Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Alt-Alt-Right’s’ Numerous Misconceptions About Israel

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: So, Victor, I know that you wanted to talk about Israel, that’s sort of tag teaming with the [Nick] Fuentes discussion, who is, you know, clearly an antisemite, and the whole issue of Israel and antisemitism in the United States. So, it’ll be interesting to hear the truth about these wars and some of the misunderstandings about—

Victor Davis Hanson: Almost everything that we hear from the alt, alt—alt-right is a word that it’s kind of ironic because in German the word “old” is “alt.” And we use the same term for the Buchanan paleo old, that’s a Greek word. But so, everybody thinks it’s alt-right, the old right, old-fashioned. No. Alt means alternative, right? I would call what’s going on now the alt-alt-right, the alternative to the alternative. Because these are different even than the Buchanan Right.

Almost everything that Nick Fuentes and that group says about Israel is untrue. So, they say that neoconservatives and Jewish interests got us into the Middle East wars, Gulf War I and II. OK. Who are they? Well, they usually mention Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, right? Yes, they were in the Project for New American [Century]. They wanted to go, but they didn’t make the decisions.

Who made the decision, say, “I won’t go in the first Gulf War,” but who said they wanted to go into Iraq? I mean, not who wrote about it or who said they should or shouldn’t, but who actually made the decision? George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet—no one is Jewish.

The Israeli government was asked, “Do you think we should go into Iraq?” “No. Please don’t. Our existential enemy is Iran, and for all the evil of Saddam Hussein, he’s a check on it.”

They didn’t want us to go in. So, why did we go in? We went in because after the first Gulf War, we let Saddam survive. He broke all the rules, still we were gonna let him be. And then 9/11 came. And for better or for worse, we said, that team said, “We’re not going to allow Islamic radicalism anywhere.” They felt that he had harbored terrorists and he was going to try to go into the oil fields, like he didn’t before.

And remember, in the first Gulf War, we didn’t go into Kuwait because Israel said so. Israel was an—I mean, they were sending Scud missiles at Israel. Israel didn’t attack them. And we were saying, “Don’t attack them, don’t reply. We’ll reply. You can’t defend yourself. We will defend, but not you. We’re gonna attack Saddam.”

And remember, people ask James Baker, the secretary of state, about, he said, “F the Jews, they didn’t vote for us.” So, there was that, that’s crazy.

So, then why do we support Israel? Well, Tucker Carlson said that he hated Christian Zionists more than anybody, and I don’t know what he meant by that.

I don’t, when I hear that term, I don’t come—Karl Rove and John Bolton? I don’t think so. I mean, they’re, they’re more secular politicos, you know. But he mentioned former Gov. [Mike] Huckabee, who’s now the ambassador.

I am a person of Christian faith, but I don’t support Israel because that’s the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian. I mean, that’s something to consider, and I know a lot of people do. But I don’t come from it as the alt-alt-right accuses people. “Well, there are either a bunch of Jews or they’re kind of crazy Christian Zionists and they get us into this war and they want us”—no, I do it from U.S. self-interest, U.S.

So, No. 1 is, Israel is a constitutional parliamentary republic. They have elections. There’s no elections in Ukraine right now. We tell Ukraine—and I’m for all helping Ukraine not start World War III, but defending itself. But they have canceled elections. They have canceled political parties. They have censored the media. We have told them, “No ceasefires,” basically, until [President Donald] Trump came in.

We tell Israel, “Ceasefire. No collateral damage. You have to have elections.”

The second thing is, so, it is a parliamentary democracy surrounded by 500 million Arab Muslims, not one democracy or parliamentary republic among them. And then you ask yourself, “Well, we give them all this money, Victor, $3.5 billion a year.” Yes, we do, in military aid for 10,200,000 people. That’s a lot. However, it’s a return on our money because we contact, we get a lot of high-quality intelligence from their intelligence services.

No. 1, when we give them F-35s, they don’t call us up and say, “It’s broken,” like most countries, or “How do we do this?” They improve it and then they call us up and say, “You know, if you do this to the F-35, it works even better.”

When we were working on the Patriot system, they said, “Listen, we have done Iron Dome, now we’re working on Iron Beam. We have Arrow. This is valuable. It’s in your interest and our interest.” So, they share technology with us.

And more importantly, as I said before, radical Islamists killed 3,000 people. On 9/11, they killed over 300 at the embassy and the Marine barracks—Hezbollah did. The Houthis disrupted international shipping on the Red Sea. Hamas and Iran have killed Americans. Iran’s killed probably over 2,000 Americans in Iraq by sending shaped charges to Islamists that were fighting our troops. And Hamas, Palestinian terrorists have hijacked planes. They killed an ambassador, we know that, to the Sudan.

So, their enemies happen to be in this part of the world, our enemies. And they’re doing a lot of the things we wouldn’t have been able to—Tucker said, “You know, World War III, why are we taking out the nuclear facilities?” We’re taking out the nuclear facilities so they don’t get a missile with a nuclear tip and tell Europe, “You’re not going to do this and you’re not gonna do this ’cause we want to go to paradise and we will destroy you.” And we didn’t want to have a nuclear exchange in the Middle East between Israel and Iran.

