Dennis Prager Columns

What the Gates-Crowley “Teachable Moment” Really Teaches

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Readers on the left will be shocked, if not incredulous, to learn that neither I nor any conservative I know realized why the president asked Vice President Joseph Biden to join him, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley for their fabled “beer summit” at the White House.

I had simply assumed that the president invited Biden in order to lessen any tension by having someone with no connection to the case join the meeting. Likewise, another conservative, the producer of my radio show, Allen Estrin, assumed that the vice president was in the area and was spontaneously invited to join the trio. My engineer, Sean McConnell, just wondered why the vice president was there.

We were all blindsided by the reason that liberals apparently instinctively understood: to provide racial balance, as it wouldn’t look right if Sgt. Crowley were outnumbered two to one by blacks. In the words of the New York Times coverage of the event: “to add balance to the photo op that the White House presented: two black guys, two white guys, sitting around a table.”

This is highly instructive.

The fact that Crowley was outnumbered three to one by liberals meant little or nothing to most Americans on the left, because they deem race far more significant than values. Most conservatives, on the other hand, saw the president, the vice-president, the Harvard professor and the police officer, not two blacks and two whites. Indeed, such a calculation would have struck most conservatives as absurd: Was Sgt. Crowley supposed to think, “Hey, great, another white is at the table; now I feel secure”?

In order to deflect attention from the president’s gaffe in declaring that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” right after acknowledging both that he was a personal friend of Louis Gates and that he did not have all the facts, the president and his liberal supporters have told us that the Crowley-Gates incident would be a great teachable moment for al Americans.

It has indeed turned out to be, but not at all in the way the president has meant it to be.

All it has taught, indeed reconfirmed, is how much more race-conscious the left is.

And it has taught us once again us that no matter how little anti-black racism actually exists in America, most blacks and nearly all of the left deny this. That the vast majority of non-blacks are either proud of the fact or could not care less that a black man is president of the United States apparently means next to nothing to most blacks and most liberals of all colors. Too many blacks and liberals continue to see whites as racist and therefore to see black-white interactions as race-centered even when they are not.

In my 27 years of broadcasting I have taken a many calls on air from black listeners some of whom have told me that I do not what I am talking about when I speak about how little white racism there is in America. I am not a black, they argue, and therefore cannot possibly know how bad it is. These callers tell me that they experience racism every day as a black person.

My response has always been to ask, “OK. What was the racist incident you experienced today?”

In every instance, the response was something along the lines of, “Well, not today.”

To which I have always responded with another question: “OK, what was the racist incident you experienced yesterday?”

And, again, nothing was ever cited.

I don’t give up. I then ask the caller when the last time was that he or she experienced racism. Answers to that are usually unclear.

My point is not that there is no anti-black racism in America. It is that there is much less than most blacks and liberals think. Even when one assumes that ill treatment was due to racism, it is often difficult to know for certain.

I then provide my listeners with this example: Years ago driving home from synagogue, both my sons and I were wearing yarmulkes, or skull caps. A convertible car filled with young boys sped past me and yelled into the car “F--- you” and called my wife a “b---ch.”

I then said to my family, “I have finally experienced anti-Semitism in America.”

I decided to follow the car and, to my shock, they screamed the same obscenities at other cars, none of whose occupants were discernibly Jewish.

It turned out that the event was not what I was certain, and had every reason to believe, was an example of anti-Semitism, but just an example of young thugs acting thuggish.

So here’s the teachable moment: Harvard historian Louis Gates talked back to a police officer because he was treated as a suspect when he felt he should not be, given his fame as a Harvard professor. The professor was certain that the only possible explanation for such treatment was that he, Gates, was a black and the officer just another racist white policeman. The professor was wrong. The president was wrong. The press is wrong. Liberals are wrong. Even most blacks are wrong.

Many American non-blacks -- even those who did not vote for Barack Obama -- were hopeful that the election of a black as president of the United States would mean the end or at least the beginning of the end of the black and liberal view of America as racist.

And here’s the other teachable moment: We were quite naïve. As far as most liberals and blacks are concerned, nothing has changed.

Too bad.

10 Questions for Supporters of 'ObamaCare'

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget? Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time? Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and Medicaid before nationalizing much of the rest of health care?

2. President Obama reiterated this past week that "no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition." This is an oft-repeated goal of the president's and the Democrats' health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy? Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance? If auto insurance were purchasable once one got into an accident, why would anyone purchase auto insurance before an accident? Will the Democrats next demand that life insurance companies sell life insurance to the terminally ill? The whole point of insurance is that the healthy buy it and thereby provide the funds to pay for the sick. Demanding that insurance companies provide insurance to everyone at any time spells the end of the concept of insurance. And if the answer is that the government will now make it illegal not to buy insurance, how will that be enforced? How will the government check on 300 million people?

3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word "care" for the word "insurance?" it is patently untrue that millions of Americans do not receive health care. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance but virtually every American (and non-American on American soil) receives health care.

4. No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration?

5. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, "While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States." Given how many lives -- in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats' bill improve or impair Americans' health?

6. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a "public option"? Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care? How could a private insurance company survive a "public option" given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others' money -- i.e., taxes?

7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut? Haven't the laws of human behavior and common sense been repealed here in arguing that while doctors, hospitals and drug companies will make significantly less money they will continue to provide the same level of uniquely excellent care?

8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn't any meaningful "reform" of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits?

9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars? Even if all the other questions here had legitimate answers, wouldn't the state of the U.S. economy alone argue against national health care at this time?

10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama -- "we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren't any healthier for it" -- we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?

Americans Are Beginning to Understand the Left

Dennis Prager


There is only one good thing about the Obama administration's attempts to nationalize most health care and to begin to control Americans' energy consumption through cap-and-trade: clarity about the left. These attempts are enabling more and more Americans to understand the thinking and therefore the danger of the left.

The left has its first president -- with the possible exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- and for the first time controls the Democratic Party and both houses of Congress. In the name of compassion for the sick and the poor and in the name of preventing worldwide environmental catastrophe, it is attempting to remake America.

In so doing some principles of the left are becoming clearer to more Americans:

Principle One: The left, as distinct from traditional liberals, is not, and has never been, interested in creating wealth. The left is no more interested in creating wealth than Christians are in creating Muslims or Muslims in creating Christians. The left is interested in redistributing wealth, not creating it. The left spends the wealth that private enterprise and entrepreneurial risk-taking individuals create.

The left does not perceive that poverty is the human norm and therefore asks, "Why is there poverty?" instead of asking the economic question that matters: Why is there wealth? And the obvious result of the left's disinterest in why wealth is created is that the left does not know how to create it.

Principle Two: The reason the left asks why there is poverty instead of why there is wealth is that the left's preoccupying ideal is equality -- not economic growth. And those who are preoccupied with equality are more troubled by wealth than by poverty. Ask almost anyone on the left -- not a liberal, but a leftist like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi -- which society they consider more desirable, a society in which all its members were equally lower middle class or one in which some were poor, most were middle class, and some were rich (i.e., America today). And whatever they say, in their hearts, the further left they are the more they would prefer the egalitarian society.

Principle Three: The left everywhere seeks to make as big and powerful a state as possible. It does so because only the state can redistribute society's wealth. And because only a strong and powerful state can impose values on society. The idea of small government, the American ideal since its inception, is the antithesis of the left's ideal.

The cap-and-trade bill's control of American energy and the "ObamaCare" takeover of American health care will mean an unprecedented expansion of the state. Added to increased taxes and the individual becomes less and less significant as the state looms ever larger. Americans will be left to decide little more than what they do with vacation time -- just as Western Europeans do. Other questions are largely left to the state.

Principle Four: The left imposes its values on others whenever possible and to the extent possible. That is why virtually every totalitarian regime in the 20th century was left-wing. Inherent to all left-wing thought is a totalitarian temptation. People on the left know that not only are their values morally superior to conservative values, but that they themselves are morally superior to conservatives. Thus, for example, the former head of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, could say in all seriousness, “In contradistinction to the Republicans, we don't think children ought to go to bed hungry at night.”

Therefore, the morally superior have the right, indeed the duty, to impose their values on the rest of us: what light bulbs we use, what cars we drive, what we may ask a prospective employee, how we may discipline our children, and, of course, how much of our earnings we may keep.

It is dishonest to argue that the right wants to impose its values to anywhere near the extent the left does. This can be demonstrated to a fifth-grader: Who wants more power -- those who want to govern a big state or those who want to govern a small state?

The president of the United States and the much of the Democratic Party embody these left-wing principles. Right now, America's only hope of staying American rather than becoming European lies in making these principles as clear as possible to as many Americans as possible. The left is so giddy with power right now, we actually have a chance.

Why I Came to Honduras

Dennis Prager


"Why have you come to Honduras?"

That is the question posed to me by Hondurans, surprised that anyone from the outside world, let alone from the media, cares enough to now visit their small country (population 8 million), a country that they themselves consider relatively insignificant.

The question is a valid one. The U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert (through July 29) warning Americans against coming here. There are very few outsiders here now. The plane from Houston to San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second largest city, was almost empty, and the few passengers were nearly all Hondurans. The hotels are largely empty.

It is all eerily reminiscent of Jerusalem during the height of the Intifada terror. I went there then for the same reason I have come to Honduras now -- to broadcast my show and thereby show solidarity with an unfairly isolated country, and to encourage, by example, people to visit Israel then and Honduras now.

Honduras has joined Israel as a pariah nation. The United Nations has condemned Honduras by a vote of acclamation, and the Organization of American States has suspended it.

The way in which nearly all the world's media portray the legal, Supreme Court-ordered ouster of President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is one major reason for the universal opprobrium. Because military men took part in the deportation of the sitting president, it has been portrayed as a classic Latin American "military coup," and who can support a military coup?

The lack of context in which this ouster took place has prevented the vast majority of the world's news watchers and readers from understanding what has happened.

I wonder how many people who bother to read the news -- as opposed to only listen to or watch news reports -- know:

-- Zelaya was plotting a long-term, possibly lifetime, takeover of the Honduran government through illegally changing the Honduran Constitution.

-- Zelaya had personally led a mob attack on a military facility to steal phony "referendum" ballots that had been printed by the Venezuelan government.

-- Weeks earlier, in an attempt to intimidate the Honduran attorney general -- as reported by The Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady, one of the only journalists in the world who regularly reports the whole story about Honduras -- "some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general's office. 'We have come to defend this country's second founding,' the group's leader reportedly said. 'If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection.'"

-- No member of the military has assumed a position of power as a result of the "military coup."

-- Zelaya's own party, the Liberal Party, supported his removal from office and deportation from Honduras.

-- The Liberal Party still governs Honduras.

The United States is threatening to suspend all aid to one of the three poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere in order to force that country -- against its own laws and with the inevitable violence it would entail -- to allow Zelaya back as president.

Yet, no Honduran I talked to said he or she wanted Honduras to cave in to the American financial threat. "We will tighten our belts," one man struggling to make a living told me. Indeed, what is happening is that Hondurans are coming to realize that American aid -- even purely humanitarian aid -- comes with strings.

In our increasingly morally confused -- i.e., left-wing influenced -- world, even America is having a harder and harder time distinguishing between right and wrong as it comes to value realpolitik and a desire to be loved, from Iran to Venezuela to Honduras, more than it values liberty. To the extent that Americans will be loved, it will be thanks to supporting liberty and thanks to the work of

American charities such as Cure International, with its pediatric orthopedic hospital here and in other impoverished places (www.cureinternational.org).

Let there be no ambiguity here. Little Honduras was supposed to be the next country to lose its liberties as it joined the anti-American, pro-Iranian Latin American left. But Little Honduras decided to fight back. And this has infuriated Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who will surely attempt to foment violence in Honduras.

Therefore, if you love liberty, you will do whatever you can do help Honduras resist Chavez and his allies, which include the United Nations and Organization of American States.

There are many ways to do that. Buy Honduran goods. Write your representatives in Washington to back the present, law-based Honduran government. And, yes, even visit this friendly beleaguered place. When the world's governments isolate a country, with few exceptions, that's all you need to know about who the good guys are.

Obama Is in Russia, but Honduras Is Where the Action Is

Dennis Prager


The importance of the summit meeting in Moscow between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pales in comparison to the events taking place in Honduras.

Whether or not the United States and Russia reduce their nuclear arsenals is ultimately meaningless. But whether Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro are victorious in Honduras or whether the movement toward left-wing authoritarianism is finally defeated in a Latin American country is extremely significant.

The courage of the pro-liberty forces in Honduras is almost miraculous. It is almost too good to be true, given Honduras' consequent isolation in the world.

Even if you know little or nothing about the crisis in Honduras, nearly all you need to know in order to ascertain which side is morally right is this: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Cuba's Castro brothers, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States are all lined up against Honduras.

And what troubles these good people? They claim that there was a military coup in Honduras that renders the present government illegal.

Here, in brief, are the facts. You decide.

The president of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya, a protege of Hugo Chavez, decided that he wanted to be able to be president for more than his one term that ends this coming January -- perhaps for life. However, because the histories of Honduras and Latin America are replete with authoritarians and dictators, Honduras's constitution absolutely forbids anyone from governing that country for more than one term.

So, Zelaya decided to follow Chavez's example and find a way to change his country's constitution. He decided to do this on his own through a referendum, without the congressional authorization demanded by Honduras's constitution. He even had the ballots printed in Venezuela.

As Mary Anastasia O'Grady, who writes The Americas column in the Wall Street Journal, explains: "A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress. But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chavez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela."

The Honduras Supreme Court ruled Zelaya's nonbinding referendum unconstitutional, and then instructed the military not to implement the vote as it normally does. When the head of the armed forces obeyed the legal authority, the Honduran Supreme Court, rather than President Zelaya, the president fired him and personally led a mob to storm the military base where the Venezuela-made ballots were being safeguarded.

As Jorge Hernandez Alcerro, former Honduran ambassador to the United States, wrote, "Mr. Zelaya and small segments of the population tried to write a new constitution, change the democratic system and seek his re-election, which is prohibited by the constitution."

In order to stop this attempt to subvert the Honduran constitution, while keeping Honduras under the rule of law and preventing a Chavez-like dictatorship from developing in its country, the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest Zelaya. They did so and expelled him to neighboring Costa Rica to prevent certain violence.

Was this a "military coup" as we understand the term? Columnist Mona Charen answered this best: "There was an attempted coup in Honduras, but it was Zelaya who initiated it, not his opponents."

Or, to put in another way: When did a military coup ever take place that was ordered by that country's supreme court, that was supported by the political party of the president who was overthrown, in which not one person was injured, let alone killed, and which replaced the ousted the president with the president of the country's congress, a member of the same party as the ousted president?

But none of this matters to the United Nations, which never met a left-wing tyrant it didn't find appealing. That is why the president of the U.N. General Assembly, a former Sandinista foreign minister, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, accompanied Zelaya in the airplane on Zelaya's first attempt to return to Honduras on July 5. (Brockmann, among his other radical moral positions, is so virulently anti-Israel that the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations threatened not to attend the U.N. Holocaust Memorial Day event if Brockmann showed up.)

And none of this matters to the OAS, which just lifted its ban on Cuba's membership and which says nothing about Chavez's shutting down of Venezuela's opposition radio and television stations.

And none of this matters to the world's left-wing media. Thus, on July 1, a writer for the United Kingdom newspaper The Guardian penned this insight: "There is no excuse for this coup. … The battle between Zelaya and his opponents pits a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a Mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite." To the Guardian writer, Zelaya was a "reform president." Lenin's useful idiots never die out.

And the Los Angeles Times editorial page wrote: "Even though the Honduran Congress and military may believe they are defending the country against a would-be dictator, the ends don't justify the means."

Quite a great deal of foolishness in one sentence. That the Los Angeles Times does not believe that Zelaya is a would-be dictator is mind-numbing. As for the cliche that "the ends don't justify the means," in fact they quite often do. That is one of the ways in which we measure means. One assumes that while the Los Angeles Times believes that Americans should be law-abiding, it agrees with Rosa Parks having broken the law. The ends (fighting segregation) justified the means (breaking the law).

If Honduras is hung out to dry, if America suspends trade and economic aid, the forces arrayed against liberty in Latin America will have won a major victory. On the other hand, if Honduras is not abandoned now, those Iran-supporting, America-hating, liberty-loathing forces will have suffered a major defeat.

Even members of the Obama administration recognize this. As quoted in the Washington Post, Jeffrey Davidow, a retired U.S. ambassador who served as President Obama's special adviser for the recent Summit of the Americas, said:

"The threats against democracy in Latin America … are not those coming from military coups, but rather from governments which are ignoring checks and balances, overriding other elements of government."

Let your representatives in Congress know that America needs to stand with liberty, not with Castro, Ortega, Zelaya, Chavez, the OAS, and the U.N. And buy Honduran goods. I am smoking a terrific Honduran cigar as I write these words: God bless Honduras.

Stoning of Soraya M.: See This Film (or Stop Complaining About Hollywood)

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

With the possible exception of university administrations, there is no institution as bereft of courage as Hollywood.

In Hollywood courage is defined as savaging oil, power and tobacco executives on film. Or producing yet another movie on the evils of the Iraq War. But if courage means doing what is unpopular -- especially among one’s peers -- I can recall precious few politically incorrect films made in the last decade ("The Dark Knight" comes to mind as a possible exception).

How many politically incorrect movies has Hollywood made in the last generation? How many films, for instance, have depicted communist evil? Given that Communism murdered more than 100 million innocents -- in peacetime! -- and enslaved about 1 billion more, one would think that Hollywood would have made a fair number of movies depicting the horrors of communism. But aside from "Dr. Zhivago" and "The Killing Fields," I cannot think of any. There are, of course, innumerable films depicting Nazi evil -- as well there should be -- but it takes no courage to make films depicting Nazis as evil.

Likewise, given Sept. 11, the slaughter of innocents around the world, and the atrocities within the Muslim world committed by “Islamists,” “Islamic fundamentalists,” “jihadists,” “Muslim radicals”

“Islamofascists” -- or whatever other term one prefers -- one would think that Hollywood would have made many films on this subject. But it hasn't.

Yet, now, released as if by Providence the week after the fraudulent elections in Iran and the suppression and murder of Iranian dissidents, is a film about the nature of the radical Muslims who govern Iran. Titled "The Stoning of Soraya M.," the film depicts events based on the true story of a woman stoned to death in a rural village in Iran in 1986 for allegedly committing adultery.

If you want to understand the type of people who run Iran, see this film. If you want to understand why men and women risk their lives to demonstrate against the fascist theocracy that rules Iran, see this film. The film is about the type of people who become “supreme leader” (Ali Khamanei) or president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). It is about their mendacity, their use of religion to commit barbarity, and, of course, their despicable treatment of women.

And don’t see it solely in order to understand what the dissidents in Iran are fighting -- though that would be an entirely valid reason. See it also because it is a powerful theatrical and emotional experience. Washington Post reviewer Dan Zak wrote that he wept while watching the movie. The Wall Street Journal described "The Stoning of Soraya M." in these words: “This is classic tragedy in semi-modern dress that means to horrify, and does so more successfully than any film in recent memory.” Los Angeles Times film reviewer Kevin Thomas wrote that the film, achieves “the impact of a Greek tragedy through its masterful grasp of suspense and group psychology, and some superb acting.” And Claudia Puig of USAToday called the film “emotionally explosive,” a “shattering and powerful drama.”

On the other hand, Amnesty International loathed the film. Which is another good reason to see it. This organization is morally confused. It has become a leftist organization in the guise of a human rights organization. It calls the film “sensationalist” because “the audience response is likely to be disgust and revulsion at Iranians themselves, who are portrayed as primitive and blood-thirsty savages.” I wonder if there are 10 people who see this film who will then conclude that Iranians in general -- as opposed to many religious fundamentalists among them -- are “primitive and bloodthirsty savages.”

Furthermore, Amnesty International argues, Iranians and foreign human rights organizations are already fighting for women and against such atrocities as stoning. Therefore, the film is unnecessary. If you don’t follow that argument, you are not alone.

Finally, the most important reason to see the film could be this:

Many of us lament Hollywood’s lack of courage, its lack of moral seriousness, and its political correctness. Here, then, is a courageous, morally deep, and politically incorrect film that mainstream reviewers -- as cited above -- have lavished praise on. It should be the ideal film for serious Americans who properly complain about Hollywood’s offerings. But if a riveting drama with a courageous theme, Oscar-level acting, which is as relevant as today’s headlines, fails at the box office, Hollywood will have been vindicated.

It therefore seems clear to me that those who do not see this film have forfeited the right to complain about Hollywood.

Senator Embarrassment, D-Calif

Dennis Prager


Last week, a brief moment in time captured much that has gone wrong with post-'60s liberalism and feminism.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers was testifying at a hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. At one point during his responses to questions posed by the Committee Chair, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the senator interrupted the general to admonish him about using the word "ma'am" when addressing her:

"You know, do me a favor," Boxer said in an annoyed tone of voice. "Could you say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?' It's just a thing; I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it. Yes, thank you."

"Yes, senator," the humiliated general responded.

The oxygen was sucked out of the room by Sen. Boxer's remarks.

It is hard to know where to begin in describing how reduced the U.S. Senate was at that moment. It is not due to differing politics that many in California are embarrassed to have Boxer as their senator; few Californians who differ from Sen. Dianne Feinstein are embarrassed by her.

To think that a body once called "the world's most deliberative" was reduced to this juvenile level is to mourn for America. The immaturity of a U.S. senator needing to ask to always be responded to as "senator" rather than "ma'am" in an ongoing dialogue with someone -- of equal stature, it should be noted -- should be self-evident to anyone.

However, in case it is not, two arguments should make this clear.

First, people in the military are taught to call their superiors "ma'am" and "sir." Thus, for example, a sergeant responding to a general will say, "Yes, sir," to a male general and, "Yes, ma'am," to a female general. Though not in the military, I always feel honored when a caller to my radio show says calls me sir. And I always have renewed respect for the military for inculcating that respectful form of address into its members.

To object to being called sir or ma'am by anyone, especially a member of the military and especially a high ranking member of the military is to betray an ignorance of the military and a tone deafness to civility that is appalling in anyone, especially a member of the United States Senate .

Second, and both more revealing and more instructive, is to understand how inconceivable it would be for a male senator to make such comments. Neither a Democrat nor Republican could imagine a male senator interrupting the testimony of a brigadier general to admonish him publicly, "You know, do me a favor. Could you say 'senator' instead of 'sir?' It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it."

If a male senator had said that, he would rightly be regarded as insecure, narcissistic, arrogant, and juvenile. Which is precisely why no male senator would ever say such a thing: He would know that he would be the laughingstock of the U.S. Senate.

For example, every Obama press conference transcript I read included journalists calling President Obama "sir," as was true for previous presidents. Can one imagine President Obama halting the conference to announce that because he had worked hard to earn the title, he expects never to be called "sir," but only "president"? It is inconceivable. People would have thought he had lost his mind.

Why did Boxer fail to think that way?

The answer is not only because she happens to act foolishly and childishly. The reason is deeper. Liberalism has lowered expectations of behavior for everyone in America except white Christian heterosexual males. They are the only Americans from whom dignified and mature conduct is always expected. Liberals treat women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, and many non-Christians, with what is known as the soft bigotry of low expectations. Many liberal women, blacks, Hispanics, and gays know that and use it to get away with conduct and speech that no WASP heterosexual male could. People rise or descend to the level of behavior expected of them.

That is why those 17 seconds in the U.S. Senate were so revealing and worthy of attention. They encapsulated the way in which modern liberalism has lowered the bar of civility for so many in America. And they revealed -- yet another time -- why this particular senator from California is an embarrassment to her colleagues, her state, and the U.S. miltary. It was not, unfortunately, an embarrassment to Barbara Boxer.

Dear Iranians: Don't Count on America (or Any Country Led by Left)

Dennis Prager


"The administration has remained as quiet as possible during the Iranian election season and in the days of street protests since Friday's vote."

-- Washington Post , Monday June 15, 2009

"We're going to withhold comment. … I mean we're just waiting to see."

-- Vice-President Joe Biden

"We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran but we, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide."

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

"Most countries appeared to be taking a wait-and-see approach, including the European Union and China, Germany, Italy and Japan -- nations with strong economic ties to Iran. France said it was closely following the situation."

-- Associated Press, June 13, 2009

For those who look to "world opinion," "the opinion of mankind," or to the United Nations for moral guidance or for coming to the aid of victims of oppression, the past few days and presumably the next few days in Iran, provide yet another example of their uselessness.

A million or more Iranians are demonstrating against last Friday's obviously stolen election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the world -- except for the lowlifes who rule places like Venezuela and Syria and who immediately sent their effusive congratulations to Ahmadinejad -- is quiet. The world is "closely following the situation," just as it followed the situations of the Jews during the Holocaust, the Ukrainians, the Chinese under Mao, the Rwandans, the Cambodians, Tibetans, and so many others.

I have long believed that the citizens of most free countries do not deserve the gift of freedom that they have. Few have any interest in promoting freedom, only in having it for themselves. Insofar as other countries are concerned what matters to most free countries, as to dictatorships, is power.

That is what America and Europe are watching -- where the power in Iran will go. Whoever wins will get free America and free Europe's respect.

Now it may be argued that if the American president speaks out in support of those demonstrating for free elections in Iran, it will be counterproductive.

How exactly? What will the unelected President Ahmadinejad and the unelected Supreme Ruler, Grand Ayatollah, the pre-medieval Ali Khamenei do? Get angry at America? Threaten to annihilate another country? Start building nuclear arms? Stone women who commit sexual sins? Hey, wait, haven't they done all that already?

As bad as most of the world's countries are, those led by left-wing governments are even worse when it comes to defending democracy.

A primary reason America is "waiting" and "watching" and "monitoring" while Iranians are beaten in the streets of Tehran is that the country is led by the left.

Compare the Canadian reaction, now that it has a conservative government:

On the very next day after the Iranian elections, according to CNN, "Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon told reporters in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Saturday, that Canada was 'deeply concerned' about allegations of voting irregularities. 'We're troubled by reports of intimidation of opposition candidates' offices by security forces.'"

Even usually appeasing Germany, now led by a more conservative government, had a sharper response than America:

As reported by CNN, "German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told ARD Sunday that the Iranian ambassador in Berlin would be summoned to explain the treatment of protesters against the result. 'I have already prompted Iran, together with European colleagues today, to quickly shed light on what has happened there -- if one can take the announced election results there seriously or not," he added.

And Germany's Deutsche Welle reported on Monday, June 15:

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she is very concerned and condemns the wave of arrests following the Iranian election."

Now compare Labor-led Britain's response:

As reported by CNN: "U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Saturday that the U.K. government had 'followed carefully, and admired, the passion and debate during the Iranian election campaign. We have also heard the concerns about the counting of ballots expressed by two of the candidates. This is a matter for the Iranian authorities to address. We will continue to follow developments.'"

"This is a matter for the Iranian authorities to address." Surely a proud moment for Britain.

The best example comes, as it often does, from that quintessential man of the left, former President of the United States Jimmy Carter, speaking from -- where else? – the Palestinian City of Ramallah: "I think this election has brought out a lot of opposition to (Ahmadinejad's} policies in Iran, and I'm sure he'll listen to those opinions and hopefully moderate his position."

Not everyone on the left is "sure" that Ahmadinejad will "listen" to his opponents' opinions. But that level of naivete regarding evil is almost exclusive to the left.

The Speech President Obama Won’t Give in Egypt

Dennis Prager


This week, President Barack Obama is scheduled to give a major address in Cairo to the Muslim world. He is likely to reiterate what he has stated previously to Muslim audiences, that America has no battle with Islam, deeply respects Islam and the Muslim world, and apologizes for any anti-Muslim sentiment that any Americans may express.

Here is what an honest address would sound like:

"Thank you for the honor of addressing the Egyptian people and the wider Muslim world.

"I am here primarily to dispel some of the erroneous beliefs many Muslims have about America and to thereby reassure you that America has no desire to be at war with the Muslim world.

"To my great disappointment, many Muslims have come to believe that my country has declared war on Muslims and Islam.

"Because of this widespread belief, I said in an interview with al-Arabiya a few months ago, that we need to restore “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

"Lets’ look a little deeper at that relationship. For the truth is, as noted by the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the American newspaper the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in the last 20-30 years America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for Muslims. We Americans engaged in five military campaigns on behalf of Muslims, each one resulting in the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims -- in which] 43 Americans were killed -- were all humanitarian exercises. In none of them was there a significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. So, in fact, in these 20 years, my country, the United States of America has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any other nation, Muslim or non-Muslim.

"While I recognize that gratitude is the rarest positive human quality, I need to say -- because candor is the highest form respect -- that America has not only not received little gratitude from the Muslim world, it has been the object of hatred, mass murder, and economic attack from Muslim individuals, groups, and countries.

"Just to cite a few of many examples from the last 40 years:

"In 1973, Muslim terrorists attacked the American embassy in Sudan and murdered our country’s ambassador, Cleo Noel, and the chief deputy of the mission, George C. Moore. Later in 1973, the Arab oil embargo against America sent my country into a long and painful recession. In 1977, Muslim militants murdered the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Frances E. Meloy, and Robert O.Waring, the U.S. economic counselor. In 1979 radical Muslims violently attacked my country’s embassy in Teheran, and for 14 months held American diplomats hostage, often in appalling conditions. In 1998, Muslim militants bombed the American embassy in Nairobi, killing 12 Americans and 280 Kenyans, and bombed our embassy in Tanzania, killing another 11 Americans. Then, on Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Muslims who had been living in America slit the throats of American pilots and flight attendants and then flew airplanes into civilian buildings in New York City, burning 3,000 innocent Americans to death.

"So, my friends here in Egypt, between America and the Muslim world, who exactly has been making war on whom?

"I have enormous differences with my predecessor, President George W. Bush. But please remember that less than a week after thousands of Americans were slaughtered in the name of your religion, President Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., and announced that Islam was a religion of peace. Moreover, in a country of 300 million people, of whom only a few million are Muslim, there is virtually no recorded incident of anti-mosque or other anti-Muslim violence despite the butchery of 9/11 and the popular support for Osama Bin Laden that we saw in the Muslim world after 9/11.

"I ask you to please ask yourselves what Egypt’s reaction would have been had 19 Christians, in the name of Christianity, slaughtered 3,000 Egyptians. How would the Christians of Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East have fared?

"As it is, because of persecution by Muslim majorities, Christians have been leaving the Middle East in such great numbers that for the first time since Christ, there are large parts of the Middle East that have become empty of both Jews and Christians.

"Yet, at the same time, millions of Muslims have moved to Western countries and to America. It is fair to say that the freest, and often the safest, place in the world for a practicing Muslim is the United States of America.

"Muslim-Americans are treated exactly as other Americans are treated. It is exceedingly rare to hear any anti-Muslim bigotry in my country. And while there is some criticism of the Muslim world, but there is far more criticism of Christianity in America than of Islam.

"Unfortunately, in much of the Muslim world today anti-Jewish speeches and writing are frequently identical to the genocidal anti-Semitism one heard and read in Nazi Germany. This is a blight on your civilization. How can you seriously charge that America is at war with Islam when in fact it is much of the Islamic world that is at war with Jews and Christians?

"I know that you would like me to announce that America is abandoning its support for Israel. But every president since Harry Truman, Democrat and Republican, has been passionate about enabling Israel to defend itself from those who wish to destroy it. And that, dear Muslims, is the issue. America will continue to support a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute, but the issue has never really been about two states. It has always been about Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

"As a friend of Egypt and of the Muslim world, I want to say something from the bottom of my heart: The day the Arab world ceases obsessing over the existence of a Jewish state the size of Belize will be a great day for the Arab and Muslim worlds. Your obsession with Israel has cost you dearly in every area of social development. This is easily demonstrated. If Israel were destroyed -- and the so-called “right of return” of millions of third-generation Palestinian refugees would ensure that outcome as effectively as would a nuclear device from Iran -- what difference would that make to the Egyptian economy, to Egyptian lack of freedoms, or anything else that matters to Egyptians? In my opinion, none whatsoever. Preoccupation with Israel has simply enabled the Arab world to not look within for 60 years.

"Finally, my fellow Americans would feel more confident in American-Muslim relations if they had ever seen a large demonstration of Muslims anywhere against all the terror committed by Muslims in the name of Islam -- whether in London, Madrid, New York, Bali, Cairo, or Mumbai. The mark of a great civilization -- and Arab civilization was indeed once great -- is a willingness to criticize itself.

"Thank you again for this opportunity to address you. I could have patronized you by exaggerating American misdeeds and ignoring yours. But I have too much respect for you.

"Shukran jiddan."

President Has “More Effective” Method to Get Intel from Terrorists – What Is It?

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

In his latest address – on Guantanamo detainees – President Obama said something of extraordinary importance that seems to have been missed by the media:

“I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more…I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation.”

As this President chooses his words carefully, these claims need to be understood.

Note that Mr. Obama did not say what nearly all opponents of water-boarding say – that water-boarding is not an effective method of extracting reliable, life-saving, information. He took no issue

with former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s claims that water-boarding or “enhanced interrogation” saved American and other lives. Indeed, he clearly leaves open the possibility, even the likelihood, that this claim is accurate. Rather, what he says is that “methods like water-boarding were not necessary to keep us safe” – not necessary, not ineffective. And why does he believe this? Because they are not “the most effective means of interrogation.”

In other words, the President’s view seems to be that water-boarding the three terrorists did elicit vital, life-saving, information. However, he contends that we could have obtained all that information using means of interrogation that were both non-brutal and more effective.

I pray the President is right. I would love America to be able to say “America never uses brutal methods of interrogation, let alone tortures” while simultaneously obtaining information it needs from captured terrorists to save thousands of innocent people from death and maiming.

But if in fact, these methods exist, they have never been revealed. President Obama needs to share this discovery with the American people, or, if they must be state secrets, with a select few individuals from Congress and the intelligence community.

It is as if the President, or anyone else, announced that brutal methods of combating cancer like chemotherapy and radiation were “not the most effective means” of combating cancer – and then refused to say what non-brutal means were more effective.

This is the paramount issue in the water-boarding debate. As Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said five years ago, it is essentially a no-brainer that we must “do what you have to do” if we apprehend a terrorist who has the information that can prevent an imminent terrorist attack.

Most opponents of water-boarding terrorists rely on the belief that such a method is as unnecessary as it is illegal. Therefore, if it is shown that water-boarding did in fact provide information that saved many innocent lives, opponents have to argue one of two positions: that there was a better, non-brutal, method available; or that it is morally preferable to have innocent Americans and others killed, brain damaged, blinded, and paralyzed rather than water-board a single terrorist.

Given that just about all of us – proponents of rare water-boarding and opponents of all water-boarding – want both security and not to water-board – the President can do the country and the world an extraordinary service by revealing – if necessary, only to a select few – what those non-brutal methods are that he knows to be “more effective.”

This would end the debate, give America more security, and enable us to say we never water-boarding or torture.

I, for one, pray those methods exist. But I don’t believe they do or that the President has a clue what they are.

Socialism and Secularism Suck Vitality Out of Society

Dennis Prager


Outside of politics, sports, and popular entertainment, how many living Germans, or French, or Austrians, or even Brits can you name?

Even well-informed people who love art and literature and who follow developments in science and medicine would be hard pressed to come up with many, more often any, names. In terms of greatness in literature, art, music, the sciences, philosophy, and medical breakthroughs, Europe has virtually fallen off the radar screen.

This is particularly meaningful given how different the answer would have been had you asked anyone the same question between just 80 and 120 years ago -- and certainly before that. A plethora of world-renowned names would have flowed.

Obvious examples would include (in alphabetical order): Brecht, Buber, Cezanne, Chekhov, Curie, Debussy, Eiffel, Einstein, Freud, Hesse, Kafka, Mahler, Mann, Marconi, Pasteur, Porsche, Proust, Somerset Maugham, Strauss, Stravinsky, Tolstoy, Zeppelin, Zola.

Not to mention the European immortals who lived within the century before them: Mozart, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Manet, Monet, Hugo and Van Gogh, to name only a few.

What has happened?

What has happened is that Europe, with a few exceptions, has lost its creativity, intellectual excitement, industrial innovation, and risk taking. Europe’s creative energy has been sapped. There are many lovely Europeans; but there aren’t many creative, dynamic, or entrepreneurial ones.

The issues that preoccupy most Europeans are overwhelmingly material ones: How many hours per week will I have to work? How much annual vacation time will I have? How many social benefits can I preserve (or increase)? How can my country avoid fighting against anyone or for anyone?

Why has this happened?

There are two reasons: secularism and socialism (aka the welfare state).

Either one alone sucks much of the life out of society. Together they are likely to be lethal.

Even if one holds that religion is false, only a dogmatic and irrational secularist can deny that it was religion in the Western world that provided the impetus or backdrop for nearly all the uniquely great art, literature, economic and even scientific advances of the West. Even the irreligious were forced to deal with religious themes -- if only in expressing rebellion against them.

Religion in the West raised all the great questions of life: Why are we here? Is there purpose to existence? Were we deliberately made? Is there something after death? Are morals objective or only a matter of personal preference? Do rights come from the state or from the Creator?

And religion gave positive responses: We are here because a benevolent God made us. There is, therefore, ultimate purpose to life. Good and evil are real. Death is not the end. Human rights are inherent since they come from God. And so on.

Secularism drains all this out of life. No one made us. Death is the end. We are no more significant than any other creatures. We are all the results of mere coincidence. Make up your own meaning (existentialism) because life has none. Good and evil are merely euphemisms for “I like” and “I dislike.”

Thus, when religion dies in a country, creativity wanes. For example, while Christian Russia was backward in many ways, it still gave the world Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. Once Christianity was suppressed, if not killed, in Russia, that country became a cultural wasteland (with a few exceptions like Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn, the latter a devout Christian). It is true that this was largely the result of Lenin, Stalin and Communism; but even where Communism did not take over, the decline of religion in Europe meant a decline in human creativity -- except for nihilistic and/or absurd isms, which have greatly increased. As G. K. Chesterton noted at the end of the 19th century, when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. One not only thinks of the violent isms: Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Fascism, Maoism, and Nazism, but of all the non-violent isms that have become substitute religions – e.g., feminism, environmentalism, and socialism.

The state sucks out creativity and dynamism just as much as secularism does. Why do anything for yourself when the state will do it for you? Why take care of others when the state will do it for you? Why have ambition when the state is there to ensure that few or no individuals are rewarded more than others?

America has been the center of energy and creativity in almost every area of life because it has remained far more religious than any other industrialized Western democracy and because it has rejected the welfare state social model.

Which is why so many are so worried about President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party’s desire to transform -- in their apt wording -- America into a secular welfare state. The greatest engine of moral, religious, economic, scientific, and industrial dynamism is being starved of its fuel. The bigger the state, the smaller its people.

Question to Left: If You love America, Why “Transform” It?

Dennis Prager


If you met a man who said he would like to “transform” or “remake” his wife, would you conclude that he: a) thought very highly of his wife and loved her? Or b) held his wife in rather low esteem and therefore found living her rather difficult?

The answer is obvious: Those who wish to remake anything (or anyone) do not think highly of the person or thing they wish to remake.

Little is as revealing of Barack Obama’s and the Left’s view of America than their use of the words “transform” and “remake” when applied to what they most want to do to America.

I among others pointed this out during the presidential campaign when Barack Obama frequently promised he would “transform America.” That is why those of us attuned to the importance of words and who hold America in high esteem were so worried about an Obama election.

Americans on the Left frequently attack critics for labeling them “unpatriotic” and/or accusing them of not loving America. The first charge is false is to the best of my knowledge. I have searched in vain for an instance of a normative conservative or Republican spokesman calling Democrats or liberals “unpatriotic.”

The second, however, is a more complex question.

It is not an attack on the left to say that their own rhetoric suggests that they love a vision of America considerably more than they love the reality of America; that they love what America could be rather than what it is. Otherwise, how to explain this liberal vocabulary of “remaking” and “transforming” America. You don’t yearn to transform or remake that which you love.

Many years ago, the prominent Jewish writer, my friend since childhood, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, helped to clarify – in a non-partisan way – a major difference between liberals and conservatives. “Conservatives,” he said, “romanticize the past; liberals romanticize the future.”

The romanticizing of the future has been a distinguishing characteristic of the Left since Karl Marx. Leftist ideologies have secular eschatologies. The further left one goes the greater the belief in revolution, the need to overthrow the contemporary order. That is why Marx so hated religion – he and Engels saw it as the “opiate of the masses” because religion, in their view, taught people how to deal with their (abject) condition rather than to become revolutionaries. But one day -- one great day – “all men will be brothers” in the stirring words of the revolutionary song that ends Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The problem is that compared with such a future utopia, no actual society could possibly compete. Certainly not racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, unequal America.

In light of those frequently made criticisms of America, I have often asked representatives of the Left why they criticize America so much if they love it so much. “Precisely because we love America, we criticize it. You criticize that which you love,” is the nearly universal response.

But, of course, it isn’t true. If you constantly criticize your spouse, for example, it is difficult to imagine that you really do love him or her. And perhaps more important, it is very unlikely that your spouse feels loved. That is why after being routinely described as racist, sexist, imperialist, etc., it is difficult to be able to tell that America is loved by the Left.

This is not written in order to indict the Left, let alone the President, for not loving America. No one can measure an other’s feelings. Furthermore I do not question the sincerity of anyone who says he loves America. What I question are the actions and rhetoric of those who claim to love America yet want to transform and remake it.

Nine Questions the Left Needs to Answer About Torture

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Any human being with a functioning conscience or a decent heart loathes torture. Its exercise has been a blight on humanity. With this in mind, those who oppose what the Bush administration did

to some terror suspects may be justified. But in order to ascertain whether they are, they need to respond to some questions:

1. Given how much you rightly hate torture, why did you oppose the removal of Saddam Hussein, whose prisons engaged in far more hideous tortures, on thousands of times more people, than America did -- all of whom, moreover, were individuals and families who either did nothing or simply opposed tyranny? One assumes, furthermore, that all those Iraqi innocents Saddam had put into shredding machines or whose tongues were cut out and other hideous tortures would have begged to be waterboarded.

2. Are all forms of painful pressure equally morally objectionable? In other words, are you willing to acknowledge that there are gradations of torture as, for example, there are gradations of burns, with a third-degree burn considerably more injurious and painful than a first-degree burn? Or is all painful treatment to be considered torture? Just as you, correctly, ask proponents of waterboarding where they draw their line, you, too, must explain where you draw your line.

3. Is any maltreatment of anyone at any time -- even a high-level terrorist with knowledge that would likely save innocents’ lives -- wrong? If there is no question about the identity of a terror suspect , and he can provide information on al-Qaida -- for the sake of clarity, let us imagine that Osama Bin Laden himself were captured -- could America do any form of enhanced interrogation involving pain and/or deprivation to him that you would consider moral and therefore support?

4. If lawyers will be prosecuted for giving legal advice to an administration that you consider immoral and illegal, do you concede that this might inhibit lawyers in the future from giving unpopular but sincerely argued advice to the government in any sensitive area? They will, after all, know that if the next administration disapproves of their work, they will be vilified by the media and prosecuted by the government.

5. Presumably you would acknowledge that the release of the classified reports on the handling of high-level, post-Sept. 11 terror suspects would inflame passions in many parts of the Muslim world. If innocents were murdered because nonviolent cartoons of Muhammad were published in a Danish newspaper, presumably far more innocents will be tortured and murdered with the release of these reports and photos. Do you accept any moral responsibility for any ensuing violence against American and other civilians?

6. Many members of the intelligence community now feel betrayed and believe that the intelligence community will be weakened in their ability to fight the most vicious organized groups in the world. As reported in the Washington Post, former intelligence officer “(Mark) Lowenthal said that fear has paralyzed agents on the ground. Apparently, many of those in the know are certain that life-saving information was gleaned from high level terror suspects who were waterboarded. As Mike Scheuer, former head of the CIA unit in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden, said, ”We were very certain that the interrogation procedures procured information that was worth having.” If, then, the intelligence community has been adversely affected, do you believe it can still do the work necessary to protect tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people from death and maiming?

7. Will you seek to prosecute members of Congress such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who were made aware of the waterboarding of high-level suspects and voiced no objections?

8. Would you agree to releasing the photos of the treatment of Islamic terrorists only if accompanied by photos of what their terror has done to thousands of innocent people around the world? Would you agree to photos -- or at least photo re-enactments -- of, let us say, Iraqi children

whose faces were torn off with piano wire by Islamists in Iraq? If not, why not? Isn’t context of some significance here?

9. You say that America’s treatment of terror suspects will cause terrorists to treat their captives, especially Americans, more cruelly. On what grounds do you assert this? Did America’s far more moral treatment of Japanese prisoners than Japan’s treatment of American prisoners in World War II have any impact on how the Japanese treated American and other prisoners of war? Do you think that evil people care how morally pure America is?

If you fail to address these questions, it would appear that you care less about morality and torture than about vengeance against the Bush administration.

The More Given, the Less Earned

Dennis Prager


One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word “earn.”

Those of us whose native language is English assume that the phrase “to earn a living” is universal. It isn’t. It is almost unique to English. Few languages have the ability to say this.

In the Romance languages, for example – a list that includes such major languages as Spanish, French, and Italian -- the word used when saying someone “earns” money, is “ganar” in Spanish, “gagner” in French. The word literally means “to win.” In Hebrew the word “marveach” means “profits.” In German, the word “verdient” means “deserves.”

Obviously, it is very different to “win” or to “deserve” or to “profit” than to “earn.”

Since the 1960s-‘70s, a concerted effort has been made to weed the word, and therefore the cultural value, of “earning” from American life. Increasingly little is earned. Instead of earning, we are increasingly owed, or we have more rights, or we are simply given.

Many American kids no longer earn awards or trophies for athletic success. They are given trophies and awards for showing up. These trophies are not earned, just granted -- essentially for breathing.

Another increasingly widespread concept that undermines the notion of earning is “unconditional love.” The term, which was barely used prior to the 1960s, is now ubiquitous. It is a prominent goal, a human ideal to strive for. The idea of having to earn love is more than unheard of today; it would strike most moderns as morally suspect.

We expect unconditional love not only from parents to babies and toddlers, but to children of any age, no matter how they act. Parental unconditional love means that all people, no matter how disgracefully they act --- even toward a parent -- and no matter how old they are, must be shown infinite love from their parents. Parental love is never to be earned, always to be given.

We expect God to show unconditional love to all people, again no matter how they act. According to the doctrine of divine unconditional love, God loves sadists as much as He loves the kindest individuals. No one earns God’s love; we receive it, like sports trophies, for breathing. Many fine people believe this about God, but I think it is religio-cultural-specific, and non-biblical. In 15 years of study in a yeshiva I had never heard the phrase, and it would have struck me, as it still does, as quite odd. It depicts God as a love machine who, like an air-conditioner that emits the same amount of cold air no matter how the inhabitants of a house act, emits the same amount of love no matter we act. It means that we in no way influence God’s love for us. I don’t find that comforting. And it is certainly no more likely to induce decent behavior in human beings than a God who does show conditional love based on human decency.

We expect unconditional love -- meaning unearned love -- from spouses. No matter how awfully you treat your wife or husband, as soon as you were married, you were owed unconditional love. While your spouse and you had to earn each other’s love prior to marriage, the moment you got married, you no longer had to earn the other’s love.

We also expect forgiveness to be given without being earned. Many people believe in what I call automatic forgiveness -- the obligation to forgive anyone any crime, committed against anyone, no matter how many victims and no matter how removed from my life. Thus the pastor of a church attended by then-President Bill Clinton told the president and all others at a Sunday service that all Christians were obligated to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist murderer of 168 people. Did McVeigh earn this forgiveness? Of course not. So where did the notion of unearned forgiveness come from, especially unearned forgiveness from people who were not the victims of the evil being forgiven? It is one thing for me to forgive those who have hurt me; it is quite another for others to forgive those who have hurt me. God Himself demands that we earn forgiveness. The term for that is repentance. No repentance, no forgiveness.

Finally, the increasingly powerful culture of entitlement and rights further undermines the value of earning anything. The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state -- you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax -- but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned, them.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

Time for Congressional Black Caucus to Disband?

Dennis Prager


Last week, seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus – Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Melvin Watt, D-N.C., Michael Honda, D-Calif., Laura Richardson,, D-Calif., Bobby Rush, D-Ill., Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, and Emanuel Cleaver II, D-Mo. -- returned from a visit to Cuba where they met with the dictators of Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro.

They were quite impressed with Fidel Castro, the longest reigning dictator in the world, the man who deprived an entire generation of Cubans of the most fundamental human rights. Some of their reactions:

CBC Chairwoman Rep. Barbara Lee: “Former President Fidel Castro is very engaging, very energetic.”

Rep. Laura Richardson: “He looked right into my eyes and said, 'How can we help you? How can we help President Obama?’”

Rep. Bobby Rush: “I think that what really surprised me, but also endeared me to him was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities.”

“He drank water, we drank water, nothing else was served, but that was just fine! I was, after all, in the presence of history.”

“In my household, I told Castro, he is known as the ultimate survivor.”

Regarding this last comment, columnist Mona Charen pithily noted: “Funny how easy it is to survive when you don't hold elections.”

Charen is a conservative, but when even major liberal editorial pages hold you in contempt, you're in trouble.

The Miami Herald labeled the seven members of the CBC who went to Cuba, “The Clueless Seven”

The Herald’s scathing editorial continued: “If only the group had met with even one prisoner of conscience or one of the wives, mothers, daughters or sisters of the 75 independent journalists, librarians and human-rights advocates imprisoned in Cuba's ‘Black Spring’ of 2003. … Or the seven could have traveled three hours from Havana to see the hunger-striking dissidents led by Jorge Luis Garcia ‘Antunez’ Perez in Placetas. Or they could have asked to see Oscar Elias Biscet, a doctor serving 25 years in prison for following the peaceful resistance of Martin Luther King Jr. … Or what of the mothers of three young men who were tried in a day and killed the next by firing squad in 2003 for trying to hijack a ferry from Havana Harbor? No passenger was hurt, but that didn't stop the Cuban government from sending a swift and terrifying message to the country's Afro-Cuban masses.”

And as the Washington Post, another major liberal newspaper, editorialized: (Rep. Barbara Lee said that) “‘Cubans do want dialogue. They do want talks.’ Funny, then, that in five days on the island the Congress members found no time for dialogue with Afro-Cuban dissident Jorge Luis Garcia Perez. … Mr. Garcia, better known as ‘Antunez,’ is a renowned advocate of human rights who has often been singled out for harsh treatment because of his color. ‘The authorities in my country,’ he has said, ‘have never tolerated that a black person (could dare to) oppose the regime.’ His wife, Iris, is a founder of the Rosa Parks Women's Civil Rights Movement, named after an American hero whom Afro-Cubans try to emulate. The couple have been on a hunger strike since Feb. 17, to demand justice for an imprisoned family member.”

Apparently, it is black Americans that the CBC cares about, not black Cubans. And the CBC calls itself “the conscience of the Congress since 1971”!

Before the CBC further embarrasses the civil rights movement, black America, the Democratic Party, and the United States of America, it should consider disbanding.

There was never a good reason for any members of Congress to create a group whose sole criterion for membership was race (or ethnicity in the case of the Congessional Hispanic Caucus). The CBC is so color-based that even congressmen representing majority-black districts who are not themselves black (such as Rep. Stephen Cohen, D-Tenn.), who applied for membership) are not allowed to be members. Such a group, if it existed anywhere else in America, would properly be declared racist and would be either legally or morally forced to shut down.

But this trip to a communist dictatorship where they ignored the oppression of black and other Cubans and served as useful fools for a tyranny ought to be the last straw.

America Has a Naive President

Dennis Prager


“The basic bargain is sound: countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them.” -- President Barack Obama, Prague, April 6, 2009

As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, the President of the United States wants America to disarm: “Countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament.”

It is hard to imagine a more destructive goal. A nuclear disarmed America would lead to massive and widespread killing, more genocide, and very possibly the nuclear holocaust worldwide nuclear disarmament is meant to prevent.

There is nothing moral, let alone realistic, about this goal.

Here is an analogy. Imagine that the mayor of a large American city announced that it was his goal to have all the citizens of his city disarm -- what could be more beautiful than a city with no weapons? This would, of course, ultimately include the police, but with properly signed agreements, vigorously enforced, and violators of the agreement punished, it would remain an ideal to pursue.

One has to assume that most people would regard this idea as, at the very least, useless. There would be no way to ensure that bad people would disarm; and if the police disarmed, only bad people would have weapons.

The analogy is virtually precise -- but only if you acknowledge that America is the world’s policeman. To idealists of the left, however, the notion of America as the world’s policeman is both arrogant and misguided. A strengthened “world community” -- as embodied by the United Nations – should be the world’s policeman.

To the rest of us, however, the idea of the United Nations as the world’s policeman is absurd and frightening. The United Nations has proven itself a moral wasteland that gives genocidal tyrannies honored positions on human rights commissions. The weaker the U.N. and the stronger America, the greater the chances of preventing or stopping mass atrocities.

On the assumption that the left and the right both seek a world without genocide and tyranny, it is, then, the answer to this question that divides them: Are genocide and tyranny more or less likely if America is the strongest country on earth, i.e., the country with the greatest and most weapons, nuclear and otherwise?

Moreover even if you answer in the negative and think that the world would experience less evil with a nuclear disarmed America, the goal of worldwide nuclear disarmament is foolish because it is unattainable. And unattainable goals are a waste of precious time and resources.

For one thing, it is inconceivable that every nation would agree to it. Why would India give up its nuclear weapons? There aren’t a dozen Hindus who believe that Pakistan would give up every one of its nuclear weapons. And the same presumably holds true for Muslims in Pakistan with regard to India disarming.

And what about Israel? Would that country destroy all its nuclear weapons? Of course not. And it would be foolish to do so. Israel is surrounded by countries that wish not merely to vanquish it, but to destroy it. It regards nuclear weapons as life assurance. And it regards the United Nations (with good reason) as its enemy, not its protector.

As for states like Iran and North Korea, they have already violated agreements regarding nuclear weapons. What would prompt them to do otherwise in a world where America got weaker? United Nations sanctions? And why would Russia and China even agree to them?

Finally, there would be no way to prevent rogue scientists from selling materials and know-how to terrorists.

The result of this left-wing fantasy of worldwide nuclear disarmament would simply be that those who illegally acquired or made but one nuclear weapon would be able to blackmail any nation.

What any president of the United States should aspire to is: 1). to keep America the strongest country in the world militarily (as well as economically, but that is not the question on the table); 2) to destroy those individuals and organizations that seek nuclear weapons so as to kill as many innocent people as possible; and 3) remain the world’s policeman. These aims cannot be achieved if America aims to disarm.

President Obama said “I am not naïve” in his talk. That, unfortunately, is as accurate as his statement before the joint session of Congress that “I do not believe in bigger government.”

New Broadway Play About Hero Who Is … Religious!

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The older I get, the less I find evil interesting and the more I find goodness interesting. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is great goodness, not great evil, that needs to be explained. In fact, given

the ubiquity of gratuitous cruelty and other expressions of evil -- and the apparent ease with which many ordinary people can be transformed into monsters -- evil may be more explicable than goodness.

Given all this, one would therefore assume that there would be many studies of goodness and of good people. Yet, there are probably 100 books, studies, and articles about evil for every book, study, or article about goodness. This emanates in large measure from the modern, i.e., post-religious, belief (“faith” would be a better word) that people are born good. Consequently, it is evil that is deemed aberrant and therefore needs to be explained, not good, which is deemed normal and therefore needs little explanation.

Just as studies of goodness are deemed less interesting than studies of evil, portrayals of goodness are deemed less interesting than portrayals of evil. Again, the ratio is probably at least a 100-to-1.

Yet, true stories of goodness, well told, are the greatest stories. While stories of evil have the benefit of sensationalism and appeal to voyeurism, stories of goodness uplift, inspire, make us cry, give us hope, provide real models to emulate, and ultimately may even make us a little better.

One problem, however, is that it is much easier to depict evil in a riveting manner than to so depict goodness. Stephen Spielberg achieved the latter in Schindler’s List, but that was the exception that proves the rule. Now, however, another exception has come along. Playwright Dan Gordon and director Michael Parva have made goodness riveting in the new Broadway play, “Irena’s Vow.”

The Irena of the title is Irene Gut Opdyke, who, at the time of the play’s World War II’s setting, was a pretty 19-year-old blond Polish Roman Catholic to whom fate (she would say God) gave the opportunity to save 12 Jews in, of all places, the home of the highest-ranking German officer in a Polish city. Ultimately discovered by the Nazi officer, she was offered the choice of becoming the elderly Nazi’s mistress or the Jews all being sent to death camps.

As it happens, I interviewed Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago and again 12 years later, and she revealed to me how conflicted she was about what she consented to do not only because she became what fellow Poles derided as a “Nazi whore” but because as a deeply religious Catholic she was sure she was committing a grave sin by regularly sleeping with a man to whom she was not married and worse, indeed a married man, which likely rendered her sin of adultery a mortal sin.

What she did therefore, was not only heroic because she had to overcome daily fear of being caught and put to death, but because she also had to overcome a daily fear of committing a mortal sin before God.

Aside from my lifelong interest in altruism and especially in understanding the motivations of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, I had an unwitting role in the making of “Irena’s Vow.” According to the playwright, Gordon, the play came about because he heard Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago. He immediately contacted her, they became friends, and the rest is history.

We never know all the good (or bad) we have done. So Gordon’s attribution of the genesis of his play to me is very gratifying. If there was a dry eye on opening night this past Sunday when I attended, it surely wasn’t near my seat.

It is rare to see a play on Broadway that is preoccupied with goodness. It is even more rare to see Broadway play extol the goodness of a religious person. When was the last Broadway show about a Christian hero? In this upside-down age that is hypersensitive to any criticism, no matter how fair, of any aspect of Islam but which regularly depicts many American Christians as buffoons and

quasi-fascists, one can only hope that this play has a long run. Likewise, in an age when art increasingly celebrates the ugly and the bad, one can only hope that a million young people see a play that celebrates the goodness that God-based morality can produce.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Dennis Prager


Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms "Nazi" or "Fascist" but almost never "Communist?"

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused - 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more -- why is "Communist" so much less a term of revulsion than "Nazi?"

There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.

This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today.

Here, then, are seven reasons.

1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao about 70 million people died - nearly all in peacetime! - virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Stalin had killed were nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example, were members of other Soviet nationalities.

The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs and members of other "non-Aryan" and "inferior" groups.

"World opinion" - that vapid amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from "world opinion." But if an Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it makes the front page of world newspapers.

2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories.

Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history, are seduced by words -- so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less significant. Communism's words are far more intellectually

and morally appealing than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis. The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine (though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine), whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology.

This seduction by words while ignoring deeds has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals. How else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about vile deeds?

3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia, Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, "people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin's holocaust."

Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China.

Until Russia and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism, communism's evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of the German state under Hitler.

4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.

5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.

6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe communism. As the French put it, "pas d'enemis a la gauche," which in English means "no enemies on the left." This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university's courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism's immoral record.

7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last "good war" America fought was World War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard America's wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) communism is simply ignored.

Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.


Brilliance is Overrated

Dennis Prager


I have met very few parents or grandparents who have not characterized at least one of their offspring as “extremely bright” or even “brilliant” – usually beginning at the age of 2. The emphasis on the importance of the intellect is greater than ever.

That is why people were persuande into having their babies listen to Mozart after it was reported that listening to Mozart -- even in utero -- would make babies smarter. As an occasional orchestra conductor, I am delighted when anyone of any age is exposed to classical music. But love of music was not an issue here -- the Mozart-for-babies craze was about love of brains, not love of music. Likewise, those who can afford to do so vie with one another to have their children admitted to prestigious preschools and elementary schools.

This preoccupation with brains and intellectual attainment extends into adulthood. Most Americans upon hearing that someone has attended Harvard University assumes that this person is not only smarter than most other people but is actually a more impressive person. That is why, for example, people assume that a Nobel laureate in physics has something particularly intelligent to say about social policy. In fact, there is no reason at all to assume that a Nobel physicist has more insight into health care issues or capital punishment than a high school physics teacher, let alone more insight than a moral theologian. But people, especially the highly educated, do think so. That’s why one frequently sees ads advocating some political position signed by Nobel laureates.

Intellectuals, e.g., those with graduate degrees, have among the worst, if not the worst, records on the great moral issues of the past century. Intellectuals such as the widely adulated French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre were far more likely than hardhats to admire butchers of humanity like Stalin and Mao. But this has had no impact on most people’s adulation of the intellect and intellectuals.

So, too, the current economic decline was brought about in large measure by people in the financial sector widely regarded as “brilliant.” Of course, it turns out that many of them were either dummies, amoral, incompetent, or all three.

The adulation of the intellect is one reason President George W. Bush was so reviled by the intellectual class. He didn’t speak like an intellectual (even though he graduated from Yale) and for that reason was widely dismissed as a dummy (though he is, in fact, very bright). On the other hand, Barack Obama speaks like the college professor he was and thereby seduces the adulators of the intellect the moment he opens his mouth. Yet, it is he, not George W. Bush, who nearly always travels with teleprompters to deliver even the briefest remarks. And compared to George W. Bush on many important issues, his talks are superficial -- as reading, as opposed to hearing, them easily reveals.

Take, for example, one of the most complex and compelling moral issues of our time -- embryonic stem cell research. This is an excellent area for comparison since both presidents delivered major addresses on the exact same subject.

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post has compared the two speeches. He has particular credibility on this score because he is a scientist (he has a medical degree from Harvard Medical School), a moralist, and has special interest in stem cell’s possibilities because he is a paraplegic from a diving accident. And, as he points out, “I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception.”

Krauthammer’s verdict?

“Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.”

“Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men.”

“Unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.”

In a similar manner, I devoted two columns to analyzing Barack Obama’s widely hailed speech in Berlin when he was a candidate for president. I found it to be both vacuous and, to use Krauthammer’s words, “morally unserious in the extreme.”

But Obama sounds intelligent. As indeed he is.

The reason we have too few solutions to the problems that confront people -- in their personal lives as well as in the political realm -- is almost entirely due to a lack of common sense, psychological impediments to clear thinking, a perverse value system, to a lack of self-control, or all four. It is almost never due to a lack of brainpower. On the contrary, the smartest and the best educated frequently make things worse.

Some Silver Linings in Our Dark Economy

Dennis Prager


There are two definitions for the term “optimist”: One who believes the future is good and one who sees the good in any given situation.

I am as little an optimist by the first definition as I am a big optimist according to the second. In the world (as opposed to my own life), I rarely think things will turn out well because they rarely do. Evil often triumphs; and even when defeated, the amount of human suffering it causes does not mean that the optimists were right. Hitler was vanquished, Stalin’s regime fell, and Mao finally died. But to the hundreds of millions of innocent people who were slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved those happy endings were irrelevant.

As regards the second definition of optimism (please see an extended discussion of this in my book “Happiness Is a Serious Problem”), count me in. It is imperative to find, or even manufacture, bright spots in a dark situation.

So here are some silver linings in our dark economic circumstances:

-- Most people are complaining less. They are more grateful for whatever they have than they were before. For example, just about everyone who still has a job is grateful for having it; nearly all of us now realize how fragile employment is. Therefore, there is an increase in the most important human quality -- gratitude. It is the root of both goodness and happiness. Grateful people are better people and they are happier people. They make the world better while the ungrateful make it worse. So the increase in gratitude may make our society better.

-- The adulation of extremely wealthy Wall Street “wizards” has ended. Most of those people produced nothing of worth and believed in economic nonsense. A large number of people making millions of dollars a year were proficient at only one thing -- making millions of dollars a year.

-- Given how many of these people were highly educated Ivy League graduates, more and more Americans may come to realize that Harvard and Yale turn out at least as many fools (perhaps more given their high incidence of arrogance) than San Diego State University or Long Island University. For years I have been urging listeners to my radio show to send their children to less expensive colleges with reputations for quality (of which this country has many) rather than mortgage their homes or raid their retirement funds to pay for high-priced colleges that offer equal or inferior instruction but more “prestige.” I was right. American parents have wasted vast sums of money purchasing cachet rather than a superior education.

-- The flirtation of capitalists and moderate liberals with left-wing politics may diminish. Why entrepreneurs who made millions would support the Democratic Party and other parts of the left when the left’s policies make it so much more difficult for others to attain financial success has always eluded rational explanation. Now that the society cannot afford liberal-left social policies -- indeed they are on their way to bankrupting cities, states, and perhaps one day America -- erstwhile financial sector and moderate liberal supporters of the Democratic Party are beginning to question leftist ideas. Some examples:

Jim Cramer, Obama admirer and host of CNBC’s Mad Money: “President Obama's budget may be one of the great wealth destroyers of all time.”

Warren Buffett, billionaire Obama supporter: “You can’t expect people to unite behind you if you're trying to jam a bunch of things down their throat.”

Clive Crook, Financial Times: “Barack Obama’s first budget showed him to be more of a left-leaning liberal than I and many others … had previously supposed.”

-- Big oil producing nations -- most of which are governed by bad people -- have been hit hard. The primitives who run Saudi Arabia, for example, have strutted on the world’s stage as if they have anything more to offer than a necessary commodity that by sheer good luck happens to lie under their soil. The decline in influence of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela is a good thing for humanity.

-- For the foreseeable future -- i.e., until another generation grows up that has not experienced this major economic downturn -- most Americans will return to some basic economic principals like not buying things they cannot afford, and not incurring too much debt. That, too, is a good thing.

If Americans become more grateful; stop venerating millionaire geniuses who produce nothing; spend a lot less on college; finally recognize that the left is a wealth-destruction machine (the left everywhere is much more interested in reshaping society -- therefore much more interested in amassing power than in making wealth); and start living more economically responsibly some real good will flow from this real bad economy.

Is There Really Only One Human Race?

Dennis Prager


One of the most frequently cited facts of life is that there is only one race, the human race. It is said in order to counteract racism. And it is said to show how much all people have in common -- our “common humanity.”

The first reason is good and valid. The notion that there is something significant that divides the races is indeed absurd. Beyond skin color, nothing divides the various races.

But in its latter meaning -- that there is one human race, one humanity, to which we all belong, I am increasingly of the opinion that this is not so.

