Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.