There is a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty that dresses itself up as scholarship, and Nicholas Jagdeo has perfected it. In his three-part “Mirrors & Parallels” series for The Times of Israel Blogs, the Executive Director of the Understanding Israel Foundation wants us to believe that Trinidad and Tobago and Israel are geopolitical soulmates. It is a seductive narrative that attempts to wipe Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank off the table and out of history. His thesis is utter and complete nonsense, and it comes with a price tag attached.
Formula One vs. A Rusted Tanker: The Economic Mismatch
Start with the economics, because Jagdeo does, and because it falls apart fastest. He wants to place Israel’s high-tech export machine, a country that wrings 53 per cent of its exports from just 11 per cent of its workforce, alongside Trinidad’s oil-and-gas-dependent petrostate economy, and call them twins because both are “single-engine.”
This is the analytical equivalent of saying a Formula One car and a rusted tanker truck are “the same” because they both have engines. Israel’s resilience is underwritten by billions in foreign military aid and a conscription pipeline that funnels state-trained personnel directly into tech incubators. Trinidad’s survival depends on stabilising extractive commodity revenue and managing a sovereign wealth fund at the mercy of OPEC. One of these is an innovation economy; the other is a hole in the ground, and no amount of rhetorical sleight of hand can turn Port of Spain into Tel Aviv.
Dismantling Non-Alignment: The Push to Abandon the Global South
Then there’s the diplomacy, where his secret agenda stops hiding and starts screaming. Jagdeo claims both nations have watched multilateral bodies “fail” and are pivoting toward unilateral alliances. But Trinidad and Tobago has spent over sixty years, since 1962, building a foreign policy identity around non-alignment and consensus, including support for a two-state solution. That is not a bug in the system Jagdeo wants to fix. It is the entire system. When he frames CARICOM and the UN as broken, he is not offering foreign-policy analysis; he is laying a pretext for Trinidad to abandon the Global South and its regional allies, precisely the outcome the Understanding Israel Foundation has publicly lobbied for since Trinidad recognised the State of Palestine. This is not analysis. Jagdeo is parroting the instructions he was given.
Conflating Local Crime with Geopolitical Occupation
The security argument is where the essay stops being merely wrong and starts becoming dangerous. Jagdeo equates Trinidad’s homicide rate with Israel’s “existential” battles against Hamas and Hezbollah, as if a gang war over turf and state contracts is the same phenomenon as a genocide that involves the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Yes, children. Over 20,000 of them.
Trinidad’s violence is a narco-trafficking and illegal-arms crisis flowing up from Latin America, a policing and socioeconomic failure. Israel is an occupier. Jagdeo missed the point when he reached for the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen coup attempt. He cites Trinidad’s disproportionate per-capita ISIS recruitment to smear local crime with an imported Islamophobic brush.
This is deliberate. Mischievous and dangerous. And Muslims, not only in Trinidad and Tobago, but across the entire region, need to wake up and vigorously reject Jagdeo’s narrative because it advances the justification for Israeli counterterrorism, surveillance, and “security” contracts to be sold into Trinidadian domestic policing.
Defaming Trinidad’s Multicultural Model
He wants us to accept the myth that Trinidad and Tobago is an “ethnic frenzy” state, tribal and fractured like the Levant. Trinidad, however, is a secular constitutional republic built on a multicultural model with shared holidays, and fluid democratic power-sharing, not the structural primacy of one chosen group. Jagdeo shamelessly defames his country’s rich civic tapestry to lobby on behalf of a foreign state.
Follow the Money: Zionist Networks and Defence Contracts
Which brings us to the money, because “Mirrors & Parallels” did not write itself out of scholarly curiosity. Jagdeo is a documented alumnus of the Schusterman Family Philanthropies’ ROI Community, a multi-billion-dollar network built specifically to fund Zionist advocacy. The Understanding Israel Foundation supplements that with paid local memberships, a grassroots push into evangelical and Pentecostal churches for tithing and sponsorship, and its role as a matchmaker steering Israeli defence and surveillance firms toward Trinidadian government contracts.
Let’s be clear, Jagdeo is not an analyst. He is a charlatan who poses as a lobbyist while sporting the name tag of an op-ed writer.
