John Derbyshire – When Christmas and New Year’s both fall on a weekend, that week in between is the silliest of all silly seasons in the Western world. Unless there’s a natural disaster, or some non-Western lunatic tries to start a war, nothing happens. So I’m going to write at length about the one newsy thing that did happen this week: the fuss over the U.S.A. not using its veto in the U.N. Security Council to take down a resolution critical of Israel. I don’t think it’s half as important as it looks.
To judge from my email bag and donation logs, I have a surprising number of readers in Israel. I say “surprising” because I hardly ever say anything about Israel or her affairs, and don’t actually know much about the place.
The last time I wrote at length about Israel was, I think, in mid-2010 at TakiMag.com, and that was only by way of putting down a marker. I had just started writing regularly for TakiMag, which runs some anti-Israel stuff, and I wanted to make my own position plain:
Any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse, both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles.
Aside from being a well-wisher of Israel in sentiment, though, I agree with Steve Sailer that we pay much more attention to the place that our national interest justifies, for reasons to do with the over-representation of Jewish Americans in the Main Stream Media and the wealthy-donor classes.