I’m a consistently boring person.

Since my high school years, my politics, my principles, ideology and values have been the same.

I’m a traditional liberal, civil libertarian, and civil rights advocate. I support equality, meritocracy, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and intellectual diversity.

I have not changed.

But the world around me has changed dramatically, requiring me to switch from being a Democrat critical of the Democrats to becoming a Republican.

Even as recently as 10 years ago I couldn’t have imagine myself uttering the words “I am a Republican.”

But recent events have pushed me away from the Democratic party and toward what I regard as the lesser of two evils – the deeply flawed but far better Republican Party

I still support much of the Democratic platform, especially with regard to domestic and social issues, such as abortion, immigration, separation of church from state and fair taxation.

But I cannot abide the dramatic shift of the Democratic leadership and much of its base away from its support for Israel and other critical foreign policy issues.

So if I could put an asterisk next to my registration form for the Republican party, it would say “foreign policy Republican.”

But registration forms require selection of one party over the other.

After I announced I was leaving the Democratic Party in 2024, for a short time, I became an independent.

But I soon realized that it was something of a cop out.

Moreover as an independent I had no influence over either party.

As a registered Republican and contributing to its candidates, I hope to be able to exercise some influence over some of its policies with which I disagree.

This is a question of priorities – for me and for our country.

The Democratic party has become the most anti-Israel party in modern history.

It openly embraces antisemitism.

And this comes at a time when Jews are the most discriminated against and attacked group around the world.

Accordingly, anyone who regards themselves as a liberal, civil libertarian and civil rights advocate must prioritize opposition to anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

You cannot join the crowds shouting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans -- nor can you stand by in silence as these thugs gain more power within the Democratic Party.

Good people must prioritize support for Jews and their nation-state at this time.

That is why I have decided to register as a Republican, ending my long association with the Democratic party and no longer describing myself as an independent.

At this time of increasing attacks on one group and one nation, staying “independent” is not an option for me.

I will lose even more friends than I did for defending President Trump’s constitutional rights.

Already I am getting emails, texts and calls from people urging me to reconsider my affiliation with a party that advocates many positions with which I disagree.

But I have made a choice – a difficult but necessary one.

Until the Democrat’s gain their sanity, I will do everything in my power to try to prevent the current Democratic party from taking control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency.

And I will choose to join the Republican Party because today it stands strong on some of the gravest issues facing America and the world.

I just saw the Broadway play “Giant” in which Roald Dahl is portrayed as a principled supporter of Palestinians, who was driven to antisemitism by his support for human rights. The largely left-leaning New York audience, which was of course denied the true background of this horrible person, were led to assume that because he supported what is today’s major left-wing cause — namely Palestinianism — he must have done so out of principle and commitment to human rights.

That is certainly the impression the playwright, actors and producers sought to convey. In that way they could present him as a complex figure who was willing to alienate many admirers of his children’s books because of his principled support of the Palestinian cause. Perhaps that is good drama, but it is bad history.

The ugly truth is quite different. Dahl was a fascist, a neo-Nazi and an extreme right-winger who came to the cause of Palestinians only because they were allegedly oppressed by the group he hated most: the Jews. The play presents it as a chicken-egg problem: which came first, his human rights support for Palestinians, or his antisemitism which grew out of that support. History provides a simple and sordid answer.

Dahl had no record of support for other minority, oppressed or marginalized group. In fact, he was antagonistic toward Blacks, immigrants and other minorities. He just hated Jews more than he hated them. He claimed that his opposition to the nation-state of the Jewish people grew out of his opposition to the war in Lebanon, but he was a strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher, who certainly was not anti-war.

Dahl’s hatred for Jews transcended Israel and the Palestinians. Mendaciously, he told people that Jews were cowards who didn’t serve in the British armed forces. Typically, he accused Jews of controlling the media, the banks and other institutions. Dangerously, he said that nations that persecuted Jews had good reasons for doing so. Even Hitler had some justification.

Sure, some of Dahl’s best friends were Jews, including his self-hating Jewish publisher. But the play, in its effort to attract audiences, focuses on his support for Palestinians, which is very much in vogue among theater goers.

Theater goers would not be interested in a play about Tucker Carlson’s pro-Palestinianism. They would see through his anti-Zionism cover for his obvious anti-Jewish bigotry. They would see no conflict justifying a theatrical presentation. They understand that most people who hate Jews automatically hate their state, and support the enemies of that state.

Israel is the Jew among states, and just about everything follows from there. No conflict. Well, Dahl presents no conflict either. Like Carlson, his hatred of Jews led him to claim support for the one minority with which the state of the Jewish people is in conflict. It’s really that simple and doesn’t deserve to be the subject of yet another literary effort to explore how Jefferson could have supported slavery, how Dostoevsky could have stereotyped Jews or why so many great men marginalized women.

