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Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again *
Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics. At the time, there was a fair bit of TheMotte discussion (including by me) which could be described as dismissive. Some choice quotes:
Yeah, about that... A few days ago Nick Fuentes did a full interview with Tucker Carlson. This was a mild surprise at most, given that Tucker has been dabbling in less-than-sympathetic viewpoints on Israel and Jews as of late. A lot of people thought that this would be the nail in the coffin cementing Tucker as a fringe figure, and that his days headlining major conservative events would end.
This appears not to have happened:
The Heritage Foundation is the Conservative Establishment think tank. It doesn't get more mainstream than them. What is striking is that the statement doesn't just contrast America with Israel, it contrasts Christians with Israel, a tacit acknowlegement of the legitimacy of Christian discomfort with Israel specifically because of their rejection of Christ. This isn't quite total groyper victory, but one can see it on the horizon.
From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad. The groypers are right that Israel doesn't act in America's interests and that many American Jews have dual loyalty. That's how coalitions work. A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side. Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King, but if he isn't, and it turns out we're all alone on this big round rock, then the groypers are blowing-up the conservative intelligentsia for no good reason.
*Apparently this is a series now.
You know that most of the reason the Near East hates the West is because of us propping up Israel, right? Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11 and the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea.
And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!
I tend to think that bin Laden was more insulted that Saudia Arabia chose protect itself from Saddam by having HW Bush set up shop rather than invoke his Mujahideen who were fresh off defeating the Soviets. That seems more salient in a lot of ways -- it was infidels setting up military bases in the holiest of Islamic countries and it was a personal slight. Moreover, the fight between Islamic Arab states and the secular pan-arabism of Saddam and Nasser was still in full flight.
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I'm pretty sure it's not even a majority of them at this point, as long as we use the expression 'support for Israel' in the Likudnik / AIPAC-ist context.
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I feel like that is both true but also sort of just an excuse to justify direct terrorist action against America. It was one reason among many, and I can't help but feel like if we were less supportive of Israel 9/11 would have still happened. We still meddle quite a bit on our own out there. I have a Ron Paulish stance on it.
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There is a legitimate geopolitical reason for propping-up Israel, but it sounds Machiavellian when stated explicitly. Israel cuts the Arab world in half, preventing them from coalescing into a caliphate which would be a global power. Israel is the cornerstone of America's divide-and-conquor strategy in the Middle East.
I'm no expert on the geopolitics of that region, but it seems to me if anything could bring them together, it's their common hatred of Israel.
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Arabs won't coalesce on their own, they need to be oppressed by somebody or they'll fight amongst themselves. So Israel beating up Iran and acting as a mild constraint on Turkish ambitions in Syria is the only way this actually happens, and both are newer than US support for Israel.
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The Arab world has tried this before - the United Arab Republic lasted three years, and it wasn't Israel that broke it up, it was Syrian elites resisting Nasser's power. The Arab world is simply too fractious to unite, they're even too fractious to cooperate in opposing Israel. Israel's proximity to the Suez Canal is more geopolitically important than the simple fact that it sits between Egypt and Syria (nothing is stopping Egypt and Saudi Arabia from uniting across the Red Sea, but that's clearly not going to happen).
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