So, we wouldn’t have been able to do that unless Israel had wiped out Iranian air defenses. So, we did.

I heard from the alt-alt-right that it’s a theocratic state, it’s a Jewish—no, it’s not. Seventy percent of the population of little 10,200,000 people are Jewish. That’s it. The other 21% are Arabs—Arabs, Muslims.

Do you think that there’s a population of 20% Jews in any of these Arab neighbors? I can tell you there might have been 5% or 6% in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi. There were at one time. And you know what happened? They were all ethnically cleansed, 1 million of them after the ’47, ’56, ’67, ’73 wars.

There’s no Jews to speak of in any of those countries. But there’s not just 20%, 21% Arabs. There’s 180,000 Christians. So when the alt-right says, “Well, in Bethlehem, the Jews ethnically cleansed all the Christians and they drove ’em out. And it used to be 80″—no, no, that was the Arabs that did that.

And where did they go? They went to the U.S., Europe, and Israel. That’s why there’s 180,000 Christians in Israel and there’s only 20% of the population of Bethlehem on the West Bank. It was just a complete distortion. And then, when you look at the Druze, there’s another 10% of the population that are Druze and other religions, and they’re all living in Israel.

And when you look at the 2 million Arabs—so, ask yourself, would you whether be a Jew living in any of these 20-something Arab countries or an Arab living in Israel? Well, we have the answer for it. There are no Jews in these places, and they were driven out. There’s 2 million Arabs. And you know what? They have one of the largest, I think they’re the second country in the Arab world as far as lifespan longevity. They have longer lives, and they’re the freest Arabs in the world.

You know that propaganda movie “Jenin, Jenin” about how the horrible Israelis destroyed Jenin? And all that was produced in Israel by Arabs. They have Arab studies programs in Israel. Nobody, you know, nobody thinks of that. Then you think, “Well, the country’s dependent.” No, it’s not.

Its gross domestic product now, I think—I just looked it up. This year it’s $60,000 per capita GDP. It’s higher than France, it’s higher than Germany—the standard of living. You go there today and Haifa looks like San Francisco around, I don’t know, the time they made “Vertigo” in the 1950s. It looks—the streets are clean, it’s sparkling. Everybody’s happy. It’s amazing.

And so, when we get this image, well, we prop it up because we give them, I guess we give them, I have it written down, $3.8 billion in military. That’s a lot. And I just explained, that’s a good investment. But the Congress just voted six bills. You know how much we’re going to give or have given or will give for the—we’re gonna give $175 billion to Ukraine, and we are giving to the dictatorships that surround Israel $1.2 billion. To Jordan, $700 [million], half a billion to Egypt, half a billion to Yemen. I could go on.

But all of these Arab countries that we are so afraid of that they will inculcate terrorism, we are giving them money, basically, to say, “Stop the radical Islamism.” So, I don’t know how, why there’s this hatred. So, then people are saying, “Well, there’s a, there’s this Jewish clique and they run at”— 35% of Jews in Israel are not marrying Jews. They’re going all over the world and marrying non-Jews, or they’re marrying Israelis who are no longer observant.

In the United States, the Jewish community is disappearing because people are intermarrying and intermarrying outside their—I wanna ask the Groypers. Can I ask you a question? If you are an Arab Muslim immigrant, are you more likely to marry someone who’s Arab and Muslim? Or if you’re a Jewish American, are you more likely to marry a non-Jew? Do you know the answer to that? It’s not even close.

So, your idea of a small clique of these medieval Jews that are doing all these weird—they’re running Hollywood. You know, they ran Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s, and maybe they’re overrepresented. But I don’t hear you talk about, as I said earlier, about the NFL being run by black players, or I don’t hear you—[former President] Joe Biden talking about the donut shops of America.

I go to every 7-Eleven when I’m driving back and forth, I have never seen somebody—I’m telling you the truth—that was not from Palestine or from India running a 7-Eleven or a quick stop. Do I think that’s some kind of organized cabal? No, I think that’s very industrious people, and they feel they’ve mastered this skill and they’re going to go ahead and do it.

So, I don’t understand why we fixate on this group when there’s this historic hatred of them. And I know why we’re doing it. As I said earlier, we’re doing it because this new generation of young males has been treated terribly, and they have been the generation that suffered the most from reverse discrimination and hiring in admissions to college.

Sixty percent of the student body are female women. They have this weird, bizarre, provocative Victorian moral code, our society does, where we encourage people to sexualize themselves. And then when you have intercourse, all of a sudden, you revert to Victorian protocols of, you looked at me the wrong way at the office, or after we had sexual intercourse, you didn’t call me, therefore, you harassed me.

It’s bizarre. And I understand all that. And AI is hitting this generation. But it was not the Jews that did this, and Israel is not being supported by the United States because of a Jewish cabal, and it’s not being supported by the United States by Christian Zionists that Tucker said he hated more than anybody in the world, more than the Nazis, more than, I don’t know, al-Qaeda. And it’s not being supported by any dark group of people in the shadows.

It’s being supported because it’s in our interest.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Alt-Alt-Right’s’ Numerous Misconceptions About Israel appeared first on The Daily Signal.