The idea of national self-determination cannot be a license to subjugate. No individual, no group of individuals, no self-identified national community has the moral right to create a tyrannical regime.
The actual injustice is that America has sold out the region’s only free society, Israel—along with freedom-seeking people across the Middle East and among the Palestinian community—while empowering jihadist forces.
We need to take seriously the lesson of the last 25 years. It is because the peace process negated the principle of moral judgment, that it enabled the Palestinian movement to subjugate, indoctrinate, and impoverish its people while continuing to attack Israel.
Any rational view of our interests would recognize that Iran — along with Saudi Arabia — is a wellspring of the jihadist movement.
The United States could have defeated the Islamist forces in Afghanistan, but we did not believe we had a moral right to.
The Trump administration was right to withdraw from the U.N. Human Rights Council. But to truly uphold the principle of rights, the U.S. itself needs to take seriously the moral difference between freedom and tyranny.
Israel, the region’s only free society, faces a virulent movement fighting to eradicate individual freedom and to impose totalitarian rule in the name of Islam — the jihadist cause — and Iran is a leader of that cause.
Let’s recognize that the Palestinian movement is deeply hostile to individual freedom, and treat it accordingly.
For years, the U.S. has embraced Saudi Arabia as an ally, but at the deepest level, Saudi Arabia is hostile to our ideal of individual rights.
The Cairo regime is notorious for flouting individual rights, freedom of speech, and rule of law. If Trump takes those political ideals seriously, he should call out, rather than turn a blind eye to, Egypt’s persistent authoritarianism.
