V Kamala Harris is an American success story. The daughter of immigrants and a ‘woman of colour’, she is convinced that racism and sexism are baked into the cake of America, yet has risen to the Vice Presidency. Imagine what she could do if not for racism and sexism — or will do if Joe Biden, as he did recently, takes a purler too many down the steps of Air Force One.
Of course, her job has long been decried as “not worth a warm bucket of spit”, to quote one truculent previous holder. The Veep is always the bane of the satirist. But not even the most laughable of her predecessors — a gang of chumps including, remember, jailbird Spiro Agnew, gaffemeister Dan Quayle and “stumblin’ Joe” himself — has quite reached her latest heights: to be an unwitting voice for Iran, a theocratic regime which regards the US as the Great Satan.
Even before the ayatollahs’ intervention, we should have been concerned by Harris’s behaviour on a visit to George Mason University, Virginia two weeks ago. The purpose was to celebrate National Voter Registration Day. This being a campus, the Veep had to do some mock-teaching on civics. And that’s where it all went south.
A student calling herself part-Yemeni, part-Iranian objected to US support for Israel. At the time, the Democrats’ rapidly anti-Zionist hard-left was trying to stop funds for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system. The funding, the student said, “hurts my heart, because it’s ethnic genocide and displacement of people, the same that happened in America, and I’m sure you’re aware of this”. She added: “Americans are struggling because of a lack of healthcare, public health care, lack of affordable housing and all this money ends up going to Israel.”
These are the big lies of our time. Israel soaking America for money at the expense of Americans? No. The vast majority of aid to Israel, and all Iron Dome money, is “earmarked”: it must be spent in the US, a vast subsidy for American workers, the sort of thing the left supports — unless it’s Israel.
The idea that Israel has committed genocide is laughable. No state, at least since the Soviet Union fell, has done more to create the Palestinian people. As for how genocide does work, ask the Native Americans, whose appalling suffering the student had the brass neck to invoke. Harris didn’t even address this insult to America’s most persecuted and impoverished citizens.
She nodded along, because these days, the “truth”, or what passes for it on campus, is that Israel is a variety of “white settler colonialism”. The truth, in fact, is Americans are projecting their guilt on to others, as powerful people always do. In the long run, this kind of self-delusion may be no less harmful than dropping bombs. Behind this genocide claim lurks “Holocaust inversion”, accusing the Jews of doing what was done to them. And behind that, there lurks the ancient fantasy that Jews control banks and politicians.
How should a Vice President respond to calumnies that fit her State Department’s definition of how anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism? The decent answer is, as Americans say, to “call it out” as lies and racism. But she praised the student and endorsed the lies. “I’m glad you said that,” she said. “Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth should not be suppressed, and it must be heard.” This is nonsense. We are no more obliged to endorse the fictions of the malicious or ignorant than those of the insane.
This “truth” is a series of untruths. One is that Jews are suppressing “debate” about Israel. As with the “genocide” claim, we’re not doing a good job, are we?
Press TV, the Iranian state media channel, was so delighted that it posted a video of this edifying teach-in, excitedly tweeting: “Student accuses US of funding ‘ethnic genocide’ by Israel in front of VP Harris.”
The timing could hardly have been better. Days later, Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, visited Kamala. Top of the agenda? Iran. Lapid greeted Harris as “one of the best friends Israel has in Washington”. Give the man a medal for keeping a straight face.
What does it mean when we’ve reached this pass, that the woman who’s a heartbeat away from the presidency is revealed as a useful idiot absent-mindedly serving our civilisation’s enemy?
“An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for his country,” said Sir Henry Wotton in 1604. In our more sophisticated age of democracy, it seems politicians no longer need to travel in order to disseminate lies.
Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition
