wall Street Journal. The interview highlighted the elements of what Montefiore calls Counterhistory.

Montefiore, 61, is “descended from Sephardic Jews who came to Britain from Tuscany in the 1790s and from Mizrahi Jews who arrived from Morocco in the 1820s . . . His great-great-great-uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), was a storied financier and philanthropist whom Queen Victoria described as ‘a noble Hebrew.’ Sir Moses also received praise (albeit backhanded) from Czar Nicholas I, with whom he’d sought an audience to intercede on behalf of Russian Jews. ‘If our Jews were like you,’ the czar told him, ‘they wouldn’t be a problem.’”

Montefiore has written a number of excellent histories (e.g., of Jerusalem and of the Romanov dynasty in Russia), and will soon publish a book on the Middle East.  The Middle East, he writes, is a region “more present in the Western consciousness than any other, its history more debated and contested than anywhere else yet conversely less understood.” Its “pivotal middleness” makes it “the epicenter of our tumultuous, rushing, interconnected world.” Montefiore’s definition of the region is expansive, going beyond “the usual focus on the Levant and the Holy Land” to include everywhere east to west from Morocco to Iran, and south to north from Sudan to Turkey. It covers 19 countries, as well as the “seaside Palestinian Islamist statelet” of Gaza.

“I call Gaza a semi-independent ‘statelet,’ and I think that’s important because there’s a pretense now that it was occupied from 2006 to 2023,” Montefiore says. He points out that since Israel withdrew troops and civilians from Gaza and the Palestinians held elections the following year, Hamas “had had prime minister, ministries, ministers and police.” It also had “what was in effect a formidable army of 40,000 paramilitaries, and it had a foreign policy. It was independent enough to launch a war.” Unlike anywhere else in the world, “it was a base for a military but it eschewed any need to educate or feed its citizens. That was the responsibility of international aid organizations. A very unique arrangement.”

From this perverse “statelet,” the horrors of 7 October 2023 emerged. “A vile act of terror, an almost Mongol style of raid and massacre and rapine,” Montefiore says, describing the events of that day. “It was also an illustration that in the Middle East, violence and war work, and force is incredibly effective at changing the whole destiny of geopolitics.” Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander, was “a diligent student of Israeli weaknesses.” He managed to put together a military and “a unique subterranean warscape of fortified tunnels that was capable of exploiting Israel’s flaws, its hubris and its political division to score what has to be seen as a very short-lived and murderous but decisive military strike against one of the great military powers of the Middle East.” Sinwar, whom Israel killed on 16 October 2024, “successfully changed the whole destiny of the Middle East,” Montefiore says. The worst pogrom in Jewish history since the World War II was turned into a propaganda victory for the perpetrators. Although Hamas “ultimately failed militarily,” abandoning Gaza’s civilians to a prolonged and bloody war, “it has also won massive success in terms of political consequences. The whole Middle East has been upturned by this tiny statelet and the gamble of one psychopathic leader who had immense freedom to act, since Hamas leaders didn’t care what happened to their people.”

What are the effects on the Middle East of the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023?  Montefiore itemizes key salient effects:

• “Hamas won in the West,” in part by controlling the media within Gaza and presenting all losses as civilian, a narrative that proved “irreversible even when Hamas’s allegations were later proven to be untrue.” “Who would have thought,” Montefiore asks, that Oct. 7 would result in “students at Harvard and Columbia calling for a one-state solution—‘from the river to the sea’—not a two-state solution?” Israelis have also had to confront “another nightmare they never contemplated, that a moral inversion of the Holocaust would be used against them.”
• What’s more, “the Israeli lobby” in Washington, “which was immensely powerful in the 1980s and ’90s and into the 2000s, has been totally eclipsed.” Montefiore explains this as a consequence of Oct. 7, “in part thanks to the development of the new ‘decolonization’ and anti-Zionist movement, and in part thanks to the misgovernance of this present Israeli government. There remains the personal relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, but that will not outlast these two personalities. Indeed, its very closeness may further contribute to the Israeli lobby’s decline.”
• Montefiore highlights what he calls Israel’s contradictions: It is, he writes, “both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy.” Yet he says there is “a moment of massive opportunity for Israel politically, even now, in the region. But they’ve got to work out how to convert their ability to win tactical military victories into lasting settlements.” That would require the Palestinians to “recognize the permanence of the Jewish republic in the Holy Land” and “to signal clearly that they do not aspire to its total destruction.” October 7, however, means that “in the short term—and I’m talking about decades here—they’ve prevented any creation of a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future.”
• Montefiore says the West’s “self-regarding secularism,” is hampering our understanding of the Middle East. “The irony is that we are in fact still Christian-adjacent, and the modern, ultra-radical, secular, decolonialist activism has many of the characteristics of a religious movement.” These include its “language of righteousness, of piety, of guilt, of sin,” along with “orthodoxies, credos, purity tests and jargon.” The result is a “semi-religious movement” grafted onto the West’s longstanding “weird fetish and obsession with the Middle East, particularly the Holy Land.”
• Alongside the jihad being waged against it, Israel also faces what Montefiore calls “a secular moral crusade. These are modern missionaries. And their mission is very Christian, with features of deep religiosity. We’re living in a fascinating period. That these activist movements in the West may force their governments to make a new intervention in the Middle East would be so beyond irony.” This new external impulse to reshape the Middle East originates not in grand chanceries but in nongovernmental movements. “Activist alliances are putting pressure on Western governments,” Montefiore says . . . These activists, he notes, are “not interested in any other regions or atrocities”—not Syria, Sudan, Yemen or Iran. “That selectivity is prefigured, and preprogrammed, by the history of Christendom.” There have been no protests of any scale against the atrocities in Iran, where in two days—Jan. 8-9—more than 30,000 people were killed. Altogether, Mr. Montefiore says, 42,000 civilians were slaughtered, “an event so colossal that it may be the largest single event massacre in the entire Middle East since 1900.” He says the regime killed more people in a week than the Shah did in his nearly 40-year reign.

What accounts for the selective moral outrage? “It shows the dangers of ideology,” he says. “When you sublet your judgment about facts and morals to a rigid ideology, you really surrender your ability to make real moral judgments, and also to make real factual judgments.” Instead, “you end up with this mad situation where the United Nations was resisting talking about the killing of 40,000 young people and the once-humanitarian NGOs refuse to discuss it because it might help the U.S. and Israel.” We are in a “completely different moral realm now, of how to judge the Middle East,” Montefiore says. “We are in a new world of counterhistory, where neither historical facts nor present-time facts matter if they don’t fit the ideological orthodoxy.”

Jeffrey H. Anderson, President of the American Main Street Initiative, unveils another example of Counterhistory: The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History has been in the news for disparaging our nation’s history and engaging in partisan activism. Addressing such charges, the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, testified at two congressional hearings. The most interesting thing about her prepared testimony is that she chose not to address a single exhibit that has opened under her seven-year watch.

Anderson writes that “I sat directly beside Ms. Hartig as a witness in her second hearing. I testified that the National Museum of American History increasingly is a museum not about American history, but about activists’ attempts to shape the future. The museum’s newer exhibits offer no coherent sense of a shared national identity, and they divide Americans into oppressors and the oppressed.”  Anderson cites several examples of his argument:

• A stand-alone display case in the midst of a busy walkway contains a lone National Football League jersey. It isn’t one that was worn by Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Jim Brown or any other early NFL legend. The jersey belonged to Carl Nassib, who in 2021 became the league’s “first openly gay player to take the field in a regular-season game.”
• Nearby, in a mini-exhibit on video games, visitors are asked, “Have you ever experimented with your identity in video games?” In April, apparently to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence, the museum opened “¡Puro Ritmo!: The Musical Journey of Salsa.”
• In the “family friendly” exhibit “Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego,” visitors are asked, “Is Gender Testing Fair?” They are told that “critics argue that gender tests are humiliating and discriminate against athletes who challenge traditional gender norms.” Aside from its commitment to activism, this is essentially an exhibit about nothing, pushing the outer limits of vacuousness. Prominent signs ask and answer, “Who Can Be a Game Changer? Anyone.” “Who Is a Game Changer? You Are.” What this has to do with American history is anyone’s guess.

In fact, the museum ignores huge swaths of American history. It offers little to nothing on the colonial period, the American founding, the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the pioneers and settlers of the American West, the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression, the Cold War and much else. Anderson correctly concludes that “Americans deserve a National Museum of American History that expresses a love of that history and views it as the wondrous story of a nation conceived in liberty. They don’t deserve a museum that alternates between ignoring and condemning our extraordinary heritage.”

See Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal (1-2 August 2026); and Jeffrey H. Anderson in the Wall Street Journal (31 July 2026).