“The question becomes,” he goes on, “how do you sustain democracy if you don’t have a Jewish majority? And then to say it’s Jewish by power, are there particular offices that have to be held by Jewish people? If so, what kind of Jewish people?”

First of all, El Sayed has it backward. Israel sustains a democracy because it’s a Jewish state.

I’ll tell you how you don’t “sustain a democracy”: by giving the Palestinians a state or any “right of return” to Israel proper. That would destroy any semblance of “liberal values,” tout de suite. Forget the nihilistic tyranny of Hamas, the regime that took power after Israel gave Gaza autonomy in 2006. Someone should ask El Sayed if he struggles with the fact that Fatah, the “moderate” wing of Palestinian politics, hasn’t put on an election in the “West Bank” for nearly 20 years. It has good reasons, of course. It knows extremists would win.

El Sayed can’t explicitly say that he opposes the notion of a Jewish state because he believes that a Palestinian ethnostate should take its place. Dissolving and creating a regional non-ethnostate ruled by a Palestinian majority is a sure way to create an authoritarian theocracy or fascist state. Ask the Middle East’s Christians how that kind of arrangement works out.

Then again, there isn’t a single genuine liberal democracy anywhere in the Islamic world. Has anyone asked El Sayed if he believes that Islamic nations that ban nonbelievers from entering cities, whip breakers of blasphemy laws, and function under the medieval diktats of sharia law are consistent “with any form of liberal values that we say we believe in here in the United States?” Why not?

Most Arab nations are artificial constructs of 20th-century French and British colonial rulers, who had little regard for any ethnic or denominational continuity or history, much less “liberal values.” Do they have a right to exist?

By any measure, the one Middle Eastern state that has laws and rights that align with American liberalism is Israel — a free press, rule of law, an independent judiciary, open elections, pluralism, and protections for the minority. By any measure, Israel has the most diverse and safest religious minority populations in the Middle East.

It’s true that Israel is an “ethnonationalist” state like, I guess, virtually every nation in Europe, for instance. It is primarily concerned with protecting people of Jewish ethnicity and culture. Not only is this important because the rest of the world has repeatedly tried to extinguish that ethnicity and culture, but also because the Islamists with whom El Sayed allies himself want to destroy it right now.

The biggest problem with El Sayed isn’t that he believes that people of Jewish descent shouldn’t be able to defend themselves, and their liberalism, in their ancient homeland, but that he doesn’t seem to think much of their safety here in the U.S., either.

El Sayed campaigns with Hasan “America deserved 9/11” Piker, whose string of violent rhetoric aimed at Jews and others is well known. When a Hezbollah fan rammed his car into a Jewish daycare center in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with the intent of massacring the children inside, El Sayed rationalized the act by contending that “hurt people hurt people.” This is an abnormal reaction in a healthy liberal society.

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It’s no coincidence that El Sayed is supported by Amani Barakat, chairwoman of Al Awda, a group that celebrates Hamas, calls for the destruction of Israel, and targets Jewish institutions in the U.S.

So, forgive us if we don’t care what El Sayed has to say about Israel’s existence.