Neither Dahl nor Carlson are great men. Their gigantic bigotry drowns out their smaller accomplishments. But you wouldn’t know that about Dahl by suffering through the mediocre play that is attracting Broadway crowds.

If I were a bit younger, I would stand outside the theater and hand out a leaflet telling the truth about the antisemitic source of Dahl’s pro-Palestinianism, but I’m too old for that. So I write columns, leaving it to others to distribute my views.

Even since a cease-fire was announced between the U.S. and Iran, anti-Trump extremists have been accusing President Trump of “war crimes” for his original attack. This is nonsense.

Trump reasonably and understandably believed Iran was close to developing a nuclear arsenal, which the mullahs might have deployed against Israel in the near term, and perhaps eventually against the U.S.

Regardless of whether the potential timing of this threat fits the traditional definition of “imminent” — which is to say, right on the verge of happening — it was real and would have been catastrophic if carried out. Accordingly, both the U.S. and Israel had the right — indeed, the obligation — to regard the threat that Iran would soon develop and deploy a nuclear arsenal as sufficiently dangerous to warrant preventive military action. Had either country waited until this nuclear threat was truly imminent, it might have been too late to stop it.

We can say this from experience. We waited too long with regard to North Korea, and that rogue nation managed to develop a nuclear arsenal under our noses. As a consequence, the Hermit Kingdom has been constantly threatening the world, and we can do nothing about it.

Iran, the world’s top state exporter of terrorism, would pose a far more serious near-term threat than even North Korea.

Even the United Nations, in its 2004 report on “threats, challenges and change,” acknowledged that even a non-imminent threat of nuclear annihilation by a hostile country might justify preventive military action under the right circumstances. As the former foreign minister of Australia, Gareth Evans, who served on the panel, put it, “The classic non-threat imminent situation is early-stage acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a state presumed to be hostile.”

It was such a justification that Israel used to preemptively destroy both Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear weapons programs before their threats became imminent. An even stronger case can be made regarding Iran’s nuclear arsenal program, since Iran has threatened to use it against Israel — which its leaders have called “a one bomb state” — and might well threaten to use it against other nations as well. Once Iran obtains a nuclear arsenal, it will already be too late for prevention or preemption.

Iran would not hesitate to drop a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv, as evidenced by its repeated targeting of Israeli metropolitan centers. But Israel would never retaliate by using nuclear weapons against Tehran, for two reasons: First, Israel never has and will never target an enemy’s large cities with a nuclear holocaust. The late hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose family was killed in the Holocaust, put it well in discussing a scenario involving a nuclear strike by Iraq: “That is not our morality. … The children of Baghdad are not our enemy.”

The same would be true of the current Israeli leadership and the children of Tehran, many of whose parents are strongly opposed to its current regime.

Second, were Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal, a strike against it may also entail the release of enormous amounts of radiation in many parts of Iran.

Israel therefore has no choice but to act preventively instead of reactively. Iran knows that Israel cannot deter its use of nuclear weapons by merely threatening retaliation against Tehran.

Professor Michael Walzer, who generally opposes military actions except as a last resort, put it well. “The Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 is sometimes invoked as an example of a justified preventive attack that was also, in a sense, preemptive,” he wrote in September 2022. “The Iraqi threat was not imminent, but an immediate attack was the only reasonable action against it.”

According to other reasonable scholars, the justification for a preventive or preemptive attack involves more than merely the temporal immediacy of the threat itself; it is a function of the temporal opportunity for carrying out the preventive action, as well as the seriousness and irremediability of a nuclear attack against its civilian population. This view was reflected by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who initially condemned Israel’s attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor but went on to praise it years later.

The same was true of Kevin Adelman, part of the American delegation when the United Nations condemned Israel. He subsequently regarded the Israeli attack as “the most wonderful example of preemption in the modern era. … Thank God Israel did that, looking back at it. The idea of Saddam Hussein being the main Arab leader with nuclear weapons since 1985 is frightful.”

The decision of whether to engage in preventive military action against the impending development of a hostile nuclear arsenal requires a balance of at least three factors. The first is the likelihood that the enemy would soon develop and possibly deploy a nuclear arsenal; the second is the degree of harm that be caused by such deployment; and the third is the reasonable expectation that setting back this threat for a considerable period of time is feasible militarily, or in combination with war-ending diplomacy.

In this case, all three of these criteria have been met, even if the existential threat was not so immediate as to categorize it as “imminent.”