A lifetime of study of good and evil has led me to a wholly unexpected conclusion: There may not be one human race; there may well be a genuine divide among humans.

It seems that there is a certain percentage of humanity that can engage in acts of surpassing cruelty that the rest of us could not engage in. These people really do seem to be members of a different race. Biologically speaking, they are of course human beings, Homo sapiens. But in a fundamental way they are members of another species as well -- an offshoot of human being that may still be part of some part of the animal kingdom to which the rest of us do not belong.

I know this sounds silly. For years I myself rejected the idea. But if there really is a sliver of human beings that can engage in acts that the rest cannot, what other explanation is there?

Well, two are offered: conditions and conditioning.

Conditions: Some argue that such evil is a matter of external conditions -- that under the right conditions just about everyone would inflict horrific cruelty on their fellow human being. That is the conclusion that Professor Stanley Milgram drew from his world famous obedience test at Yale University.

Conditioning: The other argument against the notion of two species of human beings is that with the right conditioning anyone can be led to do anything to anyone.

I believe both arguments have merit but do not address the point I am making.

Regarding Milgram: The purpose of Milgram’s experiment with Yale students -- participants were ordered to deliver increasingly painful “electric shocks” to a subject (an actor) they did not see --

was to show that people ordered to be cruel will do so because of the ease with which people obey authority.

I have no doubt that there are such people. But this does not address my two-species theory. Milgram’s students thought the “study” was academically sound, they exhibited no joy in what they did -- indeed, most exhibited serious ambivalence -- and they never saw their subject suffering (they heard him crying out).

The evil I am addressing has little or nothing to do with orders from authority. It is inflicted voluntarily, face to face with the victims and brings the evildoer pleasure.

Regarding conditioning: It is possible that a person raised to be a sadist from early childhood can be conditioned into being a sadist. But the evidence appears to suggest that those who deliberately inflict appalling pain on others enjoy doing so for reasons that cannot be traced to upbringing. They may have had a very normal upbringing, while many who had terrible childhoods exhibit no such sadistic tendencies.

In other words, it appears that there exist among human beings some people who can best be described as monsters -- and whose monstrousness cannot be explained.

This theory brings me no intellectual or emotional satisfaction. I have always wanted to believe that all human beings have at least one freedom -- moral freedom. Yet this belief is contradicted by the theory of two human species.

The man who put this notion into my mind is Rabbi Leon Radzik, a Holocaust survivor whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis. What he saw as a boy in the Nazi camps few human beings have ever imagined, let alone witnessed. He once described to me a Nazi guard who, upon seeing a starving Jewish boy sucking on a candy wrapper thrown to the ground, murdered the boy by slowly shoving a shovel into the boy’s throat -- in anger over a Jewish boy having the temerity to suck on German candy wrapper.

I asked Radzik if he had any explanation. “They were monsters in human form,” he replied.

That is what I now believe: There are monsters in human form.

From California to the Boy Scouts, It Destroys More Than It Builds

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Virtually throughout its history, and certainly in the 20th century, California has been known as the place to go for dynamism and growth. It did not become the richest, most populous, and most productive state solely because of its weather and natural resources.

So it takes a lot to turn California around from growth to contraction, from people moving into the state to a net exodus from the state, from business moving into California to businesses leaving California.

It takes some doing.

And the left has done it.

California’s Democratic legislature has been more or less able to do whatever it wants with California. The Wall Street Journal has described the result:

“The Golden State -- which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world -- has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code …”

One might argue that’s this is a politically biased assessment. So here are some facts, not assessments:

-- California’s state expenditures grew from $104 billion in 2003 to $145 billion in 2008.

-- California has the worst credit rating in the nation.

-- California has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation, 9.3 percent -- higher even than the car manufacturing state of Michigan.

-- California has the second highest home foreclosure rate.

-- California’s tax-paying middle class is leaving the state. California’s net loss last year in state-to-state migration exceeded every other state's. New York, another left-run state, was second.

-- Since 2000, California’s job growth rate -- which in the late 1970s was many times higher than the national average -- has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent.

-- California has lost 25 percent of its industrial work force since 2001.

Joel Kotkin, one of the leading observers of urban America, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, recently wrote an essay on California, “Sundown for California.” He begins with these words:

“Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I co-authored a book called “California, Inc.” about our adopted home state. The book described ‘California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy.’ … But today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.”

That is what left-wing policies have done to California. In Kotkin’s words, “the state legislature decided to spend its money on public employees and impose ever more regulatory burdens on business.”

Last week, Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer chips, announced that it would invest $7 billion to expand its facilities. Where? In Arizona, Oregon, and New Mexico. But not in California, the state in which Intel is headquartered.

The left is bringing the greatest state to its knees.

What generations created, the left destroys. There are few productive and noble institutions in America that the left has not hurt or attempted to hurt. But while the left destroys a great deal, it constructs almost nothing (outside of government agencies, laws, and lawsuits).

Take the Boy Scouts. For generations, the Boy Scouts, founded and preserved by Americans of all political as well as ethnic backgrounds, has helped millions of American boys become good,

productive men. The left throughout America -- its politicians, its media, its stars, its academics -- have ganged up to deprive the Boy Scouts of oxygen. Everywhere possible, the Boy Scouts are vilified and deprived of places to meet.

But while the left works to destroy the Boy Scouts -- unless the Boy Scouts adopt the left’s views on openly gay scouts and scout leaders -- the left has created nothing comparable to the Boy Scouts. The left tries to destroy one of the greatest institutions ever made for boys, but it has built nothing for boys. There is no ACLU version of the Boy Scouts; there is only the ACLU versus the Boy Scouts.

The same holds true for the greatest character-building institution in American life: Judeo-Christian religions. Once again, the left knows how to destroy. Everywhere possible the left works to inhibit religious institutions and values -- from substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” to removing the tiny cross from the Los Angeles County Seal to arguing that religious people must not bring their values into the political arena.

And, then there is education. Until the left took over American public education in the second half of the 20th century, it was generally excellent -- look at the high level of eighth-grade exams from early in the 20th century and you will weep. The more money the left has gotten for education -- America now spends more per student than any country in the world -- the worse the academic results. And the left has removed God and dress codes from schools -- with socially disastrous results.

Of course, it is not entirely accurate to say that the left builds nothing. It has built vast government bureaucracies, MTV, and post-1960s Hollywood, for example. But these are, to say the least, not positive achievements.

In his column this week, Thomas Friedman describes General Motors Corp., as “a giant wealth-destruction machine.” That perfectly describes the left many times over. It is both a wealth-destruction machine and an ennobling-institution destruction machine.

The Madoff Bill

Dennis Prager


I write this column without any illusion that it will reverse America’s current movement toward socialism. Rather I am writing it primarily so that future generations will not be able to say that the radical and destructive nature of the Obama/Democratic Party’s so-called stimulus plan was unknown at the time. I am writing this so that my children will know that their father vigorously opposed it and why.

How radical -- in fact, revolutionary -- is the $789 billion stimulus plan? It is, in the words of House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., “the largest change in domestic policy since the 1930s.”

It is, as Robert Rector, identified by the Times of London as “one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill,” “a welfare spendathon that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history.”

It is the reason the Obama-supporting Newsweek headlined on its cover page, “We are all socialists now.”

It is why, in the words of The Times of London, “Republicans are not alone in fearing that Obama’s hastily concocted package is the first step towards the creation of a quasi-socialist welfare state.”

President Obama and the Democrats have put America into nearly $1 trillion dollars more debt by using the cover of America’s current economic crisis to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on welfare programs, green projects, and on schools.

In a nutshell, the stimulus plan is not a stimulus plan. It is the largest spending program in U.S. history. In the words of the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman editorial that supports the bill, “The essence of the bill is to spend money …”

Almost everything about it is dishonest.

Its name is dishonest. It is a spending bill, not a stimulus bill.

Its announced aim is dishonest. It purports to stimulate the economy. But its real aim is to push America toward becoming a Western European socialist welfare state.

The way it was enacted -- the speed, the lack of transparency -- was dishonest. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Democrats rushed the bill to the floor before Members could even read it, much less have time to broadcast the details so the public could offer its verdict.”

Even the spending is dishonest. The bulk of the spending will take place over years, not now, which is the whole point of a stimulus.

For these reasons, the bill could be renamed the Madoff Bill. Not because there are any parallels between characters of its authors and the character of Bernard Madoff. There aren’t. But there are parallels between the methods. Madoff took people’s money, promised to give them benefits, while in fact squandering their money -- to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. So, too, the president and the Democrats are taking Americans’ money, squandering most of it -- to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, while promising to give them a benefit, a stimulus, when in fact they are spending the money. As Harvard economist Robert Barro told the Atlantic, “It's wasting a tremendous amount of money … I don't think it will expand the economy. … I think it's garbage.”

Even its defenders, now that the bill is passed, do not defend it as a stimulus bill. Typical was New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who devoted his essay to the stimulus plan but only attacked Republicans. He did not devote one of his 1,500 words to defending the bill as a stimulus package.

Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., described the bill with words having nothing to do with stimulus: “By investing in new jobs, in science and innovation, in energy, in education ... we are investing in the American people, which is the best guarantee of the success of our nation.”

No one should be surprised. Americans voted for a man who said time and time again that he wanted to “transform” America. He and his party are trying to do precisely that.

When a Priest Denies the Holocaust

Dennis Prager


For those of us, Christians and non-Christians, who count themselves as friends of Catholics and their church, these have been a bad few weeks.

On Jan. 21, Pope Benedict XVI revoked the excommunication of four priests who, in 1988, were illegally ordained bishops by the late renegade archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Those ordinations led to Pope John Paul II excommunicating Lefebvre and the four priests.

One of those four was Richard Williamson, who announced in an interview aired on Swedish television in November 2008 and on January 21, 2009 that “two hundred (thousand) to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps. None of them in a gas chamber.”

In the interview, Williamson also referred to the Holocaust as “the, quote unquote, Holocaust …” He has long been a Holocaust denier. As far back as 1989, for example, he risked criminal prosecution in Canada, where he praised books written by Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

While empirically true, it is misleading to simply say, as many news reports have, that Pope Benedict repealed the excommunication of a Holocaust denier. It is highly unlikely that the pope, a German who has visited Auschwitz and spoken forcefully about the Shoah (the pope used the Hebrew term for the Holocaust), knew about Williamson’s Holocaust denial. The pope, in his fervent desire to end schisms within the church, decided, wisely or not, to reach out to one prominent schismatic group, the extreme right-wing Lefebvre organization known as the Society of St. Pius X.

But it was obviously a mistake in the case of the Lefebvre priests. Williamson is a truly bad man who disgraces the church. When one watches him spew his venom in the Swedish television interview while wearing a large cross, the cross is rendered ugly -- just as the Muslim crescent is rendered ugly by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he spews his Holocaust-denying venom.

What is perplexing is not that the pope and/or his top officials made a serious mistake by readmitting Williamson into the church. People make mistakes. What is perplexing is that the moment Williamson’s big lie and Jew-hatred became known, the revocation of his excommunication was not halted or reversed. Rather, the Vatican demanded that he must “unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah.”

On the assumption that there not only theological but also moral criteria to being reinstated in the Catholic Church, an excommunicated priest who denies the Holocaust should automatically remain excommunicated. Would a priest who denied that Jesus was crucified have his excommunication rescinded? Both Christians and non-Christians believe that Jesus was crucified despite the fact that we have so much more proof of the Holocaust than we do of Jesus’ crucifixion. Yet, here is a priest denying the Holocaust of Jesus’ people, as if those nearly 6 million European Jews all died of old age.

One would love to ask these Holocaust deniers one question: Poland had three 3 million Jews in 1939 and almost none in 1945. Where did those 3 million Jews go?

A man who denies the Holocaust is either a liar on a magnitude difficult for most mortals to comprehend, or a manifestly sick human being for whom the difference between truth and lie is not discernible, or profoundly anti-Semitic.

Such a person shouldn’t be asked to “distance himself from his positions on the Shoah.” He should be shunned by the man Catholics believe to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth and by his church. If Williamson is ever to be a Catholic in good standing, he needs to repent from evil, not adopt another “position” on the Holocaust. There are no “positions” on whether the Holocaust took place any more than there are “positions” on whether slavery took place or whether there was a French Revolution.

And if he does repent, we will know. That repentance will take the form of doing work for the victims of the Holocaust that he once said never occurred.

In the meantime, there should be no place for an Ahmadinejad in the Catholic Church.


From Africa With Love

Dennis Prager


I had heard about how happy Kenyans and other Africans were about the election and inauguration of America’s first black president. But being here in Africa a week after President Barack Obama’s inauguration makes “happy” seem almost trite.

Every African, of every social status, I have met in the last week -- in Kenya, Tanzania, and even in the remote Comoros -- has raised the issue of Barack Obama with me upon learning I am American. And every one expressed what comes close to euphoria.

We had all heard that in Kenya, the native country of Barack Obama’s father, the president’s Inauguration Day was a national holiday. But that, apparently, was so elsewhere in Africa as well.

This in and of itself raises a fascinating question: why? Why, for example, did the remote African island of Mayotte, a French governed part of the Comoro Islands, make Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day a national holiday? If, let us say, the child of an Italian or Jewish or Arab father had been elected president of the United States, would Italians, Israelis, or Arabs have reacted similarly? Would Italy or Israel or Egypt have declared America’s Inauguration Day a national holiday?

Certitude is unavailable here, but the odds are against any nation, let alone a continent of nations, reacting as Africans have to Barack Obama’s election. My hypothesis is that this goes far deeper than ethnic or national pride. It goes to the depths of the psyche of the great majority of Africans/blacks in the world. Centuries of African slavery and the white racism that enabled it have taken their toll on the psyche of most black people both inside and outside of Africa.

The election of a man of black African heritage as president of a predominantly white nation, and one that also happens to be the most powerful nation in the world, is taken by blacks the world over to mean that their centuries of suffering under the racist yoke of implied inferiority are coming to an end.

This is especially felt in Africa itself because Africa is largely benighted. Though many African countries have now been independent for nearly half a century, Africa remains particularly poor, particularly corrupt, and particularly violent. Africans, of course, know this, and while Barack Obama’s election will probably do nothing to end African poverty, corruption, or violence, it does seem to mark the end of the era of belief in black inferiority.

That may explain the odd statement made to me by Africans: They have told their sons that they can grow up to be like Barack Obama. I say “odd” because in Africa, of course a black child can grow up to be the president of his (or her) country. This statement can therefore only mean, “Look, my son, we Africans, we blacks, can now do anything.”

In its remarkably positive impact on blacks around the world, the Obama election has indeed been a blessing. It is also good for America’s image -- it marks the end of the routinely (and unfairly) made charge that America is a racist society.

But these blessings notwithstanding, there is one other fascinating question to be pondered: What, if any, will the relationship be between President Obama’s policies and these two benefits? In other words, will blacks around the world continue to celebrate the ascendancy of a black man to the presidency of the United States of America even if he largely governs as mainstream white presidents did? And will America’s image continue to benefit from the election of a black man even if his foreign policy decisions are quite similar to his white predecessors’? Or is “the world” more interested in America moving left in its foreign policy than in the color of its president?

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, it is fun being an American in Africa. Even when I admit -- which admittedly I only do when directly asked -- that I voted for the other guy, I get a big smile. Just for being an American at this moment in time.

We shall see if it matters in the long run. I’m not sure it will.

California college student: Terror is the New Communism

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

As they say on the TV show “24,” the following took place last week between 9 and 10 p.m. on a flight from Los Angeles to Denver.

I spoke for a few minutes to the 20-year-old woman seated across the aisle from me.

She: What brings you to Denver?”

Me: I am giving a speech.

She: What do you do?

Me: I'm a radio talk show host.

She: Who did you vote for?

Me: McCain

She: Why?

Me: Smaller government and the war on terror.

She: Terror is the new communism.

Me: Communism killed about a hundred million people. And who do you think attacked and killed 3,000 of us on Sept. 11?

She: The government.

For the record, as I believe this to be essential to understanding this young woman’s views, she is a student attending the University of California Santa Barbara.

Truth is she had to be a student at a major university. She would never have come up with “Terror is the new Communism” on her own. It is a moral obscenity that one has to learn.

Of course, there is an irony to this statement. Meant in the opposite way she meant it, I could largely assent to the proposition that terror is the new communism. Communism was an enslaving and murderous threat in its time and the Jihadism is such a threat in our lifetime.

But that is not how this young woman meant the statement. As she has learned history and the contemporary world, communism was a bogeyman in its time and terror is a bogeyman in our time.

When I told her that communism had killed 100 million people, I could not tell if she even processed the words. It was as if had I uttered a series of nonsense syllables. She either didn’t believe me or didn’t care.

On the assumption that I had met a person with a normal conscience, the only rational explanation for her non-reaction is that she didn’t believe me and regarded what I said as right-wing propaganda (just as the belief in that Islamist terror threatens us).

In her belief that neither communism nor terror were/are real threats, I suspect this young woman represents many college students. If one wants to understand what left-wing dominance in university social sciences departments produces, one merely had to meet this young woman.

At most universities, communism is a non-evil, indeed, largely a non-issue. The most enslaving and murderous movement in history is almost never taught as such. When communism is mentioned at all, it is usually solely in order to show how vile anti-communists were. Thus, as little as students may know about McCarthyism, most students far more readily identify it with evil than they do communism. Indeed, more could probably identify Joseph McCarthy than Joseph Stalin.

Nor is this a matter of students not being taught to label anything as evil. They have no problem labeling Nazism, Fascism, George W. Bush, slavery, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and tobacco companies as evil. It’s just that they won’t label communism as such.

Does one in 10.000 students know of the communist terror-famine that took about 6 million Ukarainian lives. How many know about the communist Pol Pot, who butchered nearly one-third of his fellow Cambodians? Or how many innocents were murdered in the Gulag Archipelago (or could even identify it)? Or that China’s communist tyrant Mao Zedong killed about 60 million of his

fellow Chinese? Or that Communist North Korea is essentially a concentration camp in the guise of a country?

The answer to all these questions is very few.

And that, quite frankly, breaks my heart. I am currently reading “Mao: The Secret Life,” almost universally regarded, even in the mainstream media, as the most important book on Mao ever written. According to the authors, in 1930-31 alone, Mao and his gang developed 120 types of torture for use on innocent people he wanted to force into phony confessions so as to rule by terror. They included burning the vaginas of wives of opponents and pulling wires through men’s penises, which were then attached to their ears and plucked.

These poor souls have no memorial. Least of all at an American university.

Obama’s Inaugural Address Short on Inspiration

Dennis Prager

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The night Barack Obama won the election, he gave one of the most inspiring victory addresses I ever heard.

The day Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States, he gave one of the least inspiring inaugural addresses I have ever heard.

Even the estimated 2 million people who came to see the man they revere and to celebrate the inauguration of the first black president of the United States, cheered few times. There was almost nothing to cheer. The address was largely a downer. Even if America is in as desperate a condition as the new president believes it is, the moment called for something uplifting.

As a politically moderate friend of mine said to me, the speech was joyless.

And when it wasn’t joyless, it was often either incoherent or disjointed or factually wrong.

That is not to say nothing good was said. There were some fine thoughts, delivered in Barack Obama’s effective manner.

So let’s honor the good:

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned.” We may differ on how greatness is earned but this point cannot be stated too often.

“For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.” It is a joy to hear, finally, a man of the left include the Vietnam War in the list of the good wars America has fought.

“…to all other peoples and governments…know that America is…ready to lead once more.” You have to wonder how the Democratic Left reacts to a call to America to lead -- isn’t that American exceptionalism?

“…for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” Hurrah! Given that the “T-word” was not mentioned in the Democratic presidential debates, it was nice to hear it in the inaugural address.

Now to some platitudes:

“On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear …” It is time to retire this Democratic Party platitude. No one invokes fear as much as the left does. Beyond Islamic terror, it’s hard to identify a right-wing fear. But the left’s list has been almost endless: racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, heterosexual AIDS, secondhand smoke, global warming, just to name a few.

“On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” No matter how many times I read this line, I had little idea what Mr. Obama was referring to.

And onto some problematic lines:

“We will restore science to its rightful place.” I assume this is liberal code for pushing, among other things, embryonic stem cell research. But that is not the problem with this statement. There are two other problems. First, science’s “rightful place” is a notch beneath moral values, but one suspects that those who agreed with Mr. Obama’s statement did not hear it that way. Second, if science is so important to Mr. Obama how does he so cavalierly announce that global warming is a major threat to humanity’s future in the light of current global cooling and the number of scientists who dissent from the man-made-carbon-dioxide-global-warming hysteria? Is the global warming steamroller really driven by science? Or by politics?

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...” If in Obama’s America, we will no longer ask, “Is government too big?” we will be in big trouble.

“(The market’s) power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that … a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.” Precisely because too many Democrats (and Republicans) were disturbed by the fact that the prosperous were buying homes more easily than the poor, the government cajoled banks into giving loans to too many people who should not have had been given them. Now the poor and just about everyone else are suffering.

“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” It is only a “false choice” among those who deem the Patriot Act a rejection of our ideals. Most Americans believe that the Bush administration kept us safe and preserved our ideals.

“We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth …” We are? What religion has shaped America as much as Judaism and Christianity have? What language has shaped America as much as English? The President’s point is either untrue or meaningless. Why did he make it?

“We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.” Unfortunately, there isn’t a shred of evidence that most of the old hatreds are passing. And there are

even some new ones. And “common humanity” means little outside of biology. People who treat others decently do so out of common values, not “common humanity.”

“To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West -- know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.” Really? Who exactly? Ruthless tyrants who only destroy have had hundreds of millions of followers. The president’s claim is more wishful thinking.

And, finally, a platitude that is actually dangerous:

“Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Only the very, very naive could say something so wrong. It is hard to identify a time in history when any people’s security emanated from the justness of their cause. That is a fairy tale. Did the justness of the Jews’ cause give the Jews security in Hitler’s Europe? Or the Ukrainians or Armenians or Cambodians or anyone else? Powerful armies give decent peoples their security, not the justness of their cause. If President Obama believes that in this world good people are secure thanks to the goodness of their cause, America is in trouble.

Guess Who Cares about Dead Palestinians? Jews!

