I used to like the New Yorker, before wokeness ruined American arts and letters, and especially before October 7 turned progressive America’s Middle Eastern coverage increasingly sympathetic towards Hamas.

Still, this week, I was magnetised by what appeared to be a New Yorker profile of Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, written by David Remnick, the magazine’s (Jewish) editor.

Given that profiles signify some kind of dignity, and a depth and a point of view worth engaging with, I had to read to check: surely the New Yorker hadn’t sunk that low.

At first, it didn’t seem it had. Sure, the framing of the profile did not make it immediately clear that Sinwar is a mass murderer, arch-terrorist, and Holocaust-pursuer with global ambitions. Notes from Underground, the headline teased, accompanied by a black and white picture of a trim Sinwar smirking, legs casually crossed, in a chair amidst rubble, set against a sepia shot of pre-war Gaza. “The life of Yayha Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza.”

But Remnick does not glamourise Sinwar, one of 1000 prisoners released in exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011. Nor did he gloss over Sinwar’s sadistic, multi-decade track record of gruesome executions of Gazans for crimes like suspected homosexuality or adultery.

The piece is tightly written. It appears well reported. But in the textures, the semantic rhythms, the implications and false equivalences, the simple truth leaks out that this is a piece entirely typical of the rot that has taken hold.

And by the end of the opening paragraphs, it did here too. “During the war against the newborn state of Israel – a period of suffering and displacement known in Arabic as the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’ – the family [of Sinwar] fled south and into the Gaza Strip,” writes Remnick.

Hang on a sec. Is the “Nakba” just simple obvious history, rendering understandable the decades of hostility, warmongering and terrorism against Israel that followed, along with the making of the likes of Sinwar, as Remnick’s prose suggests?

Not according to those who argue that the Nakba is an overstated, weaponised bit of Palestinian spin, taken out of context to vilify Jews, and woven into millions of fake histories to legitimise attacks on Israel.

Here’s another example of how this works. “Benjamin Netanyahu…put in place what is now widely known as the “conception,” a set of tactics intended to contain Hamas while weakening the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank, and stifling any talk of peace negotiations,” writes Remnick, accurately enough.

But look at this non-sequitur pretending to follow on logically. “Over time, Sinwar and the rest of the Hamas leadership lost faith that there would be any progress with Israel. After the second intifada, the Israeli political establishment, especially under Netanyahu, became increasingly brazen in its contempt for Palestinian interests”.

Netanyahu here is the one blocking “progress with Israel” – but Remnick doesn’t spell out what the “progress” imagined by Hamas is. Presumably it is their endlessly stated goal: the murder of all the Jews of Israel, keeping only those who will be useful, and installing an Islamic regime where once Israel was.

And then there’s the astonishing implication that of the two, Netanyahu and Sinwar, it is Netanyahu that would be the obstacle to peace.

Remnick goes on to add, as if this is perfectly reasonable fuel for October 7, that “the Trump Administration, led by Jared Kushner, helped draft the Abraham Accords … sidelining the Palestinians yet again.”

But perhaps the most telling bit of the whole piece is this. Remnick, visiting Kibbutz Be’eri, met an IDF general who described the Gazan militias and their executions as “Einsatzgruppen.” This, he says, was a “single word that stayed with me”.

The general then said something totally obvious, uncontroversial and largely accepted in Israel: “We are ready to fight and diminish Hamas and exterminate them wherever they are”. But to Remnick: “Exterminate…was as jolting as “Einsatzgruppen”. The suggestion, cloaked in temperate and sober language, is that Israelis are behaving as much like Nazis as Hamas did on October 7.

Then there are his sources. Remnick, one of the top journalists in the world, consults mainly peace activists and Haaretz writers; the general is an exception, whom he seems to have encountered by chance. His sources minimise Hamas’s crimes.

There are no members of the war cabinet in this piece. There are no hostage families or Nova survivors here. He interviews Palestinian academics and Gazan social scientists. Only a few are willing to condemn Hamas. Members of Hamas leadership also speak to Remnick.

There are some important truths here, though; terrifying and urgent. One is that Israeli prisons are part of the problem, letting Palestinian militiamen live and talk and plot together. Another is that Hamas feels it has won the war, no matter what happens now, thanks in large part to the anti-Israel protests that have swept the West.

In short, those who insist the Gaza protests don’t boost Hamas are lying through their teeth – and Remnick has the words of Hamas top brass to prove it.

It’s a pity he, and the culture he represents, don’t seem to think this is a problem.