By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, August 05, 2024
Israel has
killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr.
Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of the
new Iranian president; Shukr was killed in Beirut. The message from Jerusalem
is clear enough: Commit atrocities against Israelis—and let us remember here
that we are talking to a great extent about women and children, and almost
exclusively about unarmed civilians—then there will be nowhere to hide. Let us
hope that the gentlemen in Tehran take the appropriate lesson from this. The
ladies and gentlemen in Washington, too.
The ladies and gentlemen in New York, on the other hand,
appear beyond teaching.
“Netanyahu, Defiant, Appears to Have Gone Rogue, Risking
a Regional War,” shrieks
the New York Times. “Ignoring the efforts of President Biden and the
condemnation of many allies, the Israeli prime minister is forcing the pace of
the war and feeding the revolt of the far right.”
The headline above the essay by former Israel bureau
chief Steven Erlanger is a model of how to use words to avoid talking
about things. Benjamin Netanyahu is not at war—Israel is. And Israel is
not “risking a regional war.” Israel is involved in a regional war, one
that was forced upon it by Iran, sometimes using proxies and sometimes using
its own forces directly, as it did on April 13, when it attacked
Israel with more than 300 missiles and drones. The Houthis, Iran’s proxy in
Yemen, are waging war on Israel—including
a recent drone attack on Tel Aviv—as well as waging a war on the United
States, attacking
a U.S. Navy vessel in May, and conducting a wider military campaign against
shipping in the Red Sea.
So, Israel is involved in a war. Iran is involved in the
same war. Lebanon is involved in that war, too. So is Yemen. And—let’s go ahead
and emphasize this for a second—so is the United States. Hamas killed
Americans on October 7, too. And do you know who the late Fuad Shukr was? He
was believed to be among those who organized the 1983
attack on U.S. Marines stationed in Beirut, killing 241 American
servicemembers—the deadliest day for the Marines since Iwo Jima. (A
simultaneous attack killed 58 French troops.) In 1983, the United States
ignominiously turned tail and ran after the Beirut attack, with President
Ronald Reagan grievously miscalculating that it wasn’t our fight. More
Americans than you might think—including many on the right—had taken to heart
George McGovern’s message in “Come
Home, America.” (And the moronic caricature of Ronald Reagan that has
largely displaced the complicated historical figure in the American mind makes
it difficult to remember what a peacenik he was.) Americans had the
option of coming home, and we took it. The Israelis are home. There is
nowhere to go. And that is why the nation is mobilized—it is not Netanyahu’s
war, though it has been politically beneficial to him.
One of the factors at work in the current Israel
discourse in the United States—which includes explicitly pro-Hamas and jihadist
elements on the American left—is old-fashioned antisemitism, the belief that
the Jews simply cause trouble everywhere they are found by dint of their
inconvenient habit of existing while being Jewish. There are more
subtle versions of that, too, including the notion that Jews can be
authentically Jewish only when they are victims, that they somehow transgress
against the Jewish character when they defend themselves or look after their
own interests. But there also is the matter of Americans’ insistence upon
extending our own imbecilic partisan tribalism to circumvent the entire globe,
attempting to understand the complex realities of world affairs through the
distorting prism of American party politics.
Netanyahu is from the right, and so progressives
understand him as being part of that more general thing called “the right,”
whose most important constituent (for the purposes of American culture-war
reckoning) is the American right—but that also includes the British right and
anything to do with Brexit, the French right, the Italian right, the Hungarian
right, etc. As recently as the overlapping executive careers of George W. Bush
and Tony Blair or Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, it was possible (even normal!)
for politicians representing very different political tendencies at home to
work together internationally in the pursuit of common interests. But the left
cannot abide Netanyahu or treat Israel as a genuine ally so long as Netanyahu
is prime minister, and so the Biden administration finds itself unable to take
its own side in a fight, at least unable to do so with full commitment. If the
Harris campaign hopes to distinguish its candidate from her boss, it will find
the going tricky.
Whether Israel has a government of the right or a
government of the left should not matter very much to Americans. Israel is a
decent, liberal, democratic state whose people can be trusted to choose their
own governments and to manage their own affairs—and, more to the point, Israel
has been a critical and necessary U.S. ally under Israeli governments of all
characters and under U.S. governments of diverse kinds. That’s the thing about
democratic regimes: Governments come and go, administrations come and go, but
the country doesn’t stop being the country—as much as partisan hysterics insist
otherwise.
Partisan blinders and language that obscures meaning make
it difficult to see the plain facts. One of those facts is that Israel—and the
United States—are already involved in a regional war in the Middle East. What
do we mean to do about it? One option is to try to win the thing.
And, then, there’s the other option.