Dennis Prager


For those individuals -- such as nearly all members of the world news media -- who, in light of Israel’s invasion of Gaza -- see moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, here are some clarifying thoughts.

First, it would be difficult nearly to the point of impossibility, to find Israeli or other Jews who celebrate the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Jews both within and outside of Israel cringe when they see pictures of dead Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. For thousands of years at their Passover seders, Jews have removed wine from their cups to ceremonially weep for the Egyptians -- their erstwhile slave owners for 400 years -- who died during the Jews’ exodus. Jews have never stopped weeping for enemies.

The opposite is the case with the large majority of Palestinians. It would be quite difficult to find many Palestinians who do not celebrate the deaths of Israeli Jews or non-Israeli Jews. This is not only reflected in Palestinian polls that show majority support for terrorism -- and terrorism means killing innocent Jews -- it is also reflected in Palestinian media, Palestinian schools, and Palestinian mosques that routinely glorify murderers of Jews, and refer to all Jews as “monkeys” and the like.

Take for example, Palestinian reaction to the 2001 Palestinian terror bombing of a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in which 15 Jews, five of whom were two sets of parents and their children, were murdered and an additional 130 people were injured, some permanently maimed.

As reported by the Associated Press, a month later, “Palestinian university students opened an exhibition that included a grisly re-enactment” of that mass murder. The students built a replica of the Sbarro pizzeria, with fake blood, splattered pizza, a plastic hand dangling from the ceiling, and a fake severed leg wearing jeans and a bloody black sneaker.

“The exhibit also includes a large rock in front of a mannequin wearing the black hat, black jacket and black trousers typically worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews. A recording from inside the rock calls

out: ‘O believer, there is a Jewish man behind me. Come and kill him,’” paraphrasing a verse in the Koran. It became a popular tourist attraction for Palestinians, to which Palestinian parents took their little children.

Here’s the question: Can anyone even imagine Jews, in Israel or anywhere else on earth -- no matter how right-wing they are politically or religiously -- doing something analogous to celebrate the death of Palestinian civilians? I have spoken to Jewish groups on both U.S. coasts since the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and when the subject of Palestinian civilian deaths is mentioned, all I hear is regret and sadness.

This moral chasm that separates Israel from its enemies, and separates the Jews from their enemies, merely confirms what Hamas repeatedly says about itself: “We love death more than the Jews love life.” This motto is so true that Hamas not only doesn’t weep for dead Israelis, it doesn’t weep for dead Palestinians. It uses living Palestinians as human shields and uses dead Palestinians as propaganda. The moral disequilibrium is such that Jews weep for dead Palestinian far more than Hamas does.

The second point to be raised is about perspective.

If during World War II, Western news media had reported German and Japanese civilian casualties in the same detail and with the same sympathy they report Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza, it is doubtful that the Nazis and the Japanese militarists would have lost that war. Certainly, at the very least, the anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist war effort would have been severely compromised.

The analogy is entirely apt. Hamas is on the same moral level as the two World War II enemies. Do those who condemn Israel for its attacks on Hamas fighters that have tragically resulted in hundreds of civilian Palestinian deaths also condemn the Allied bombings of German and Japanese military targets that resulted in far more civilian deaths? I suspect not since most critics of Israel still regard World War II as a moral war. The overriding issue, therefore, is whether fighting Hamas is moral. If it is, then the unintended death of Palestinian civilians is a tragedy, not an evil (except on the part of Hamas, because it situates its fighters and its missiles among civilians, including schools).

Third, if Hamas had the same ability to bomb Israel as Israel has to bomb Gaza, would the number of Jewish civilians be in the hundreds? Or would there be the Holocaust in Israel that Hamas and its Iranian sponsors dream of?

The answer is so obvious that this consideration alone renders moral Israel’s war to destroy Hamas. In a short period of time Hamas will have more accurate missiles and longer-range ones. One of them could kill a thousand or more. Another one could destroy passenger planes coming into Ben-Gurion Airport, thereby causing foreign airlines to stop flying into Israel. It is that inevitability that Israel is fighting to prevent. But in the morally confused world we live in, only with thousands of Israelis dead, would Israel’s invasion of Gaza be “proportional,” and therefore acceptable. But Israel is more interested in living with world condemnation than in dying with world sympathy.

A Question for My Friend Alan Dershowitz

Dennis Prager


Harvard Law Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is that rare individual who is both a highly respected academic and well known to the general population.

But in another regard he is even rarer. He regards himself as a man of the left, yet on one of the defining moral issues of our time, attitudes toward Israel, he has nothing in common with the left. He is not only one of Israel’s staunchest supporters, he spends much of his time defending Israel. He has written innumerable articles and four books defending Israel: “The Case against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace,” “The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved,” “The Case for Israel,” and “What Israel Means to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians, and Journalists.”

This past week, Dershowitz wrote two eloquent columns defending Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza. One was titled “Israel, Hamas, and Moral Idiocy,” published in the Christian Science Monitor and the other, “Israel's Policy Is Perfectly ‘Proportionate,’” was published in the Wall Street Journal.

In his Monitor column, Dershowitz describes “three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets” -- “Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers,” “the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists,” and “the United States and a few other nations that place the blame squarely on Hamas.”

It is relevant to the question I will pose that he omits any mention of the world’s left, even when mentioning the European Union. Who exactly in the European Union is condemning Israel? Its conservatives? Who in America is condemning Israel? Conservatives? Who in Australia or Canada? Conservatives? Of course not. As regards Israel (and America and much else), the Western world’s moral idiots, to use the term in the title of the Dershowitz column, are virtually all on the left, including and especially many of his colleagues in academia.

So, I have a question for my friend Dershowitz. (I say ‘friend’ because we’ve known each other for years and debated and dialogued together.)

Given that Israel’s security is so important to you, given that you believe that the ability to morally distinguish between Israel and its enemies is tantamount to the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and given that those who condemn Israel for its “disproportionate” response to Hamas terror-rockets are almost all on the left in America and Europe, why do you continue to identify yourself as a man of the left?

Everyone who thinks sometimes differs with one’s ideological compatriots. But when one’s ideological compatriots are morally wrong on the greatest moral issue of the moment and perhaps the very clearest as well, don’t you at least suffer from cognitive dissonance?

It seems that to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Dershowitz engages in some intellectual denial. Just as he avoids any mention of the left in his column on the world’s moral idiots at the present moment, he does criticize the right for having its anti-Israel moral fools. In his book “The Case against Israel's Enemies,” he has a chapter on the far left and a chapter on the far right, as if there is any equivalence of impact. And as if the existence of anti-Israel voices on that insignificant “far right” somehow balances the staggering number of anti-Israel voices on the huge left, whether far or not so far.

Dershowitz himself repeatedly acknowledges how inverted moral thinking reigns on American campuses.

To cite just two examples: In 2005 Dershowitz wrote, “It’s no coincidence that so many of the professors leading the campaign against Harvard President Lawrence Summers for his recent comments about women in science also were in the vanguard of the campaign to divest from Israel and boycott Israeli academics.” And in 2007: “The only people who tremble on campuses are students at Columbia and Berkeley who are worried that they'll be graded down for being pro-Israel.”

Now which part of the American political spectrum dominates the universities, the left or the right? The former, of course. But Dershowitz won't put two and two together, at least publicly, and conclude that there is something fundamentally and morally flawed about the left and its values.

Dershowitz undoubtedly reads the New York Times and Boston Globe editorials as well as those of the Wall Street Journal. So he knows that only the conservative editorials of the Wall Street Journal routinely defend Israel.

He knows that with few exceptions, there are no pro-Israel left-wing journals as there are right-wing pro-Israel journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and National Review.

He knows that Israel is routinely bashed on left-wing talk radio (including, though more subtly, on NPR) and that Israel is constantly defended on right-wing talk radio.

He knows that on the Internet, the most virulent attacks on Israel are on the left, while the most pro-Israel websites are nearly all conservative and right wing, from Townhall.com to LittleGreenFootballs to NationalReviewOnline.

But none of this matters. Dershowitz still morally equates left and right and considers himself a man of the left.

Why?

I welcome Dershowitz’s response. Here is mine.

One reason, I believe, is that to acknowledge the moral failure of the left, especially the secular left, on most of the great moral issues of the post-World War II era -- the Cold War, the Middle East, confronting (or even acknowledging the existence of) the Islamist threat -- is very difficult for a person on the left, even one as analytical as Dershowitz. Secular leftism is analogous to Arthur Koestler’s “god that failed.” And few people want to confront the fact that the ideal, the god they bet their lives on, is a false god.

Second, to acknowledge the broken moral compass that guides the left is to implicitly endorse the right, especially the religious right. But that is very difficult for anyone on the left to do because the essence of the secular left is a rejection of the Christian right. That it is conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who are the most stalwart supporters of Israel, must greatly disturb Dershowitz.

And, it is precisely among those who most reject Judeo-Christian values that anti-Israel moral idiocy prevails. How does Dershowitz explain that? That’s my question.

When a Woman Isn't in the Mood: Part I

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Given our preoccupation with politics and economics, it is easy to forget that for most of us micro issues still play a greater role in our lives. So here are some thoughts that, as heretical as they might sound, have been found extremely helpful, sometimes even marriage-saving, from listeners to my radio show, which features a “male-female hour” every week.

The subject is one of the most common problems that besets marriages: the wife who is “not in the mood” and the consequently frustrated and hurt husband.

There are marriages with the opposite problem — a wife who is frustrated and hurt because her husband is rarely in the mood. But, as important and as destructive as that problem is, it has different causes and different solutions, and is therefore not addressed here. What is addressed is the far more common problem of “He wants, she doesn't want.”

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wife's refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think men's natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a woman's nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

This is a major reason many husbands clam up. A man whose wife frequently denies him sex will first be hurt, then sad, then angry, then quiet. And most men will never tell their wives why they have become quiet and distant. They are afraid to tell their wives. They are often made to feel ashamed of their male sexual nature, and they are humiliated (indeed emasculated) by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex.

When first told this about men, women generally react in one or more of five ways:

1. You have to be kidding. That certainly isn't my way of knowing if he loves me. There have to be deeper ways than sex for me to show my husband that I love him.

2. If this is true, men really are animals.

3. Not my man. He knows I love him by the kind and loving way I treat him.

4. You have it backwards. If he truly loved me, he wouldn't expect sex when I'm not in the mood.

5. I know this and that's why I rarely say no to sex.

Let's deal with each of these responses.

1. You have to be kidding. …

The most common female reaction to hearing about men's sexual nature is incredulity, often followed by denial. These are entirely understandable reactions given how profoundly different — and how seemingly more primitive — men's sexual nature is compared to women's.

Incredulity is certainly the reaction most women have when first being told that a man knows he is loved when his wife gives him her body. The idea that the man she is married to, let alone a man whose intelligence she respects, will to any serious extent measure her love of him by such a carnal yardstick strikes many women as absurd and even objectionable.

But the question that should matter to a woman who loves her man is not whether this proposition speaks poorly or well of male nature. It is whether it is true. And it is true beyond anything she can imagine. A woman who often deprives her husband of her body is guaranteed to injure him and to injure the marriage — no matter what her female friends say, no matter what a sympathetic therapist says, and no matter what her man says.

(Very few men will confess to the amount of hurt and eventual anger they experience when repeatedly denied sex).

Of course, there are times when a man must simply refrain from initiating sex out of concern for his wife's physical or emotional condition. And then there are men for whom sex rarely has anything to do with making love or whose frequency of demands are excessive. (What “excessive” means ought to be determined by the couple before the refusals begin, or continue.) But the fact remains: Your man knows you love him by your willingness to give him your body.

2. If this is true, men really are animals.

Correct. Compared to most women's sexual nature, men's sexual nature is far closer to that of animals. So what? That is the way he is made. Blame God and nature. Telling your husband to control it is a fine idea. But he already does. Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control. He has married knowing he will have to deny his sexual nature's desire for variety for the rest of his life. To ask that he also regularly deny himself sex with the one woman in the world with whom he is permitted sex is asking far too much. Deny him enough times and he may try to fill this need with another woman. If he is too moral to ever do that, he will match your sexual withdrawal with emotional and other forms of withdrawal.

3. Not my man.

Many women will argue, understandably, “My husband knows I love him. He doesn't need me to have sex with him to know that. And this is especially so when I'm too tired or just don't want sex. Anyway, my man only enjoys sex with me when I'm into it, too.”

The importance of mutual kindness to a marriage is impossible to overstate. But while necessary, it is not sufficient. Women can understand this by applying the same rule to men. Most women will readily acknowledge that it is certainly not enough for a man to be kind to her. If it were, women would rarely reject kind men as husband material. But as much as a woman wants a kind man, she wants more than that. If a man is, let us say, lacking in ambition or just doesn't want to work hard, few women will love him no matter how kind he is. In fact, most women would happily give up some kindness for hard work and ambition. A kind man with little ambition is not masculine, therefore not desirable to most women.

Likewise, a kind woman who is not sexual with her husband is not feminine. She is a kind roommate.

Furthermore, a woman who denies the man she loves sex is not kind.

4. You have it backward.

Every rational and decent man knows there are times when he should not initiate sex. In a marriage of good communication, a man would either know when those times are or his wife would tell him (and she needs to — women should not expect men to read their minds. He is her man, not her mother.)

But, to repeat the key point, rejection of sex should happen infrequently. And it should almost never be dependent on mood — see Part II next week.

5. I know this and that's why I rarely say no to my husband.

This is a wise woman. She knows a sexually fulfilled husband is a happy husband. (At the same time, men need to recognize that complete sexual fulfillment is unattainable in this world.) And because a happy husband loves his wife more, this cycle of love produces a happy home.

In Part II, I will explain in detail why mood should play little or no role in a woman's determining whether she has sex with her husband.

I conclude Part I with this clarification: Everything written here applies under two conditions: 1. The woman is married to a good man. 2. She wants him to be a happy husband. If either condition is not present, nothing written here matters. But if you are a woman who loves your husband, what is written here can be the most important thing you will read concerning your marriage. Because chances are the man you love won't tell you.

A Response to Marc Shaiman’s Musical Against Prop 8

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Marc Shaiman, the Tony Award-winning composer of the film and stage musical “Hairspray,” has done the country a major, if inadvertent, service. He has composed a brief musical piece against California Proposition 8 that takes only three minutes to reveal the ignorance and hate that pervades so much anti-Proposition 8 activism.

This short musical, viewed more than 2 million times on the Internet, features major Hollywood talents playing (through song) two groups on a beach -- gay men and women in beach clothes and a stuffy formally dressed church group composed of whites and blacks.

Its message begins with a religious man and woman reacting to the cheerful gay group (celebrating the Barack Obama victory) by singing these words:

“Look! Nobody’s watching

It’s time to spread some hate

And put it in the constitution

Now, how? Proposition Hate!

Great!”

Shaiman puts hateful words in the mouths of the religious proponents of the man-woman definition of marriage: “It’s time to spread some hate and put it in the constitution.” But no one put hate in the constitution. The only words Proposition 8 added to the California Constitution were: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” What is hateful about that? It may be wrong, but why is it hateful?

All the hate publicly expressed in the Prop. 8 battle has come from activists like Shaiman. For the record, most gays have not joined these radical activists. It is radical gays and radical straights who have led the movement to smear the Mormon Church and to compile blacklists of those who gave money to the Proposition 8 campaign. As one of many examples of their vindictiveness, Shaiman himself is directly responsible for forcing Scott Eckern, the Mormon artistic director of the California Musical Theater, to resign because he made a personal contribution to Prop 8.

As for ignorance, the first distortion follows immediately, explaining the way religious people will succeed in putting their hatred into the Constitution.

“People, listen to our plea

They’ll teach kids about sodomy!”

And then the gay group responds:

“That wasn’t right, that’s a lie!”

And the church group counters:

“But it worked, so we don’t care!”

No one ever mentioned sodomy being taught in schools. But it is in no way a “lie” to argue that when marriage discussions arise in school classes, children will be taught about princes marrying princes and princesses marrying princesses. It has already begun.

To cite one of many examples, in Massachusetts, whose Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage, second graders at the Joseph Estabrook Elementary School in Lexington “used the children's book, ‘King & King’ as part of a lesson about different types of weddings Lexington Superintendent of Schools Paul Ash said Estabrook … has no legal obligation to notify parents about the book … ‘Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal’” (Boston Globe, April 20, 2006).

Likewise, shortly after the California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, overturned an earlier California proposition defining marriage as man-woman, students in a Northern California elementary school were taken to their female teacher’s wedding to her female partner.

The next distortion Shaiman puts into the mouth of a religious man comes when Jesus Christ shows up between the two groups, and the religious man says to Jesus:

“Jesus, doesn’t the Bible say these people are an abomination?”

And Jesus responds, “Yeah.”

It is quite audacious, to put it mildly, to have Jesus tell a falsehood in a musical seen by millions. Yet, no one seems to care about Mr. Shaiman’s distorted depiction of Jesus and of the Bible.

The fact is that nowhere in the Bible are homosexuals called “an abomination.” And no one, beyond one sick fringe family that has no standing in any religious community, refers to gays as “abominations.” On the contrary, religious opponents of same-sex marriage always speak of “hating the sin, not the sinner.” They speak of love for gays; it is the activists for same-sex marriage who express hate -- for the Mormons, the Orthodox Jews, the evangelical Christians, the traditional Catholics, the African-Americans (whose lopsided vote in favor Prop 8 is widely credited with passing the Proposition) and for all the others who seek to keep marriage defined as man-woman.

This is followed by another distortion of the Bible, again from the mouth of Jesus:

“… but you know it says exact the same thing (“abomination”) about this shrimp cocktail!”

Shaiman, one suspects, has not carefully studied Leviticus. As fate would have it, I am currently teaching the Book of Leviticus at the American Jewish University, the West Coast seminary of Conservative Judaism. And Shaiman tells a half-truth. Yes, Leviticus calls shellfish “an abomination” and uses the same word for sexual acts between men. However, the text states that shellfish is an abomination “for you,” i.e., for Jews alone (Leviticus 11.12). The act of a man “lying with a man as with a woman” is labeled “an abomination” without the qualifying words “for you.” And Jews who do eat shellfish are never called or considered “abominations” any more than men who engage in homosexual acts are.

Jews alone are prohibited from killing and eating pork, shellfish, and the other non-Kosher creatures. These Kosher laws of the Torah prohibited Jews from killing and eating most species of animals thousands of years ago. The reasons for why certain species are permitted and why some are not are far too complex for a column. But Professor Jacob Milgrom, author of the three-volume Anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus, convincingly demonstrates that the Torah’s dietary laws are overwhelmingly concerned with ethics and holiness.

But none of that matters. In an age when most college graduates know little or nothing about the Bible -- which, until the baby boomer generation, was the most widely read, most widely studied, and most widely revered book in America -- they will learn all they think they need to know about the Bible and homosexuality from a three-minute musical on the Internet.

Hatred based on ignorance is known as bigotry. Making the bigotry of much of the anti-Proposition 8 activism apparent is Marc Shaiman’s significant, if inadvertent, contribution.

Why can’t Shaiman and his fellow activists acknowledge that there are good people on both sides of this issue? Those of us who supported Proposition 8 readily acknowledge that many good people differ with us. Neither position is inherently hateful, but this little musical is.

Why Reporters -- and Judges and Professors -- Are Biased

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

That the news media were biased in the 2008 presidential election is now acknowledged by fair-minded people, left or right

As Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said this weekend at a Politico/USC Conference on the 2008 election: “It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business. … It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Given how obvious this bias is, the question is not whether liberals in the media tend to offer biased reporting. The question is why? Why can’t liberal news people report the news without any slant?

The answer is that for people on the left, all -- I repeat, (set ital) all (end ital) -- professions are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. That end is the social transformation of society, meaning the promoting of “social justice” as the left understands that term.

For most liberal news reporters, therefore, the purpose of news reporting is not to report news as objectively as possible. The purpose of the media in general and of reporting specifically is to promote social justice and the social transformation of society.

For most liberal judges, the primary purpose of being a judge is to promote social justice and transform society. That is why liberal judges are so much more likely to be judicial activists than conservative judges. Most liberal judges do not see their roles as merely adjudicating a dispute according to the law. They see their role primarily as using the law and their power to rule on the law to promote social justice.

For most university professors -- and many high school teachers, as well -- outside of the natural sciences and math, the same holds true. The task of a teacher is to teach, i.e., to convey the most important information as honestly as possible. But, again, this conflicts with the social justice goal of the left. History teachers who merely teach history are of little use to the left. History -- and English and political science, and sociology and other liberal arts -- teachers must use their classroom to produce young people who will wish to engage in society-transforming work for social justice.

For most liberals in the arts (there are very few conservatives in the arts) there is no denial of their having an agenda. They state quite candidly that the purpose of the arts is to challenge the (conservative) status quo, to raise political and social consciousness by advancing a “progressive” political and social agenda. The artist whose agenda is merely to produce beautiful art is looked upon as a reactionary buffoon, and is not likely to be taken seriously -- no matter how talented -- in the worlds of music, dance, painting, and sculpture.

Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research. There are the exaggerated secondhand smoke data popularized so as to decrease smoking and fight “Big Tobacco.” And now we have the scientifically questionable belief in man-made carbon emissions causing global warming leading to natural catastrophe – and recommended “solutions” many of which, if adopted, will serve the goal of undermining corporate capitalism.

The best analogy of the directing of all human endeavors toward a left-wing purpose would be those early medieval centuries of European life when just about everything man made was supposed to reflect a religious consciousness. Virtually nothing stood apart from the Church. The arts were religious, the sciences were handmaidens of theology, and schools were religious in nature.

Most moderns look upon that period as a dark age -- perhaps a bit unfairly at times. But the people who most scorn what they deem the religious “Dark Ages” are trying to building a secular-left dark age in our time. Because the left is a religion, a substitute for the Christianity it seeks to displace.

Is Gay the New Black?

Dennis Prager


Gay is the new black is one of the mottos of the movement to redefine marriage to include two people of the same sex.

The likening of the movement for same-sex marriage to the black civil rights struggle is a primary argument of pro same-sex marriage groups. This comparison is a major part of the moral appeal of redefining marriage: Just as there were those who once believed that blacks and whites should not be allowed to be married, the argument goes, there are today equally bigoted individuals who believe that men should not be allowed to marry men and women should not be allowed to marry women.

