The meaning of Wilders’s litmus test on Israel

A week ago I learned about, and immediately endorsed, Geert Wilders’s litmus test with regard to Israel. Here is the entire entry:

In his article today on Geert Wilders, Paul Belien writes:

Wilders regards support for Israel as the litmus test to decide with whom he is willing to cooperate.

In the excellent Wilders manner, this is stated so simply and directly. It gets to the heart of the issue and comprehends other, unspoken issues within it.

A lot of people at other sites, and a couple of VFR commenters, were put off by this, because they feel I’m making automatic support for everything Israel does a condition of conservatism. Of course by support I don’t mean automatic support for everything Israel does. I mean support for Israel’s existence, its right to exist and thus to defend itself—rights which much of the world at present denies.

Yesterday I wrote to Bjorn Larsen:

A lot of people got very annoyed with me for agreeing with Wilders’s litmus test, because they feel I’m trying to force them to support Israel. Do you think I made a mistake by doing that?

Bjorn replied:

Of course this was not a mistake, in the context of Wilders’s warning the world about Islam.

Islam’s continuous jihad against Israel, and our support for Western Civilization (in its roots based on Judaism’s idea of equality under God, and therefore equality under the law, and therefore freedom and civilization), must lead to our unconditional support of Israel in its fight to survive against Islam. This is what Wilders means when he says, “We are Israel.” Where Israel goes, so do we.

Support for Israel has nothing to do with being a conservative, neo, paleo or any other version, or a liberal. One’s political leanings on this existential question are as irrelevant as saying that freedom of speech is only a conservative issue, or, even more absurd, saying that we can only agree on the life-or-death issue of Islam if we also agree on social policy, taxation, and health care.

Support for Israel will be automatic for rational freedom-loving people—Israel’s survival is a universal and existential issue, as basic as freedom versus slavery. So let’s agree on the basic threat of Islamization and deal with specific policies when that problem has been solved.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2010 08:50 AM | Send