The Israelis give almost every indication that they mean
to win. And for the Israelis, “win” is effectively a synonym for “survive.” The
message from Washington is less clear. And there are two people in the United
States who can be relied upon at all times to bring the opposite of clarity to
any situation. One of them will be the next president.
Yoram Hazony Is Intellectually Dishonest
Every now and then, I feel the need to go on-the-record
publicly about something. And this is one of those times.
Yoram Hazony is intellectually dishonest.
Allow me to elaborate.
Last month, I attended NatCon4, the annual conference of
the so-called national conservatives, which is mainly a Donald Trump campaign
rally but also a nexus for the right’s nationalists—who are a funny kind of
nationalist after all, nationalists whose enemies are all in the United States
and whose friends are all in Budapest. I wrote
several pieces
about the event, including one about the religion-and-nationalism
panel, about which I could have written 10,000 words (and may yet; there’s
that religion-and-politics book in the works) but contented myself with about
2,000. Hazony, one of the main forces behind the NatCon conference, wrote in to
complain about the piece, arguing that I had given the panel insufficient
attention and that my piece was “angry.”
(When I write that Yoram Hazony is intellectually
dishonest, there are two possible explanations—one of which is that I am angry,
the other of which is the self-evident truth.)
Eh, big deal. People write in to complain all the time.
It’s what complainers do. But one of my colleagues got an idea: Why not take up
the matter in a debate with Hazony? And that sounds to me about as much fun as
getting a Prince Albert piercing, but, as Jonah Goldberg likes to say (quoting Lawrence
of Arabia), “I am a river to my people.” I’ll go to Washington to talk to a
doofus, or even a gaggle of doofi organized into a congressional subcommittee.
I’ve done it before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again.
So one of my colleagues wrote Hazony proposing a
conversation, and Hazony replied that he could not condescend to such a
conversation because—and here is the lie in the service of cowardice—I had
published scandalous antisemitic libels here in The Dispatch. “Kevin
Williamson used your publication to say that my Judaism is pure idolatry,” he
wrote. You’ll note the half-clever rhetorical gambit there: Hazony, faced with
criticism of his politics, insists that what’s actually being criticized
is Judaism.
I can understand why Hazony would want to avoid a
discussion. (“Why does baloney avoid the grinder?” as William F. Buckley Jr.
put it when describing his frustrated attempts to organize a debate with Robert
Kennedy.) I can understand his deploying intellectual dishonesty in the service
of intellectual cowardice—that is what dishonest men do.
Now that Hazony has so helpfully illustrated my point for
me, allow me to reiterate here what I wrote in the
original piece:
What morality asks of Donald Trump
is one question, but the relevant one here is what Donald Trump demands of his
adherents. The thou-shalt-not that should be top of mind here is not Trump’s adultery
(or his idolatry, or his coveting, or his lying) but the Trump movement’s
demand that its adherents bear false witness as a test of loyalty and condition
for good standing.
That Trump recently was nicked by
martyrdom makes it that much easier to sanctify the lies and the fraud and the
adultery and the cruelty and the bulls—t.
Is there a single honest Trump
apologist in America? I cannot think of one. There certainly weren’t any to be
seen at the RNC. All of them bear false witness: about the 2020 election, about
the origin of Trump’s legal troubles, about his business and political record,
about his character, about his religious convictions, about Joe Biden, about
the Democrats, about the state of the country, about Ukraine, about Russia.
Trump is dishonest himself and a spur to dishonesty in others. Read Steve
Hayes’ recent
conversation with born-again bulls—t artist Mike Lee to get a taste of it.
Yoram Hazony can stand up there and
declare that you cannot call yourself a conservative if you have any hesitation
about public displays of the Ten Commandments. But can you call yourself a
Christian—or, in Hazony’s case, an observant religious Jew—if you stand in
front of those commandments and systematically violate them in the cause of
political expedience?
The notion that I would argue that Judaism is
idolatry is preposterous. The notion that The Dispatch would publish
such a claim is preposterous. Yoram Hazony’s politics are febrile and
idolatrous. About his personal religious conviction, I know nothing other than
the fact that it is insufficient to keep him from being dishonest and
ridiculous. About Judaism per se, I have often observed that what my fellow
Catholics should learn from Protestants is love of Scripture and its study, and
what we should learn from Jews—our “elder brothers in faith,” as Pope John Paul
II called them—is abhorrence of idolatry. Perhaps by “my Judaism,”
Hazony means something other than what the rest of the world calls Judaism,
like when a callow kid with a head full of intersectionality talks about “my
truth.” But if what we are talking about is Judaism, then I believe my record
on the subject speaks for itself.
“Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But
not through me.”
Words About Words
Corn. It is a more subtle thing than you might
think.
Last
week, I quoted from James George Frazer’s The
Golden Bough:
If the festival of the first of
August was in its origin an offering of the first-fruits of the
corn-harvest, we can easily understand the great importance which the ancient
Irish attached to it, and why they should have thought that its observance ensured
a plentiful crop of corn as well as abundance of fruit and milk and fish,
whereas the neglect of the festival would entail the failure of these things
and cause the hair of their kings to turn prematurely grey.
What gives? some readers demanded. Isn’t corn a
New World thing? How would the ancient Irish have even known about it, much
less grown it?
In American English, corn refers to that yellow
stuff they grow a lot of in Iowa, the stuff those ethanol bastards make their
money turning into ersatz gasoline and forcing the rest of us to use. In
British English, corn encompasses grains and cereal crops categorically.
Don’t tell the USDA, but, for a great many English-speaking people, wheat is
corn.
What we call corn, many other English speakers
call Indian corn or maize. The English-speaking people who first
encountered maize in North America applied to it the word that seemed to them
closest.
So the Anti-Corn Law League, to take one example, wasn’t
concerned with restrictions on the trade and cultivation of what we call corn.
They were talking mostly about what we call wheat. The Anti-Corn
Law League is one of my favorite old political organizations; they
had a great newsletter, which we today know as The Economist. They
also had the better side of the argument way back when, and still do.
Economics for English Majors
Why did the Anti-Corn Law League have the better
argument, you ask? The same reason free-traders do today: Trade restrictions
are a scam. If trading with nefarious Canadians really were contrary to the
economic interests of ordinary Americans, we wouldn’t need a law against it:
Americans do not need to be coerced into looking after their
own affairs. But trade restrictions are never in the interests of
consumers—they are, at best, in the interest of politically connected and
influential businesses that wish to be rid of competition, leaving consumers
with no choice but to buy certain goods when, left to mind their own affairs,
they would have preferred others.
The Corn Laws were a particularly dramatic example of how
the politics of trade restriction actually work. There was a lot of
nationalistic huffing and puffing, talk of patriotism, and warning that the
British could not safely rely on scheming foreigners (especially the French!)
for critical goods. Free trade in corn, they argued, was a national security
threat as well as a force that would destabilize farming communities and
traditional ways of life.
Wait—who argued that?
The wealthy landowners who controlled the domestic corn
business, of course. The poor weren’t worried about the French, they were
worried about what the poor are always worried about: the price of bread.
Restrictions on trade are restrictions on supply, and where supply is
restricted, there will be upward pressure on prices. The landowning aristocracy
demanded to be protected from the scourge of low bread prices for the poor. And
that argument was successful for a very long time.
We’ve had it here, too. For much of the post-war era,
unionized autoworkers were paid outsized wages to produce terrible cars, the
profits of which inflated the incomes of much more highly paid executives and
relatively wealthy shareholders. When the Japanese entered the market with a
radical plan—build cars that don’t break down all the time!—the U.S. automotive
business demanded protection. And it often got it, even from erstwhile free
traders such as Ronald Reagan. But short of mining the harbors, no protectionist
measure was going to keep Americans from buying Toyotas and Hondas and what
used to be called Datsuns. We were treated to lectures by ill-educated oafs
such as Donald Trump that Americans could not compete with that fixture of
American economic discourse, the Asian Economic Superman.
In the 1960s, Japan was a relatively poor and low-wage
country, and so, of course, its firms could produce superior automobiles at
lower prices. Today, Japan is a rich and high-wage country, and so, of course,
its firms can produce superior automobiles at lower prices. The populists back
then talked about the Japanese the way they talk about the Chinese today. You
know: They don’t really value individual life the way we do, they are used to
working like slaves, they can subsist on low wages. The Japanese autoworker
“didn’t get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of
great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home:
death, or hitting his monthly production quota.” (All right, that last bit is
from Apocalypse Now, a film about Vietnam adapted from a novella about
the Congo Free State, but that’s how they talk, and you know it.) A few years
ago, the South Koreans were too poor and undeveloped to compete with; today,
the South Koreans are too rich and sophisticated to compete with.
There are whisperings of an Indian Economic Superman to
take up the torch that has passed from the Japanese to the Chinese to the
Koreans. I guess everybody east of the Urals will get a turn.
Elsewhere …
Here’s a weird mix: Andrew Rannells, Junot Diaz, and me.
Writing in
the Wall Street Journal, I consider the perplexing case of my
mother, who almost lost an arm to a poodle scratch but fed bears out of the
palm of her hand. The theme is, “What I Learned on My Summer Vacation.”
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