It is worth noting that the people least impressed with the comparison of the gay struggle to redefine marriage with the black struggle for racial equality are blacks. They voted overwhelmingly for Californias Proposition 8 which amends the California Constitution to define marriage as being the union of a man and a woman.

One reason given is that blacks tend to be socially conservative. But another, less verbalized, reason may well be that blacks find the comparison demeaning and insulting. As well they should.

One has to either be ignorant of segregation laws and the routine humiliations experienced by blacks during the era of Jim Crow, or one has to be callous to black suffering, to equate that to a person not being allowed to marry a person of the same sex. They are not in the same moral universe.

There is in fact no comparison between the situation of gays in America in 2008 and the situation of most black Americans prior to the civil rights era. Gays are fully accepted, and as a group happen to constitute one of the wealthiest in American life. Moreover, not being allowed to marry a person of the same sex is not anti-gay; it is pro-marriage as every civilization has defined it. The fact is that states like California already grant people who wish to live and love a member of the same sex virtually every right that marriage bestows except the word married.

A certain number of gay men will feel better if they can call their partner husband and some lesbians will enjoy calling their partner wife, but society as a whole is not benefitted by such a redefinition of those words. Society as a whole does not benefit by removing, as California did, the words bride and groom from marriage licenses and substituting Partner A and Partner B.

But hoping that the more radical gays and straights of the gay rights movement will ask what benefits society? before what makes some gays feel better? is useless.

And so, the movement appropriates the symbols and rhetoric of the back civil rights struggle when that struggle and the movement to redefine marriage have next to nothing in common. How can a seriously moral individual compare forcing a black bus rider to sit in the back of a bus or to give up his seat to a white who demands it, or prohibiting a black human being from drinking from the same water fountain or eating at the same lunch counter as a white human being, or being denied the right to vote, or being prohibited from attending a school with whites, let alone being periodically lynched, to either the general gay condition today or specifically to being given the right to redefine marriage for society?

The vast majority of Americans, including those who oppose same-sex marriage, know that the homosexual is created in Gods image every bit as much as is the heterosexual; and acknowledge that the gay man or woman has a right to love whom he or she wants and that commitment has the right to be given legal protections.

But radically redefining the most important institution in the life of a civilization; and routinely labeling as the moral equivalent of racists every individual who does not want children regularly asked whether they will marry a boy or a girl when grown up, and who rightly fears that every traditional religious community will be labeled as a hate group -- these are not commensurate with civil rights.

Gay and straight activists who liken their demand to redefine marriage to black suffering under Jim Crow merely cheapen historic black suffering. Most blacks know this but for the sake of their political coalition wont say it. They should. Rosa Parks is in a different moral category than the protestors against Proposition 8.

Some Positive Reactions from the Right

Dennis Prager


I spent a good part of the past year speaking and writing against the election of Barack Obama. During the last week of the campaign, my Salem Radio Network colleagues, Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved, and I spoke on behalf of the McCain-Palin ticket in the Battleground states of Colorado, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

One would expect that I would be devastated at Barack Obamas election -- as devastated as liberals were at the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004. I am not -- yet. Here are some reasons why:

1. Republicans won the election of 2004, an election that was more important to the future of America and the world than was this election. Had Sen. John Kerry won in 2004, America would have left Iraq in defeat and Islamists would have won their greatest victory ever. Millions of young Muslims would likely have seen in Islamic jihadism humanitys future and signed up for terror; and Iraq would have degenerated into genocidal chaos.

2. The election of a black president is good for blacks, good for whites, and therefore very good for America.

At least at this moment -- no one can predict the future -- many more blacks feel fully American, and fewer blacks regard white America as racist than ever before. One cannot attain a higher status than the American presidency, and a black man will now occupy that position. As the Hoover Institutions Shelby Steele wrote, this is the first time in history that a majority white nation elected a black as its leader.

Conservatives are not surprised. I have argued for decades that America is the least racist country in the world. By and large, only Americans on the right have believed, or at least had the courage to say, this. Now that fact is obvious to virtually anyone with eyes to see.

3. The Obama victory poses a serious challenge to liberalism and to the doctrine of black victimhood.

If fewer and fewer blacks perceive white Americans as racist, a major reason for black support for liberalism could lose its appeal to blacks. On the other hand, if liberalism continues to portray blacks as victims of white racism, more white Americans will regard liberalism as phony -- or worse, as stirring up racial tensions for political gain.

Most whites are tired of racial tension, tired of being portrayed as racist, tired of their children being taught in college that they are either consciously or unconsciously racist, tired of lowering standards for blacks or anyone else.

So the Obama victory puts liberals in a bind. They either acknowledge the reality of an essentially non-racist America and thereby alienate black and white liberals still committed to this proposition or they continue to play the America is racist card and alienate many whites.

The challenge the Obama victory poses to many blacks is that they will have to abandon ascribing black problems -- such as disproportionate amounts of violent crime and the highest rate of out-of-wedlock births in America -- to racism. Fewer and fewer white Americans will tolerate being blamed for problems within black life.

4. The Obama victory will bring clarity to Americas place in the world.

Now that America is apparently loved again, we shall see how this plays out beyond emotional rhetoric. Will Europe contribute significantly more troops to Afghanistan? Will Germany now allow its NATO troops to shoot at Taliban fighters (thus far they have been allowed to shoot only if shot at)? Will our allies and Russia and China place the needed sanctions on Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear device? Or is Americas being loved irrelevant to how other countries behave?

5. Conservatives will be able to show how much more decently they act when they are out of power.

The treatment of President George W. Bush by liberals has been despicable, undeserved and unprecedented. We who oppose Barack Obamas policies will, hopefully, act in accordance with conservative values of decency. Hence my simple announcement on the day after the election: I did not vote for him. I did not want him to be president. But as of January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will be my president.

Barack Obama may have a successful presidency or a failed one. If he allows the left wing of the Democratic Party to set his agenda, it will be the latter. In the meantime, however, we can celebrate the aforementioned good of Barack Obamas election and pray for him and for our beloved country.

Will Americans Really Vote to Fundamentally Transform America?

Dennis Prager


Today, Americans decide on whether, in the words of Barack Obama last week, to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

That is really what this election is about, even though most of those voting for Barack Obama do not want to fundamentally transform America. That is Barack Obamas and the Democratic Partys agenda.

Why then are so many people likely to vote for the U.S. senator from Illinois?

They all have their reasons. But aside from those who hold left-wing views, relatively few want America fundamentally transformed. This can be seen by analyzing the largest groups voting for Barack Obama:

1. People who vote Democrat no matter who the nominee is.

These are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats -- people who usually want more government in their lives, want bigger and stronger unions, dont trust Republicans, and/or have voted Democrat all their lives. Whatever their reasons for regularly voting Democrat, for most of these people, fundamentally transforming America is not one of them.

2. Black Americans

Black Americans regularly vote Democrat, but more will today than ever before. The possibility of a black president electrifies them in ways that no other minority group in America can fully relate to. Jews were happy and proud when Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., ran for vice-president in 2000. And Greek Americans felt similarly when Spiro Agnew and Michael Dukakis were candidates for national office. But little changed in Jewish or Greek Americans perceptions of themselves or of America.

For most blacks, however, the prospect of a black president symbolizes that they are truly part of America, and in one fell swoop helps undo the racist perception of black inferiority that more than a few blacks believe many whites hold. In short, it gives black Americans the thing all humans most yearn for -- respect from others and self-respect, i.e., dignity. Left-wing blacks, like left-wing whites, want America fundamentally transformed, but that is not the primary reason most blacks are so excited by an Obama victory.

3. Hispanic Americans

According to all analyses of Hispanic voting, Hispanics vote increasingly Democratic because they perceive Republicans as hostile to them. Their social values are far more conservative than liberal, but the immigration issue is a far larger concern for most Hispanics. In fact, if Barack Obama were a conservative Democrat he would get even more Hispanic votes. So, with this group, too, fundamentally transforming America plays little or no role in the Hispanic vote for Barack Obama.

4. Single women

Single women of all colors and ethnicities vote Democrat. They do so primarily because many of them are financially dependent on the state, because they have no man to depend on, nor a husband who might influence them politically (married women are considerably more likely to vote Republican than single women). Whatever their reasons for voting for Barack Obama, transforming America is not one of them. They would vote for any Democrat.

5. Young people

Large numbers of young people are apparently passionately committed to Barack Obama. In their case, the senators youth, his being black, and his charisma are major factors. But for them, transforming America is particularly appealing. That is why Obama used these words before a college audience. Young people tend to think their elders have made a mess of the world and that they will transform it because they are smarter and more idealistic than those who lived before

them. They do not know how hard it has been to make a country as great as America and have been educated to see its flaws far more clearly than its far greater virtues.

6. Leftists.

Leftists by definition want to fundamentally transform America. That is their primary reason for voting for Obama. His intelligence, charisma, and being black are only bonuses. Most important to the left is changing America. The farther left you go, the greater the disenchantment with America as it now exists and the greater the yearning to fundamentally transform it in the image of the vision they have for it.

If Barack Obama wins and he is given a Democratic-controlled Congress, the United States will indeed be transformed.

There will be, in Charles Krauthammers words, an unprecedented expansion of government power.

Economic growth will be slowed in favor of achieving economic equality.

Unions will be allowed to abolish secret ballots.

Serious attempts will be made to shut down the most effective opposition to the left -- talk radio.

The defense budget will be severely decreased.

Judges will be chosen based on their commitment to empathize with the downtrodden (Obamas own stated criterion for choosing judges), not based on their commitment to judging according to neutral rules that are blind to the individuals status in life.

Same-sex marriage will become national law as the Defense of Marriage Act is repealed and liberal judges rule that defining marriage as man-woman is unconstitutional.

Coal, nuclear energy, and new drilling will be discouraged and dependency on foreign oil will therefore rise while rationing of energy is instituted.

Companies will seek to do more and more business abroad as they become taxed more than in any other Western country.

Israel will be pressured to make peace.

America will leave Iraq whether or not Iraq is ready for us to do so, thereby increasing Islamic terror there and elsewhere.

Parents will have fewer years to instill their values in their children, as earlier and earlier education becomes the norm.

Judeo-Christian values, the founding values of America, will continue to recede in influence as America becomes more and more a secular-left country like those of Western European.

And when all this -- and much more -- transforms America, no one American will be able to argue they didnt know. Barack Obama promised it.

Why the Left Wants to Change America

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

If you ask most supporters of Sen. Barack Obama why they so fervently want him to be elected president, they will tell you about their deep yearning for "change."

And that, of course, has been the theme of the Obama campaign from its inception -- "change." It is the word found on nearly all the placards at Obama rallies. It is the word most often cited by the candidate himself.

But for all its ubiquity and for all the passion of its advocates, what this change is about is not entirely clear.

Of course, Obama himself often has spoken about the overriding need for change from eight years of President George W. Bush's policies. But this is not what he or most of his supporters really mean when they talk about change. In fact, it cannot be. This is easy to show: All candidates for president run on a platform of change from the party in power. If they don't stand for change, why vote for them?

George W. Bush wanted a change from Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton wanted a change from the first George Bush. And so on back to the first candidate for president to run from a party other than that of the prior president.

If change in policies from those of George W. Bush were all Barack Obama meant by change, "change" would not elicit anywhere near the passion it does. Nor would it be the basis of the depth of his appeal to his left-wing supporters. Surely John Kerry wanted as much of a change from George W. Bush in 2004. Yet he did not run on a platform of "change."

What Barack Obama is tapping into with the word "change" is nearly eight years of the left's constructing a description of an America that has been made so awful that "change" means changing America, not just changing policies.

The truth is that aside from the Iraq war, which is turning out to be quite successful, George W. Bush's policies have not been particularly controversial or even particularly right-wing. But the left has constructed for itself a view of America that, if you subscribe to it, makes radical change imperative.

The left, from The New York Times to MoveOn.org, has led itself and others to believe that:

--George W. Bush lied America into war.

--Tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans have been killed in a war waged in order to line the pockets of Vice President Dick Cheney's friends.

--The Constitution has been trampled on.

--America has become a torturing country.

--America's poor have become far more numerous and far more downtrodden.

--American troops in Iraq repeatedly have engaged in atrocities against innocent civilians.

--The opportunity for economic self-improvement has ceased for most Americans.

--Racism is endemic to American society.

--Republican rallies are hate-fests.

--John McCain has run a racist campaign against Barack Obama.

--Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, is a religious zealot and an idiot.

--Christian fundamentalists are on the verge of taking over America and turning it into a theocracy.

--The world is getting closer and closer to catastrophic and irreversible damage caused by human beings; and George W. Bush and energy interests are standing in the way of preventing universal destruction.

--America is on the road to fascism.

Now, as it happens, none of those things is true. But the left believes them all. That is why radical "change" becomes mandatory -- or America will collapse (and the world, too, which is why Barack Obama often mentions changing the world, as well as America).

Of course, many Americans who do not consider themselves leftist also will vote for Barack Obama and left-wing Democratic congressional candidates. They do so because they are lifelong Democrats who do not realize how far left their party has strayed and think they still are voting for the party of Truman and JFK; or because they personally benefit from Democratic largesse (e.g., government workers); or because they are active in their unions; or because they have come to believe the media and the Democrats, who have been telling them for almost a decade about how George W. Bush and the Republicans have ruined their country.

But as for the left, it lives in a bubble of its making. That is why most leftists live in places where nearly everyone shares their fantasies -- bubbles such as Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, the west side of Los Angeles, and the most hermetically sealed of the bubbles: universities. They interact almost only with other people who share their fantasy world of America Made Bad.

From Karl Marx to today's Democratic Party, the left everywhere has manufactured villains to slay -- starting with the bourgeoisie and land owners to today's "special interests" (though not, of course, left-wing special interests, such as labor unions, teachers unions and the trial bar), "the rich," drug companies, oil companies, neocons, evangelical Christians and, of course, the myriad racists, sexists, Islamophobes, homophobes and xenophobes.

That's why the left is so passionate about "change." In fact, if I believed America had become what the left believe it has become, I would be, too. But what they believe about America is not true; America remains the greatest country in the world. It needs to be fixed where broken, but not changed. Those who want to change it will make it worse. Perhaps much worse.

Opposition to California Proposition 8: Hate in the Name of Love

Dennis Prager


Next to the presidential election, California Proposition 8 is the most important vote in America.

It will determine the definition of marriage for the largest state in America, and it will determine whether judges or society will decide on social-moral issues.

In 2000, 61 percent of the voters in California, one the most liberal states in America, voted to retain the only definition of marriage civilization has ever had -- the union of a man and woman (the number of spouses allowed has changed over time but never the sexes of the spouses). But in May 2008, four out of seven California justices decided that they would use their power to make a new definition: Gender will now be irrelevant to marriage.

As a result of this judicial act, the only way to ensure that we continue to define marriage the way every religious and secular society in recorded history has defined marriage -- as between men and women -- is to amend the California Constitution. It is the only way to prevent the vote of one judge from redefining marriage, as was also done in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Which is why Proposition 8 exists.

But even though California voters decided by a large margin to retain the man-woman definition of marriage, passing Proposition 8 will be a challenge.

First, the attorney general of California, Jerry Brown, unilaterally renamed the proposition as it appears on California ballots. It had been listed as "Amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Brown, a liberal Democrat, changed the proposition's wording to: "Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. Initiative Constitutional Amendment."

The reason for this change is obvious -- to make the proposition appear as a denial of a basic human and civil right.

Marriage has never been regarded as a universal human or civil right. Loving and living with anyone one wants to live with are basic human rights. But marriage is actually a privilege that society bestows on whom it chooses. And even those who believe that any two unmarried people who want to get married should be given a marriage license should regard as wrong an attorney general changing a ballot proposition's language to favor his own social views. What Brown did was attempt to manipulate people who lean toward preserving the definition of the most important social institution in society -- people who have no desire whatsoever to hurt gays -- to now think of themselves as bigots.

According to Sacramento Bee columnist Margaret A. Bengs, "a recent Field Poll analysis found" that the new wording by Brown "had a 'striking' impact on those newly familiar with the measure, with a 23-point swing against it."

What we have here is truly manipulative. Four justices create a right, and then a sympathetic attorney general renames a proposition so as to protect a 4-month-old right that no one had ever voted to create.

And the left accuses the right of imposing its values on society.

The second hurdle for Proposition 8 is even greater: the multimillion dollar campaign to label proponents of Proposition 8 "haters" and to label the man-woman definition of marriage as "hate." Or as they put it: "Prop 8 = Prop Hate."

It is apparently inconceivable to many of those who wish to change the definition of marriage that a decent person can want to retain the man-woman definition. From newspaper editorials to gay and other activist groups, the theme is universal -- proponents of traditional marriage are haters, the moral equivalents of those who opposed racial equality. As The New York Times editorial on the subject put it, Proposition 8 is "mean-spirited."

But it is the charge of hate (along with bigotry, homophobia and intolerance) that is the primary charge leveled against supporters of Proposition 8. That's why one major anti-Proposition 8 group is "Californians Against Hate."

Any honest outsider would see that virtually all the hate expressed concerning Proposition 8 comes from opponents of the proposition. While there are a few sick individuals who hate gay people, I have neither seen nor heard any hatred of gays expressed by proponents of Proposition 8. Not in my private life, not in my e-mail, not from callers on my radio show.

It is the proponents of same-sex marriage who express nearly all the hate -- because in fact many of them do hate, loudly and continuously. But hate in the name of love has a long pedigree. Why should our generation be different?

These charges of "hate" against proponents of retaining the man-woman definition of marriage do not speak well for those who make them. I, for one, find it easy to believe that most opponents and most proponents of Proposition 8 are decent people. There are millions of decent people who think marriage should be redefined. I think they are wrong, but I do not question their decency.

Why won't those who favor redefining marriage accord the same respect to the millions of us who want gays to be allowed to love whom they want, live with whom they want, be given the rights they deserve along with the dignity they deserve, but who still want marriage to remain man-woman?

There Are Two Irreconcilable Americas

Dennis Prager


It is time to confront the unhappy fact about our country: There are now two Americas. Not a rich one and a poor one; economic status plays little role in this division.

There is a red one and a blue one.

For most of my life I have believed, in what I now regard as wishful thinking, that the right and left wings have essentially the same vision for America, that it's only about ways to get there in which the two sides differ. Right and left share the same ends, I thought.

That is not the case. For the most part, right and left differ in their visions of America and that is why they differ on policies.

Right and the left do not want the same America.

The left wants America to look as much like Western European countries as possible. The left wants Europe's quasi-pacifism, cradle-to-grave socialism, egalitarianism and secularism in America. The right wants none of those values to dominate America.

The left wants America not only to have a secular government, but to have a secular society. The left feels that if people want to be religious, they should do so at home and in their houses of prayer, but never try to inject their religious values into society. The right wants America to continue to be what it has always been -- a Judeo-Christian society with a largely secular government (that is not indifferent to religion). These opposing visions explain, for example, their opposite views concerning nondenominational prayer in school.

The left prefers to identify as citizens of the world. The left fears nationalism in general (this has been true for the European left since World War I), and since the 1960s, the American left has come to fear American nationalism in particular. On the other side, the right identifies first as citizens of America.

The left therefore regards the notion of American exceptionalism as chauvinism; the United Nations and world opinion are regarded as better arbiters of what is good than is America. The right has a low opinion of the U.N.'s moral compass and of world opinion, both of which it sees as having a much poorer record of stopping genocide and other evils than America has.

The left is ambivalent about and often hostile to overt displays of American patriotism. That is why, for example, one is far more likely to find American flags displayed in Orange County, Calif., on national holidays than in liberal neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, Manhattan or San Francisco.

The left subscribes to the French Revolution, whose guiding principles were "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The right subscribes to the American formula, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The French/European notion of equality is not mentioned. The right rejects the French Revolution and does not hold Western Europe as a model. The left does. That alone makes right and left irreconcilable.

The left envisions an egalitarian society. The right does not. The left values equality above other values because it yearns for an America in which all people have similar amounts of material possessions. This is what propels the left to advocate laws that would force employers to pay women the same wages they pay men not only for the same job but for "comparable" jobs (as if that is objectively ascertainable). The right values equality in opportunity and strongly believes that all people are created equal, but the right values liberty, a man-woman based family and other values above equality.

The left wants a world -- and therefore an America -- devoid of nuclear weapons. The right wants America to have the best nuclear weapons. The right trusts American might more than universal disarmament.

The left wants to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples for the first time in history. The right wants gays to have equal rights, but to keep marriage defined as man-woman. This, too, constitutes an irreconcilable divide.

For these and other reasons, calls for a unity among Americans that transcends left and right are either naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other. The left knows this. Most on the right do not.

Gotcha Questions for Katie Couric (and Her Colleagues)

Dennis Prager


Just as Charlie Gibson did in his interview with Sarah Palin, Katie Couric set out to humiliate the Republican vice-presidential candidate with a series of "gotcha" questions.

This tactic -- rarely employed with major liberal candidates -- could be used equally effectively against Couric, or most any other liberal member of the television news media. It would be highly instructive to have Couric asked questions in the same way in which she (and Gibson) asked questions of Palin.

For example:

Q: Critics of the war in Iraq argue that prior to the invasion of Iraq, America had never attacked a country that had no plans to attack it. How then do you explain the Korean War?

On my radio show, I have asked this question of some of the most celebrated names among liberal intellectuals, and they had little or nothing to say. One major editor simply admitted that he had little familiarity with that war. That is too bad because America invaded a country that had absolutely no intention, let alone ability, to attack the United States. The United States attacked Korea -- and sacrificed over 30,000 American lives -- solely in order to prevent Korea from becoming a totalitarian Communist state. We succeeded in the southern half, and over 50 years later, North Korea remains essentially a gigantic concentration camp.

Q: Many Americans believe that the most important way of understanding the effects of taxation on government revenues is the Laffer Curve. What is your opinion about this?

The Laffer Curve, which, unlike the "Bush Doctrine," is objectively definable, is perhaps the most important economic argument against tax increases -- because at a given point of increased taxation, the government will actually receive less tax revenue, not more. It would be quite surprising if many TV news people, including anchors, could define this economic theory, let alone intelligently discuss it.

Q: Is there any point in a woman's pregnancy at which you would call an abortion immoral?

