Rome—Italy’s debate over what to do about the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been overshadowed by a furious row over the ill-judged comments of Alessandro Di Battista, an MP for the Five Star Movement (M5S) and deputy chairman of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee.

            Founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo and catapaulted to success by his fiery rhetoric, the M5S appears to be developing the navel-gazing self-absorption of the corrupt traditional parties that it seeks to replace.

            As reports emerged of ISIS atrocities – forced conversions, the kidnapping of sex slaves, mass executions and beheadings – Di Battista provoked outrage by suggesting that the West should negotiate with the black-clad militants and that the resort to terror was an understandable tactic in an asymmetric conflict.

            Non-violent techniques were better, and he wasn’t justifying terrorism, Di Battista wrote on the widely read party blog, but “in the era of drones and of total arms disequilibrium, terrorism, unfortunately, is the only violent weapon remaining for those who rebel.”

            Strapping on explosives and blowing myself up on the underground might be the only option left, if I were a villager whose home was under bombardment by remote-controlled aircraft, the MP wrote.

            Terrorists were responding to violent actions and you couldn’t defeat them by sending more drones, but only by elevating them to the level of interlocutors, he added.

            Coming just days before the videotaped beheading of the American journalist James Foley, Di Battista’s comments seemed woefully inadequate in the face of the unprecedented barbarity of the Islamic State regime. Far from negotiating with the perpetrators of such horrors, their challenge calls rather for military defeat and public trials for crimes against humanity.

            Di Battista’s lengthy post contained a detailed indictment of US foreign policy in recent decades, put forward as a possible explanation for the terrorists’ excesses, and placed the crimes of the CIA on the same level as those of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.

            Islamist fighters may be indignant about the US invasion of Iraq, but their carefully nurtured sense of grievance is just as likely to take them back to the first crusade.

            “I wonder why people feel horror for Islamic terrorism and not for the coups promoted by the CIA,” he mused. “Is overthrowing a legitimately elected government simply for obscene economic interests, and thus provoking a civil war, less grave than blowing up an aircraft in flight?”

            Di Battista went on to ask whether an ISIS fighter capable of beheading a prisoner was actually that different from US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who “knowingly lied” to justify the invasion of Iraq.

            His historical and philosophical reflections were roundly attacked by members of the mainstream parties and even by angry readers of the Beppe Grillo blog.

            Among the few voices raised in his support was that of contrarian journalist Massimo Fini.

            Commenting in the pages of Il Fatto Quotidiano the day before the decapitation of James Foley was made public, Fini wrote: “All Western wars of recent years have been ‘asymmetrical’ and have encouraged, or rather imposed terrorist methods on our adversaries.”

            Dismissing efforts to export Western values and rights for women to Islamic countries, Fini said he stood with the low-tech head-cutters rather than the high-tech bombers, whose actions had killed 160,000 civilians during the Iraq war.

            “If I have to choose in this war of horrors, I choose the ISIS people,” Fini wrote.

            Even after news of Foley’s execution, Di Battista insisted that the “barbarous, unacceptable” violence that he had suffered was part of a cycle of tit-for-tat atrocities that included those in Abu Ghraib prison, the 9/11 attacks and “barbarous, unacceptable North American imperialism… that led millions of people to die of hunger.”

            His interventions naturally stoked hostility in the mainstream media, to which the M5S responded by calling for the sacking of three state TV journalists and instituting a competition to elect the most servile and hostile “journalist of the year”.

            The list of candidates included an elderly journalist who had recently died, and the winner was: Giuliano Ferrara, the outsized editor of Il Foglio.

            Ferrara responded with pithy scorn: “Gribbels (a combination of Grillo and Goebbels)? I don’t give a damn.”

            The M5S’ participation in political debate over the summer gave the impression it was business as usual: preening fighting-cocks pecking at one another while the cockpit and the world around them went up in flames.

            The crisis to the east of the Mediterranean represents a generational challenge that requires more from Italy than a symbolic one-day visit to Baghdad by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the holder of the revolving EU presidency.

            As ISIS attempts to redraw the post-colonial map of the Middle East, Italy should be part of the solution.

Home to the headquarters of Christianity, with a creditable record in humanitarian aid and security cooperation, the country has trade and political relations with the region that date back thousands of years.

            But the medieval savagery of ISIS -- an organization that wants to put the clock back to a time before clocks -- should have no place on the maps of the 21^st century.

            Di Battista insists we should stop considering the terrorist as “an inhuman individual with whom it is impossible to negotiate.” In the case of ISIS he may just be wrong.

            Philip Willan is the author of “Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy”.