Shmuley Boteach: Before Coronavirus, We Should Have Cut off China, Iran over Human Rights

The coronavirus outbreak revealed “moral hypocrisy” on the part of global leaders, assessed Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of Lust for Love: Rekindling Intimacy and Passion in Your Relationship, describing the West’s decades of dealings with both China and Iran amidst human rights abuses across prior decades as acceptance of the two states’ “moral virus.”

Boteach offered his remarks on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with special guest host Joel Pollak.

“If you want to look for just how the coronavirus has exposed some of the moral rot of our society, you will notice that when China was imprisoning its own Nobel Peace Prize winner — a political dissident who died in custody and his wife was also imprisoned — when China was just brutalizing citizens for expressing an opinion, we had no issue visiting there,” said Boteach.

Boteach added, “[We were] not pushing them to better their human rights record. When Iran was threatening the Jews with a second Holocaust, we had no issues whatsoever in doing the Iran nuclear agreement, and the Europeans were running there to do deals for oil, but when there was a threat to our souls, our morality, our goodness, our ethics, our values, [and] our convictions, nobody gave a damn, but the moment there was a threat to our body … ‘Oh no, I’m not going to go.'”

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“It just kind of exposes the moral hypocrisy,” continued Boteach. “We should always have had issues with Iran, not because they have the coronavirus, but because they had a moral virus because they were not ethical people because the mullahs were monsters threatening a genocide.”

American foreign policy should be grounded in human rights, Boteach determined. 

“We have to be moral people, and our foreign policy should be governed not just by whether or not countries have infectious diseases, but whether they have a human rights that we Americans can respect,” Boteach said.

Asked about the religious response to the coronavirus outbreak, Boteach replied, “We have to emphasize life. We have to protect life. We have to promote life.”

Boteach concluded, “The correct religious response is, I think, for us to do everything we can to protect and promote life. We have to contain the virus. We have to listen to the doctors. We also have to pray, of course. We have to be prepared.”