Couric spent some time trying to show how immoral Palin's anti-abortion position is, since it even extends to cases of rape or incest. That was not necessarily unfair questioning. Even some who believe that human life begins at conception are prepared to allow abortions in the case of rape or incest. But it would be highly educational for Americans to see the tables reversed on pro-choice people: Are there any circumstances when a pro-choice person is prepared to make a moral judgment on killing a human fetus? How about during the third trimester (presuming, of course, that the pregnancy poses no threat to the life or health of the mother)? Or when an abortion is performed solely for convenience (for example, a married woman who was planning to start a new business or to take a long-planned trip abroad -- and the pregnancy therefore came at an inconvenient time)?

Some more possible questions:

Q: Members of the news media believe, correctly, that individuals running for political office, because of their potentially great impact on American life, should subject themselves to interview after interview about their views, values, personal life and knowledge base by often hostile members of the news media. But, the most powerful members of the news media, people who have more impact on American life than almost any politician in America, do not allow themselves to be interviewed about their views, values, personal life and knowledge of the issues. Why not?

Q: Which of the Federalist Papers do you think is most important? Why?

Q: In a question to Palin, you said that "women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes." If that is so, why don't employers only hire women whenever possible? What employer wouldn't want to save 23 percent for the same work? Is it possible that many women choose more flexible hours, want jobs with less travel and may choose less demanding work given their desire to be home more?

Q: On one of your CBS newscasts this year, you said: "A new study on teens and sexual harassment should give every parent pause. … In a study that appeared in the journal Child Development, 90 percent of teen girls say they've been harassed at least once." Did you read that report? If not, how do you justify reporting it on a national newscast in order to alarm "every parent"? The report defines sexism and sexual harassment as including "sexist comments about their academic abilities, sexist comments about their athletic abilities … demeaning gender-related comments, teasing based on their appearance, and unwanted physical contact." In other words, if a boy says to a girl, "You throw a ball like a girl!" that is deemed an instance of sexual harassment. Isn't that somewhat hysterical?

Q: What did you think of any articles in the most recent issues of Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review or any other conservative journal? Or do you only read liberal writing?

While every conservative pundit, commentator and talk show host I know of is regularly exposed to liberal thought, the opposite is not the case. It would be fascinating to learn how much Couric knows about how half the country thinks.

Jewish Left Wins, Jews and Israel Lose

Dennis Prager

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

For decades most of the organized left has fought against Republicans and conservatives more than against the world's greatest evils. During the Cold War, starting in the late 1960s, one heard little if anything from the left about the evils of Communism or of Communist societies such as the Soviet Union or Communist China. But one heard a great deal about the evils of American anti-Communists; Ronald Reagan was vilified much more than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

But last week, a new line seems to have been crossed. The organized Jewish left -- i.e., left-wing Jewish organizations that claim to be committed to the welfare of Jews -- made it clear that even in the fight against the greatest enemy of the Jewish people, the Jewish left prefers to fight what it considers an even greater enemy -- conservatives and Republicans.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who has repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel and who denies the Holocaust, came to speak at the United Nations. The day before he was scheduled to speak, Jewish organizations across the religious and political spectrum had organized a "Stop Iran" rally at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across from the UN. They had invited Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and then invited Republican vice-presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The intent was to maximize publicity for the anti-Iran cause, the most important Jewish concern (and arguably the most important world concern) today. With Clinton and Palin present, the world press would cover the anti-Iran rally, and the Jewish community could show the world and America

that this was one cause that knew no politics -- the most prominent female Democrat and the most prominent female Republican would both lend their names and prestige to this rally.

However, the moment that Clinton learned that the organizers had invited Palin, she withdrew. For Clinton, giving the other most popular woman politician in America publicity was unacceptable -- even among New York Jews, one of the steadfast liberal and Democratic groups in America. The near collapse of the Stop Iran rally was of less consequence to Clinton than denying Palin a public platform.

Not many were surprised by Clinton's action. What was alarming was the realization that for much of the Jewish left -- not leftists who happen to be Jews and for whom the welfare of the Jewish people is not particularly significant, but left-wing Jews who claim to care deeply about Jewish survival -- fighting Palin is of greater importance than fighting Ahmadinejad.

Left-wing Jews and Jewish organizations put intense pressure on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to cancel the invitation to Palin. And the pressure worked.

As the liberal editorial page of New York's major Jewish newspaper The Jewish Week put it:

"But somehow, a big-tent cause like Iran as a terrorist power seeking nuclear arms has become so politicized within our community that Monday's rally was more about the non-presence of Gov. Sarah Palin than about the very real presence at the UN of a Holocaust denier whose goal is to destroy our way of life."

Yet, in a rare move, publishing an entire speech that was never given, Ha'aretz, Israel's equivalent to The New York Times in its prestige and in its liberal politics, published the speech that Palin would have given. In Israel, liberal and even many left-wing Jews know that Iran is a greater threat to Israel than American conservatives.

The Palin speech was so good it should be read by every American concerned with Israel's survival. And it was so nonpartisan that it praised Clinton for being at the rally. To say that Palin -- who has the American, Alaskan and Israeli flags in her Juneau office -- is a better friend of the Jews and Israel than much of the American Jewish left sounds odd only to Jewish leftists.

But the Jewish left acts as if it fears and hates her more than it fears and hates Ahmadinejad. That is why within days of her nomination Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., announced that "John McCain's decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel. … It is frightening that John McCain would select someone one heartbeat away from the presidency who supported a man who embodies vitriolic anti-Israel sentiments."

Wexler's statement was false: Palin supported Steve Forbes, not Buchanan. And associating Palin with Nazi or anti-Israel sympathies is morally loathsome, not to mention weakens the struggle against real anti-Semites.

For left-wing Jewish organizations and their supporters -- as opposed to many rank and file liberal Jews -- the real fight is against Republicans and especially Christian conservatives (as a community, the Jews' best friends) more than against a nuclear Iran.

After the cancellation of Palin, a left-wing Jewish organization that was influential in opposing Palin's appearance, an organization called J Street, on whose Board of Advisors sits the executive director of MoveOn.org, headlined on its website: "We Won!"

That is indeed the case. The Jewish left did win. Which is why the Jews and Israel lost.

Dennis Prager Talks To Joe Lieberman About The Bailout

Dennis Prager

Friday, September 26, 2008

As the conversations and accusations continue to swirl around the proposed bailout legislation, Dennis Prager sought clarity from Senator Joe Lieberman. He spoke to Dennis from the Senate cloak room.

Prager: Let’s begin with this: Were you surprised? The public is being told a deal was made and then torpedoed by House Republicans. Is that the fact?

Lieberman: This is not the fact. There was not a deal. There was an agreement, let’s say, among some members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Democrats in the House side of the House Financial Services Committee. They went out and announced it. Frankly, I think they announced it prematurely, because the normal course is to take those agreements back to the four caucuses. So, there never was an agreement. It was clear the House Republicans are very much against the Paulson plan. I was in the Senate Democratic caucus with Paulson the other night—one of my rare appearances these days, Dennis, at Senate Democratic…

Prager: I was thinking that.

Lieberman: And there was a lot of really emotional challenging of Paulson. [It was the same among] Senate Republicans. So no deal, and then Senator McCain came back to try to put one together. I think he’s in a position now as the titular leader of the Republican Party to have a special ability to bring people together. And his goal is to get an agreement that saves the country from an economic disaster—but to make sure the taxpayers’ money is protected in it, and I think that’s the direction in which we’re heading.

Prager: What was the major Senate Democratic objection to the Paulson plan?

Lieberman: Now the difference: To some extent the things people focus on in the different caucuses are different, but the overall concerns are not. There’s real concern about one making sure that if it does end up being $700 billion of taxpayers’ money that the taxpayers are protected as best we can—and that we basically try to get an ownership interest in any fiscal entity that we put money into. That was not there in the original Paulson plan. That’s a major concern of House Republicans as well, and also Senate Democrats obviously want to go after Wall Street and cap compensations—so does John McCain—of the CEOs on Wall Street. Of course, they would like to introduce a tax increase into this bill, but that will never go.

Prager: Alright, so what is the big divide? Are there one, two, three issues? What’s the big divide?

Lieberman: You know it’s an interesting question. I think there’s a conceptual agreement that there has to be protection for the taxpayers’ money, there has to be a cap on executive compensation, there has to be a sort of oversight—none of which was in the original Paulson plan. The House

members are very concerned. They want to—they would prefer—that the government have the ability to try to just insure some of these banks instead of actually buying assets, because that could be done more cheaply, and [they want] to have Wall Street pay for it. Secondly, Secretary Paulson seems to be skeptical about whether that would work. I think that compromise may be—make that one of the options that he has to consider. But the good news here is that we’re now down to four people negotiating—one for Senate Democrats and Republicans, one for House Republicans and Democrats.

Prager: And who are they?

Lieberman: It’s Chris Dodd, senator from Connecticut for Senate Democrats, Judd Gregg, senator from New Hampshire for Senate Republicans. On the House side it’s Barney Frank from Massachusetts for Democrats and Roy Blunt from Missouri for Republicans. I feel quite optimistic that these four can reach an agreement, hopefully by the end of the day that we can take to the floor of both chambers tomorrow. I think everybody understands that we have got to get something done before the markets open on Monday. But frankly, it’s got to be something sensible because it makes no sense to rush to do something that doesn’t get the job done and is unfair to the taxpayers. And I think that’s the whole McCain approach. That’s why he flew back. That’s why I think he’s been constructive. That’s why I think you are seeing some coming together of the parties.

Prager: So Senator McCain’s coming back to Washington was helpful?

Lieberman: Yes, I mean the Democrats are trying to put out the message that there was a total agreement and McCain came back and blew it up. That’s just not right, not true. There was no total agreement. The House Republicans particularly were always not part of the proposed agreement and a lot of Republicans and Democrats in both Houses were not part of it. I think McCain went back and forth yesterday afternoon, this morning between Senate and House. He talked to a lot of people, was on the phone with the administration, the White House, Paulson and I think he’s a big part of the reason why it’s down to four strong negotiators that are roomed together. That’s always the best way to get something done. And then they come out to the caucuses. So he felt that there was enough progress made that he could take off for Oxford, Mississippi. He’ll be at the debate tonight, and then he will fly back right afterward to be here tomorrow to see if we can close the deal.

Prager: Did Senator Obama play any analogous role on the Democratic side?

Lieberman: Not that I can see. And that’s an interesting point. I wasn’t in the White House meeting yesterday. Some of the Democrats criticized John McCain for not making a long speech saying that Senator Obama had, but John’s here not to make speeches. It was a very contentious meeting and he basically said for the sake of the country and the people we serve we got to get together and reach a bipartisan agreement. And then he went to work to try to make that happen.

Prager: I have to tell you that was my read before you came on. It was all conjecture and, ironically, I came to that conclusion based on Harry Reid’s comments.

Lieberman: It’s really been laughable. The truth is, when McCain came back he did it sincerely. He did something risky because staying on the campaign trail you are not accountable for what happens here. He came back to try to do something right for the country. But, if it doesn’t happen, then he’s accountable for it.

Prager: That’s right.

Lieberman: I think he is going to help make it happen this weekend in a way that will protect taxpayers. So to say that he caused a problem—I think Obama and McCain are the now leaders of their parties by virtue of their nomination.

Prager: That’s right. Well said.

Lieberman: This is a big problem. And for them not to be here would have been a mistake.

Liberals Warnings About Obama Loss May Prove Self-Fulfilling

Dennis Prager


If Barack Obama loses the 2008 election, liberal hell will break loose.

Seven weeks before the 2008 presidential election, liberals are warning America that if Barack Obama loses, it is because Americans are racist. Of course, that this means that Democrats (and independents) are racist, since Republicans will vote Republican regardless of the race of the Democrat, is an irony apparently lost on the Democrats making these charges.

That an Obama loss will be due to racism is becoming as normative a liberal belief as “Bush Lied, People Died,” a belief has generated intense rage among many liberals. But “Obama lost because of white racism” will be even more enraging. Rage over the Iraq War has largely focused on President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But if Obama loses, liberal rage will focus on millions of fellow Americans and on American society.

And it could become a rage the likes of which America has not seen in a long time, if ever. It will first and foremost come from within black America. The deep emotional connection that nearly every black American has to an Obama victory is difficult for even empathetic non-blacks to measure. A major evangelical pastor told me that even evangelical black pastors who share every conservative value with white evangelical pastors, including pro-life views on abortion, will vote for Obama. They feel their very dignity is on the line.

That is why the growing chorus -- already nearing unanimity -- of liberal commentators and politicians ascribing an Obama loss to American racism is so dangerous.

Andrew Sullivan of (set ital) The Atlantic: (end ital) “White racism means that Obama needs more than a small but clear lead to win.”

Jack Cafferty of CNN: “The polls remain close. Doesn’t make sense … unless it’s race.”

Jacob Weisberg of (set ital) Newsweek and Slate: (end ital) “The reason Obama isn't ahead right now is … the color of his skin. … If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth.”

Nicholas D. Kristof of (set ital) New York Times: (end ital) “Religious prejudice (against Obama) is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice.”

Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in a speech to union workers: “Are you going to give up your house and your job and your children's futures because he's black?”

Similar comments have been made by Kansas’s Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, and by writers in (set ital) Time (end ital) magazine. And according to The Associated Press: “A poll conducted by The Associated Press and Yahoo News, in conjunction with Stanford University, revealed that a fairly significant percentage of Democrats and independents may not vote for Sen. Barack Obama because of his race.” If you read the poll, it does not in fact suggest this conclusion. The pollsters assert that any person with any negative view of black life means that the person is racist and means that he would not vote for Obama. Both conclusions are unwarranted. But “Obama will lose because of racism” is how the poll takers and the media spin it.

Why do liberals believe that if Obama loses it will be due to white racism?

One reason is the liberal elite’s contempt for white Americans with less education -- even if they are Democrats.

A second reason is that it is inconceivable to most liberals that an Obama loss -- especially a narrow one -- will be due to Obama’s liberal views or inexperience or to admiration for John McCain.

The third reason is that the further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election -- where do all these Republican voters come from? And that in turn explains why liberals ascribe Republican presidential victories to unfair election tactics (“Swift-boating” is the liberals’ reason for the 2004 Republican victory). In any fair election, Americans will see the left’s light.

If Obama loses, it will not be deemed plausible that Americans have again rejected a liberal candidate, indeed the one with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. Liberals will explain an Obama defeat as another nefarious Republican victory. Combining contempt for many rural and middle-class white Americans with a longstanding belief in the inevitability of a Democratic victory in 2008 (after all, everyone they talk to despises the Republicans and believes Republicans have led the country to ruin), there will be only one reason Obama did not win -- white racism.

One executive at a black radio station told me when I interviewed him on my radio show at the Democratic National Convention that he could easily see riots if Obama loses a closely contested election. Interestingly, he said he thought blacks would be far more accepting of a big McCain victory.

I pray he is wrong on the first point. But it does seem that liberals are continuing to do whatever they can to increase anger at America, or at least at “white America.” For 40 years, liberals have described the most open and tolerant society on earth as racist and xenophobic. If Barack Obama loses, the results of this liberal depiction of America may become frighteningly apparent.

The Gibson Doctrine

Dennis Prager


Sarah Palin's reputation survived her interview with ABC News' Charlie Gibson.

The same cannot be said for Charlie Gibson.

On my radio show last week, I twice defended Barack Obama. Once, against those conservatives who took a comment made by Obama in an interview with George Stephanopoulos out of context and suggested that Obama had inadvertently admitted he was a Muslim. And again, when I contended that Obama did not imply that Palin was a pig in his now famous "lipstick on a pig" reference.

I mention this only because I want to assume that people of good will on both sides can still be honest about what transpires politically. And in this instance what transpired was that Gibson intended to humiliate Palin.

It wasn't even subtle. Virtually everything Gibson did and virtually every question he posed was designed to trap, or trick, or demean Gov. Palin. There are views of his face that so reek of contempt that anyone shown photos of his look would immediately identify it as contemptuous.

But one series of questions, in particular, blew any cover of impartiality and revealed Gibson's aim to humiliate Palin.

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His worldview?

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

When he asked Palin whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine without defining it, he gave the game away. He lost any pretense of fairness. Asking the same unanswerable question three times had one purpose -- to humiliate the woman. That was not merely partisan. It was mean.

I couldn't answer it -- and I have been steeped in international affairs since I was a Fellow at the Columbia University School of International Affairs in the 1970s. I have since been to 82 countries, and have lectured in Russian in Russia and in Hebrew in Israel. Most Americans would consider a candidate for national office who had such a resume qualified as regards international relations. Yet I had no clue how to answer Gibson's question.

I had no clue because there is no right answer. There are at least four doctrines that are called "Bush Doctrine," which means that there is no "Bush Doctrine." It is a term bereft of meaning, as became abundantly clear when Gibson finally explained what he was referring to:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that -- the right to preemptive attack of a country that was planning an attack on America?

That's the Bush Doctrine? "The right to preemptive attack of a country that was planning an attack on America?"

Isn't that just common sense? What country in history has thought it did not have the right to attack those planning to attack it? I learned the "Bush Doctrine" when I was a student at yeshiva in the

fourth grade, when I was taught a famous Talmudic dictum from about 1,800 years ago: "If someone is coming to kill you, rise early and kill him."

And preemptive attack is exactly what happened in June 1967, when Israel attacked Egypt and Syria because those countries were planning to attack Israel. Would any American president before George W. Bush have acted differently than Israel did? Of course not. Did they all believe in the Bush Doctrine?

That is how Gibson added foolishness to his meanness.

All the interview did was reconfirm that Republicans running for office run against both their Democratic opponent and the mainstream news media.

This year it is more obvious than ever. The press's beatification of Obama is so obvious, so constant (how many covers of Newsweek and Time has Obama been on?) that media credibility even among many non-conservatives has been hurt.

Let me put this another way. Charlie Gibson showed far greater hostility toward the Republican vice-presidential candidate than Dan Rather did in his interview with Saddam Hussein or Mike Wallace did in his interview with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Which reminds me of another Talmudic dictum: "Those who are merciful to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful."

We might call it the media's Gibson Doctrine: Confront Republicans, act obsequious toward tyrants.

Explaining Jews, part one: What is a Jew?

Dennis Prager

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Years ago, on a flight to Louisville, Ky., the woman seated next to me asked what brought me from Los Angeles to Louisville.

"I will be giving a lecture," I responded.

"To whom?" the personable middle-aged woman asked.

"To the Jewish community," I responded.

She then proceeded to engage me in a discussion about Jews, and it became apparent that she believed Jews wielded great influence in society. So I decided to ask her a question:

"There are almost 300 million Americans. How many of them do you think are Jews?"

"Fifty million," she replied.

When I told her there are 6 million Jews in America, she thought for a moment and said, "Hum . . . they must all live in Kentucky."

Love them or hate them, respect them or loathe them -- and most people have at least one of these reactions -- of all the world's groups, none receives as much attention, including hatred, as the Jews. And this has been true for thousands of years.

Yet, for all their fame and notoriety, Jews are little understood. In fact, it may be said that those who do not understand Jews fall into two groups: non-Jews and Jews.

So, after a lifetime immersed in Jewish life -- an involvement that includes nearly every aspect of Jewish life from the religious (Reform, Conservative and Orthodox) to the secular (Jewish federations, Israel and Soviet Jewry activism) -- and after 25 years of speaking to people of all backgrounds on the radio and in lectures, I feel ready to attempt the daunting but significant task of explaining Jews.

With this first column of the year, I inaugurate a series of columns titled "Explaining Jews." Last year, 25 of my 50 weekly columns were devoted to "The Case for Judeo-Christian Values," and I came to realize the significance of exploring one topic in depth alongside columns on the immediate issues of the day.

Subjects to be addressed will include:

Why are Jews overwhelmingly to the left of center?

Are Jews a nation, a religion, a race, an ethnicity?

Why have Jews been so hated?

What is Zionism? Is anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism?

Are any stereotypes about Jews true?

Why are most Jews irreligious? And how can there be a secular Jew when there is no such thing as a secular Christian?

Why do Jews oppose intermarriage?

Does Judaism believe in an afterlife?

Why don't Jews seek converts?

Is the doctrine of "Chosen People" racist?

How do Jews view Christians?

Do Jews control Hollywood?

Why do Jews shun "Jews for Jesus"?

Readers' additional questions and reactions are encouraged.

Let's begin with the most basic question: Are Jews a religion, an ethnicity, a people, a nation, a culture?

The most accurate answer is all of the above. And that confuses both Jews and non-Jews because there is no other major modern group that falls into all these categories.

Christians, for example, constitute a religion but not a nation. One is a Christian by virtue of affirmation of a faith. In order to be a Christian, one has to believe some Christian doctrine.

On the other hand, Americans are a nation, not a religion, and there are, therefore, Americans of every religion and of no religion. As is true of other nations, one is born an American by virtue of one's parent(s) being American. No affirmation of American faith is necessary. One can be an American and hold no American values or love for America.

Jews are Jews in both the above ways. One can become a Jew solely by affirmation of the Jewish religion (just as one can become a Christian by affirmation of Christianity) or solely by being born to a Jewish parent (originally the father, through most of Jewish history the mother, in Reform Judaism today the father or the mother).

That is why there can be atheist and secular Jews -- just as there can be atheist and secular Americans even though the country's values are Judeo-Christian. But that is also why any person in the world, no matter what race, ethnicity or religion his or her parents are, can become a member of the Jewish people through religious conversion.

That is also why there can be self-hating Jews -- people born Jewish who devote their lives to harming the Jewish people -- because no one born a Jew can be read out of the Jewish people. It's probably a good thing. But not always. As we shall see.

Explaining Jews, Part II: Why are most Jews secular?

Dennis Prager


To understand Jews, one must understand that most Jews are not religious.

This is true even if our definition of "religious" is minimal, i.e., observant of any specifically Jewish religious laws, attends synagogue once a month or even declares a belief in God.

According to a 2003 Harris Poll, "Only 16 percent of Jews go to synagogue once a month or more often"; and regarding belief in God: "Protestants (90 percent) are more likely than Roman Catholics (79 percent) and much more likely than Jews (48 percent) to believe in God. Religious affiliation here includes many people raised as members of a religion or religious group, regardless of what they practice or believe now."

