The most tedious feature of Middle East discourse isn't the violence—though that's certainly regrettable—but the intellectual prostitution required to maintain any position within it.

Both left and right have constructed elaborate moral accountancy systems that would make a medieval theologian blush with envy. The left has discovered that anti-imperialism can justify literally anything, provided the perpetrator can claim historical grievance and the victim represents "Western interests." The right has decided that civilization itself hangs in the balance, which conveniently licenses whatever brutality serves their preferred regional client.

What both sides share is a magnificent capacity for moral blindness that operates with Swiss precision: they can spot war crimes at a thousand yards when committed by the wrong team, yet develop sudden myopia when their own side engages in identical behavior.

The result is a discourse where principles are not applied but performed—where universal human rights become conditional on one's position in an imaginary hierarchy of historical suffering, and where the same action becomes either heroic resistance or barbaric terrorism depending entirely on who signs the checks.

One grows tired of being lectured about moral complexity by people whose complexity consists entirely of finding increasingly sophisticated ways to abandon moral consistency. The Middle East may be complicated, but basic human decency is not. When you find yourself explaining why this particular targeting of civilians is actually quite different, you've already lost the plot.

Perhaps the most honest thing one could say about the region is that it has become a theater where Western intellectuals go to rehearse their abandonment of the principles they claim to cherish—a kind of moral vacation destination where the normal rules of ethical reasoning are cheerfully suspended in favor of more exciting forms of tribal identification.

The tragedy isn't just what happens to the people who live there. It's what happens to the people who watch from a distance and discover, to their evident delight, that they never believed in universal human rights at all.