It’s not so much that I mind you cheering for foreign countries. But the ones you pick are all dumps.

Yes, I am one of those who despises the World Cup because the city’s ethnics insist upon waving their ugly “home country” flags around.

However, I have Israeli and US flags on my desk.

(Not a Canadian one. Canada is just the amorphous blob I was accidentally born in, and now happen to plug my computer into.)

I don’t care if this is “hypocritical.” “Hypocrisy” only troubles leftists.

John Derbyshire pens a forward-to-your-friends column on the contentious neo vs paleo topic of “caring about Israel”:

I’ll speak for myself here. America’s my country, and the only one I’d be keen to fight and die for if the peril was great enough to need my sorry old hide set against it. I feel strong extranational attachments, though: attachments on behalf of which I’d be willing to give up money or time—or even, under conceivable circumstances, want to see my country commit warlike acts.

There’s the Anglosphere, that great collection of British-settler nations, together with Britain herself, in which I feel most at home, and which, in my opinion, have attained the fairest, freest, and least corrupt systems of government ever known to man.

Beyond the Anglosphere there is Western civilization—nations culturally descended from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Germania, Byzantium, medieval Christendom, and the Enlightenment.

It remains the case that any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates.

It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles.

It is also indisputably the case, as has often been said, that if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest were to lay down their arms, there would be peace in Palestine, while if Israel were to lay down her arms, the Israelis would be slaughtered.

At some level, I’ll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me—how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it.

The Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It’s an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I’d like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.

There’s an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo.

***
I take exception to Derb’s mention of “Athens.”

I understand what he means, but surely the present day inhabitants of Greece bear no genetic connections to the ancient ones.

For one thing, their old statues aren’t covered in hair.

For another, there’s clearly been an IQ drop of at least 20 points over the centuries. Were they invaded by Arabs or something?