Why most contemporary Jews are irreligious, given that the Jews gave the world the Bible and introduced humanity to the God of monotheism, is a fascinating subject. It is also a vital subject given the role that secular Jews -- such as Marx, Freud and Einstein -- have played in forming the modern world.

One reason was traditional (Orthodox) Judaism's inability to keep most Jews religious once Jews were free to leave the ghettos and shtetls (small Jewish towns or villages throughout Eastern Europe) in which most Jews lived.

The only Jewish religious alternative was a new Jewish movement called Reform Judaism, begun in Germany in the beginning of the 19th century. But with all the good intentions of Reform's founders to stem the departure of Jews from Judaism, Reform retained little that was distinctively Jewish. It dropped kashrut (the Jewish dietary laws), Hebrew as the language of worship, Jewish peoplehood, opposed the return of Jews to Israel (Zionism), and allowed moving the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.

By the mid-19th century, some Jews broke away from Reform and founded Conservative Judaism, in order to "conserve" Jewish religiosity without being Orthodox.

While Reform and Conservatism appealed to many Jews, a deeply religious, God-centered alternative to Orthodoxy that can keep Jews religious has not yet arisen.

And why did most Jews reject Orthodoxy? Over the course of thousands of years, a combination of anti-Semitism and Orthodox Jewish law -- one of whose primary purposes was to keep Jews separated from the non-Jewish world -- kept Jews in isolation. And when any group has little or no interaction with other groups, its intellectual life begins to atrophy. This was not only true in Orthodox shtetls; it is a problem in much of the Islamic world today as well as in the secular liberal university.

Therefore, once Orthodoxy was exposed to the light of freedom, it had few rational or convincing responses to the modern world's challenges. Faced with the choice between science, Mozart, personal liberty and great literature on the one hand, and Orthodox isolation on the other, the choice for nearly all Jews was obvious.

And that brings us to a second reason for many Jews' irreligiosity. Jews decided that the secular world of the arts, the university and celebration of reason -- a world devoid of religion -- was the world for Jews to work for. Secular Jews are still believers in the Enlightenment (despite the anti-Semitism of Voltaire, the father of the Enlightenment, and despite the anti-Semitism of secular Europe).

Which brings us to the third reason. Along with their rejection of Jewish religiosity, Jews also feared and loathed their Christian neighbors' religiosity. European Jews had suffered for centuries from religion-based (especially European Christian) anti-Semitism. For example, Jews were tortured to death on a charge of "desecration of the host," which essentially meant being murdered for allegedly torturing a wafer. Christian anti-Semitism in Europe ensured that virtually no Jew would feel sympathetic to religion generally, let alone Christianity specifically. Therefore, when European culture began warring on Christianity, many Jews completely identified with the anti-religious warriors. Those warriors were the men of the Enlightenment, the self-righteous title the anti-Christians gave their movement.

Thus began the now centuries-old Jewish association of secularism and anti-religiosity (especially Christianity) with what most Jews deem is good for Jews. That America's Christians have founded the country that has provided the most blessed place in which Jews have ever lived -- and that many Christians are now the Jews' best friends in a world that has more anti-Semitism than at any time since the Holocaust -- has not changed many Jews' belief that the anti-religious, especially those trying to weaken Christianity's influence, are the Jews' natural allies.

A fourth reason for Jews' alienation is the huge percentage of Jews who attend university. A major aim of the university is to influence students toward secularism and away from the Judeo-Christian value system that America's values have largely been based on.

Fifth and finally, Jews have suffered a great deal throughout history, culminating in the Holocaust. This has further reinforced Jews' alienation from God and religion.

Given Jews' influence in America, itself the most influential society on Earth, their alienation from and hostility to religion and to Judeo-Christian values, the greatest value system ever devised and the one based on the Jews' own Bible, is a tragedy. But if this irreligiosity is to be undone, it must first be understood.

Explaining Jews, Part III: A very insecure people

Dennis Prager


On Jan. 21 in Paris, a gang of Muslims intent on kidnapping Jews kidnapped 23-year-old Ilan Halimi. Reciting verses from the Koran in phone conversations demanding money from the family, they ultimately rejected the money and tortured Halimi to death. They kept him naked for weeks while they cut him up and finally poured flammable liquid over his skin and burned him alive.

When Jews read this story, they see themselves as Halimi and think that such a thing could happen to them somewhere in the world today and somewhere in the world at any time in the past.

If you want to understand how Jews think and behave, you must first understand how large antisemitism and the Holocaust loom in the psyche, emotions and minds of the vast majority of Jews.

It could not be otherwise.

While ethnic, racial, religious and national hatreds are as old as mankind, none has been as universal and as deep as hatred of Jews.

Jew-hatred was given the name "anti-Semitism" only in 1879 by a German anti-Semite named Wilhelm Marr. The term is entirely misleading since it has nothing to do with "Semites." Jews may be Semites, but so are Arabs, and antisemitism never meant hatred of Arabs, only of Jews. That is why many contemporary writers, including my coauthor (Rabbi Joseph Telushkin) and I in our book "Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism," do not spell the word "anti-Semite," but rather as one word without a hyphen -- "antisemite."

Jew-hatred or antisemitism has been so deep that tens of millions of people have equated the Jews with the devil and many more have desired that the Jews be erased from the Earth. Such an attempt was made only one generation ago in what is called the Holocaust (or Shoah, the Hebrew term). This was the German Nazi attempt to murder every Jewish man, woman and child, which resulted in the murder of two out of every three Jews in Europe.

To give an idea of how many Jews have been murdered for being Jews, all one needs to do is look at population statistics. Scholars estimate the population of the Roman Empire at about 60 million at the time of Jesus. According to the dean of Jewish historians, Professor Salo Baron, at that time Jews comprised about 10 percent of the population. That means that 2,000 years ago there were about 6 million Jews. It is also estimated that at that time, the world's population was about 200 million.

Today the world's population is over 6 billion. While the world's population is about 30 times larger than 2,000 years ago, the Jewish population has barely doubled. Had Jews been left alone to procreate at the same rate as others, there would be about 180 million Jews in the world today. Moreover, even the 6 million number for the Roman empire represented a huge loss of population due to extensive killing of Jews in the 12 centuries from their inception.

It is true that Jewish population losses have been also due to assimilation, but this assimilation was itself overwhelmingly a result of persecution -- forced conversions, desire to lead a far safer life as part of the majority culture, etc. In fact, because of the Holocaust, there are fewer Jews today than there were 100 years ago.

One can now understand why the Passover Haggadah -- the special prayer book for the Passover Seder meal, first written about 2,000 years ago -- contains this famous statement: "In every generation there are those who rise against us to annihilate us . . . "

As a result, Jews are probably the most insecure group in the world. This may come as a surprise to most non-Jews since Jews are widely regarded as particularly powerful. But Jews' power and Jews' insecurity are not mutually contradictory. In fact, Jews' power derives in large measure from their insecurity. The stronger the Jews' influence, Jews believe, the less likely they are to be hurt again.

Fear of being hurt again is the major reason most identifying Jews are so protective of Israel. First, they fear that without Israel, Jews are far more vulnerable to another outburst of antisemitic violence. And this has been true. Israel, for example, was Soviet Jewry's great defender (along with America and Diaspora Jewry) and the place to escape to. Only a very strong Israel, Jews believe, can prevent another Holocaust. Second, Jews believe that Arabs and other Muslims want to do to Israel and its Jewish inhabitants what the Nazis did to the Jews. And given the Palestinians' desire to destroy Israel, the Iranian regime's repeated calls for the annihilation of Israel, and the number of Muslims who chant, "Death to Israel," this fear is entirely warranted.

Fear of being persecuted and even murdered solely for being a Jew resides in just about every Jew's psyche. It helps to explain Jews' preoccupation with Israel; Jews' preoccupation with teaching the world about the Holocaust; Jews' fear of Christianity -- most Jews are taught about European Christian antisemitism at a very young age and link Christianity to the Holocaust; and even Jews' near-religious commitment to liberalism, which most Jews see as the best guarantor against antisemitism. An increasing number of Jews are rethinking the latter two conclusions as a result of Christian treatment of Jews in America and Christian support for Israel and because of the lack of such support on the Left. But whatever one's position on these matters, the fact remains that fear of pogroms, torture, expulsions and mass murder shapes most Jews' psyches and politics.

Explaining Jews, Part IV: All the types of Jews

Dennis Prager


Among the most frequently asked questions about Jews are: Why are Jews overwhelmingly liberal? Why are so few religious?

One column in this series has already dealt with the question of why Jews are secular. Before answering the question of why Jews tend toward the Left -- and before proceeding with any of our analysis of Jews -- it is necessary to understand the various groups that comprise the Jewish people.

In the most general sense, Jews fall into two categories: those who identify as Jews and those who do not (or do so only when forced to do so by outsiders). The latter may be called "non-Jewish Jews," a term coined by an early 20th-century Jewish radical, Isaac Deutscher, to describe himself.

The non-Jewish Jew is someone who is born to a Jewish parent but who chooses not to identify with either the Jewish community or Judaism. Such a person is not necessarily hostile to Jews; but these Jews often play an important role in society. Examples are the many college professors who have Jewish family names but who do not identify in any way with the Jewish community or religion. As we shall see when attempting to explain Jewish liberalism and leftism, their lack of identity -- often complemented by an antipathy to American national identity -- helps explain most of their social and political views.

I do not include among non-Jewish Jews those people who are born Jewish and convert to another religion, such as Christianity. These are Christians who happen to be born Jews, not non-Jewish Jews.

The second category of Jews consists of Jews who do identify as Jews -- meaning that they identify with the Jewish community or with Judaism or with both.

Among identifying Jews are secular Jews and religious Jews.

An identifying Jew can be a secular, even an atheistic, Jew. Indeed the founders of the modern state of Israel were secular Jews, men and women whose entire being was suffused with Jewish identity, but who were completely irreligious. They strongly believed, as did the founder of modern Zionism -- the completely secular Theodore Herzl -- that the Jewish people needed to live in their homeland just as the French or English needed to live in their countries.

Given that the basis of Jewish peoplehood and identity is religious -- Abraham became the first Jew by virtue of his belief in the one God; Moses is a thoroughly religious figure who brings the Jews to the borders of a divinely promised land, Israel; and the entire founding history of the Jews is contained in a religious work, the Hebrew Bible -- the notion of a secular Jew identifying as a Jew is intellectually inconsistent. But that has not mattered to the many Jews who dropped Jewish beliefs yet remained committed to their Jewish identity and to the welfare of the Jewish people.

For some Jews, Jewish identity is so strong that no matter what their religious views, they wish to continue to identify as Jews. This is not only true of secular identifying Jews. At the other end of the religious spectrum are a small number of Jews who convert to Christianity and who also do not wish to relinquish their identification as Jews (thus calling themselves "Messianic Jews" and "Jews for Jesus" rather than "Christians").

Finally, among religiously identifying Jews, there are three major religious denominations -- Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Roughly speaking, the Orthodox believe in the divine origin of both a Written Law (the Torah) and an Oral Law (found in the Mishnah, the earliest part of the Talmud). They do not believe these (or, for the most part, rabbinic) laws can be changed. The Conservative movement believes the laws should be observed but that Conservative rabbis can change laws, and it does not affirm the divine authorship of Scripture. The Reform movement does not believe in the divine authorship of Scripture, does not believe that any of the laws (except universally ethical ones) are binding, and regards every Jew as an autonomous unit who accepts from Judaism only what is meaningful to him/her. Sometimes, the distinction between Reform and secular Jews is not obvious.

Among the reasons it is so important to understand these types of Jews is this: The great majority of Jews who affect the world are either non-Jewish Jews or Jews with minimal Jewish identity, and very rarely have Jewish religious faith or religious values. That is why all talk about "Jewish control" of Hollywood or of media or of anything else is meaningless. A disproportionate number of powerful figures in these professions and in academia may have been born to a Jewish parent, but most of them have no Jewish identity and they surely do not work on behalf of any Jewish interest. When was the last pro-Israel movie made, for example?

However, given the influence of non-Jewish Jews on society -- in the arts, the university, the media -- it is fair to say that a Jewish revival among Jews is in both the Jews' and humanity's interest.

Explaining Jews, part V: Why are Jews liberal?

Dennis Prager


The most frequently asked question I receive from non-Jews about Jews is, why are Jews so liberal?

The question is entirely legitimate since Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well. For example, other than blacks, no American group votes so lopsidedly for the Democratic Party. And the question is further sharpened given that traditional Jewish values are not leftist. That is why the more religiously involved the Jew, the less likely he is to be on the Left. The old saw, "There are two types of Jews -- those who believe Judaism is social justice and those who know Hebrew," contains more than a kernel of truth.

In no order of importance, here are six reasons:

1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice (as well as with holiness and personal morality), and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.

2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world. The (secular) Encyclopedia Judaica begins its entry on "Afterlife" by noting that "Judaism has always affirmed belief in an afterlife." But the preoccupation of Judaism has been making this world a better place. That is why the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is largely silent about the afterlife; and it is preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egyptian values. That value system was centered on the afterlife -- its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, the pyramids, were tombs.

3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right wing -- such as the words "right-wing" and "conservative." Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only. (It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn't matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.) The fact that the Jews' best friends today are conservatives and the fact that the Left is the home of most of the Jews' enemies outside of the Muslim world have made little impact on Jews' psyches.

4. Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion -- especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity -- with anti-Semitism. Jews are taught from birth about the horrors of the Holocaust, and of nearly 2,000 years of European, meaning Christian, anti-Semitism. They therefore tend to fear Christianity and believe that secularism guarantees their physical security.

That is what animates the ACLU and its disproportionately Jewish membership, under the guise of concern with the Constitution and "separation of church and state" (words that do not appear in the Constitution), to fight all public expressions of Christianity in America.

5. Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew's belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian's belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.

The Jews' religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

6. Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews'. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as "world citizens"; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.

Just as liberal Jews fear a resurgent Christianity despite the fact that contemporary Christians are the Jews' best friends, leftist Jews fear American nationalism despite the fact that Americans who believe in American exceptionalism are far more pro-Jewish and pro-Israel than leftist Americans. But most leftist Jews so abhor nationalism, they don't even like the Jews' nationalism (Zionism).

If you believe that leftist ideas and policies are good for America and for the world, then you are particularly pleased to know how deeply Jews -- with their moral passion, intellectual energies and abilities, and financial clout -- are involved with the Left. If, on the other hand, you believe that the Left is morally confused and largely a destructive force in America and the world, then the Jews' disproportionate involvement on the Left is nothing less than a tragedy -- for the world and especially for the Jews.

Explaining Jews, Part VI: Jews who aid those who hate Jews (and America)

Dennis Prager


Some recent news items about Jews aiding enemies of the Jews:

Last week, professor Noam Chomsky went to Lebanon to speak at the headquarters of Hezbollah. As described by the BBC, not a media friend of Israel, "Hezbollah's political rhetoric has centered on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel," and Hezbollah has been "synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings." The terror group's views on the need to annihilate the Jewish state are identical to those of Hamas and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chomsky announced his support for Hezbollah and its need to be militarily strong.

Also last week, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Vienna, a member of a Jewish sect called Neturei Karta, went to Stockholm to meet with a Palestinian Hamas official to help raise funds for Hamas. Hamas is, of course, dedicated to annihilating Israel, as is Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish fringe group that believes no Jewish state should exist unless founded by God. It therefore supports Palestinian and other Muslim groups that murder Jews in Israel.

In March, a group of five Neturei Karta rabbis from Britain and the United States went to Tehran to lend their support to the Iranian regime in its calls for the annihilation of Israel. The group said nothing about the Iranian regime's repeated denials that there was a Holocaust.

This week, the University of California at Irvine Muslim Student Union is sponsoring a series of lectures under the heading, "Holocaust in the Holy Land" and "Israel: The Fourth Reich." Featuring activists committed to Israel's destruction, its lead speaker is a Jew named Norman Finkelstein, a professor who devotes his life to attacking Jewish communities and Israel. Also appearing is Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss from the above-mentioned Neturei Karta.

Tony Judt, a widely published New York University professor, recently wrote that "Israel, in short, is an anachronism," and should therefore cease to exist. The Jews of Israel should live under Arab/Muslim rule. Note that of all the countries of the world, Judt -- who the Jewish newspaper The Forward identified as "raised in the heavily Jewish East End section of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis" -- has advocated the disappearance of one country, the Jewish one. Why, for example, does Judt not write that Pakistan, a Muslim state carved out of India, is an "anachronism"?

Jews siding with the Jews' enemies or even actually fomenting Jew-hatred has a history that long predates Chomsky, Finkelstein, leftist Jewish professors and the Neturei Karta. Karl Marx, though baptized a Christian, was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis but wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question." In it he wrote, among other anti-Semitic charges, that "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist."

How is one to explain these Jews who work to hurt Jews?

I think the primary explanations are psychological. As I wrote in a previous column, it is almost impossible to overstate the pathological effects of thousands of years of murder of Jews -- culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, when nearly all Jews on the European continent were murdered -- have had on most Jews.

It is not coincidental that Norman Finkelstein's parents went through the Holocaust or that Yisroel Dovid Weiss's grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. But even Jews who lost no relatives in the Holocaust fear another outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and given the Nazi-like anti-Semitism in the Muslim world today, that is not exactly paranoia.

One way to deal with this is to side with the enemy. Consciously or not, the Jew who sides with those dedicated to murdering Jews feels that he will be spared. He becomes the "good Jew" in the anti-Semites' eyes. How else to explain the visit of a Jew named Noam Chomsky to Lebanon to support Hezbollah or the fact that Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust? How else to explain Norman Finkelstein telling cheering German audiences that the Jewish state is morally the same as the Nazis? How else to explain rabbis visiting Tehran to extol the Holocaust-denying regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran that seeks to exterminate Israel?

The other psychological explanation is related. The Jew -- specifically the radical Jew -- who sympathizes with Jew-haters wishes to announce to the world that he is not really like other Jews.

While the other Jews are moored in provincial Jewish ethnic or religious identity, he is a world citizen who no more identifies with the Jews' fate than with the fate of Iroquois Indians.

The prevalence of Jew-hating Jews would be no more than an interesting study of psychopathology were it not for one additional fact: All these Jews (except for the fringe Neturei Karta rabbis) also hate America. And they do the same damage to this country -- aiding the enemies of America just as they do the enemies of the Jews.

Explaining Jews Part VII: Why anti-Zionism is anti-semitism

Dennis Prager


Imagine someone saying that he seeks the destruction of Italy because he regards Italian national identity as racist. Further, imagine that this person constantly denies being anti-Italian, because he does not hate all Italians, only Italy and all those who believe Italy should exist.

Now substitute "Jewish" for "Italian" and "Israel" for "Italy" and you understand the absurdity of the argument that one can be anti-Zionist but not anti-Jewish.

Among the many lies that permeate the modern world, none is greater -- or easier to refute -- than the claim that Zionism is not an integral part of Judaism or the claim that anti-Zionism is unrelated to antisemitism.

In order to understand why, it is first necessary to explain Zionism and anti-Zionism.

A modern secular movement called Zionism was founded in the 19th century, but the belief that Jews belong in Zion (the biblical term for Jerusalem) is as old as the Jewish people. See Part One of this series, "Explaining Jews," for a discussion of why Jews are a people and not only a religion.

Starting in 586 B.C., with the destruction of the first Jewish state, Jews were already Zionists in that they fervently prayed to return to Zion. While the movement known by the specific name "Zionism" is modern, the movement of Jews returning to Zion is more than 2,500 years old. That is why the claim that Zionism -- the return of the Jewish people to Zion -- is not part of Judaism is a theological and historical lie.

Judaism has always consisted of three components: God, Torah and Israel, roughly translated as faith, practice and peoplehood. And this Jewish people was conceived of as living in the Jewish country called Israel. One can argue that the modern state of Israel was founded at the expense of Arabs living in the geographic area known as Palestine (there was never a country or a nation called Palestine); but that in no way negates the indisputable fact that Zionism is an integral part of Judaism. Nor does the fact that some Jews who have abandoned Judaism are opposed to Zionism, nor that a tiny sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Neturei Karta) believe that only the Messiah can found a Jewish state in Israel.

When anti-Israel Muslim students demonstrate on campus chanting, "Yes to Judaism, No to Zionism," they are inventing a new Judaism out of their hatred for Israel. It would be as if anti-Muslims marched around chanting, "Yes to Allah, No to the Quran." Just as Allah, Muhammad and the Quran are inextricable components of Islam, so God, Torah and Israel are of Judaism.

But, one might argue, even if Zionism is as much a part of Judaism as any other part of the Hebrew Bible, the modern Jewish state of Israel has no right to exist because it displaced many indigenous Arabs, known later as Palestinians.

Before responding to this, it is crucial to understand that this argument -- that Israel's founding was illegitimate -- is completely unrelated to anti-Zionism. An intellectually honest person who believes Israel's founding is illegitimate would still have to acknowledge that Zionism is an inseparable part of Judaism.

But the argument that Israel is illegitimate because its founding led to 600,000 to 700,000 Arab refugees is as anti-Jewish as is anti-Zionism. Virtually every country in the world was founded by displacing some of the people who had lived there, and many of those countries did far worse to far more people than Israel did. Therefore, anyone who calls only for Israel's destruction had better explain why, of all the states on earth whose founding was accompanied by the displacement of others, only the Jewish state is illegitimate.

Take Pakistan, for example. Unlike the Jewish state of Israel, which had existed twice before in history, there was never a country called Pakistan, nor was there ever any other independent Muslim country in the part of India that was carved out to create Pakistan. Moreover, if the Jewish state of Israel is illegitimate because it created 700,000 Arab refugees, why isn't the Muslim state of Pakistan, which created more than eight million Hindu refugees, illegitimate?

The answer is obvious. When people isolate the one Jewish state in the world for sanctions, opprobrium and delegitimizing, they are doing so because it is the Jewish state. And that, quite simply, is why anti-Zionism is simply another form of Jew-hatred.

You can criticize Israel all you want. That does not make you an antisemite. But if you are an anti-Zionist or advocate the destruction of the Jewish state, then let's be clear: You are an enemy of the Jews and of Judaism, and the word for such a person is antisemite.

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