On December 31, 2007, I posted my favorite ten articles by Rite Jew Dennis Prager. I had to wait one whole year to deliver the 2008 installment and, unsurprisingly, Prager didn’t disappoint.
So here it is. Enjoy my end-of-the-year Prager-palooza:
A Response to “What You Have To Believe To Be a Republican Today” (Jan. 29)
For four years, a list of alleged Republican positions—“What You Have To Believe To Be a Republican Today”—has been circulating on the Internet and forwarded in countless e-mails. In this presidential election year, it is important to respond to these charges. If people want to vote for a Democratic president, they should not do so based on falsehoods about Republicans. […]
1. “Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a ‘we can’t find Bin Laden.’”
Response: Saddam Hussein was always considered a bad guy by anyone with a working moral compass, and that included Democratic President Bill Clinton and his administration. The main reason that President Ronald Reagan armed Saddam Hussein was so as to enable Saddam to fight against Iran so that Iran would not be the dominant power in the Muslim Middle East. Arming an evil man to fight another evil man does not make the former less of an evil man. America aided Stalin’s genocidal Communist Soviet Union in order for him to better fight against Hitler. And after World War II, America aided some former Nazis in order to be able to fight Stalin. That is moral wisdom, not hypocrisy. […]
4. “A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.”
Response: Unlike those on the left, many Republicans, not to mention medical science, view a human fetus as having its own body and not being a mere extension of a woman’s body. People can differ on the legality of early abortions -- not every immoral action is necessarily illegal -- but to belittle the killing of a human fetus for no medical reason as “a woman doing what she wants with her own body” is only one more example of the left’s broken moral compass.
5. “Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.”
Response: No mainstream Republican or conservative has ever said that he or she, let alone Jesus, hates homosexuals. But because there is so much hatred on the left for Republicans and for religious conservatives, many on the left, like the writer of this list, constantly accuse Republicans and conservatives of being haters. It is usually projection. […]
7. “If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.”
Response: While many Republicans believe that teenage sexual standards should be left to parents and not to schools, no mainstream Republican has ever argued, “If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.” But many people, not just Republicans, think that teaching “safe sex” to middle schoolers sends a message to young minds that society assumes they will have sexual intercourse. And what society assumes usually happens. When society assumed teenagers should not have sex, they rarely had it. For generations before schools put condoms on bananas, there was far less teenage sex because society has a profound impact on teenage sexual behavior. The message in schools since then has often been that the only reason not to have sex at age 16 (or 15 or 14) is that you might get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted disease. The portrayal of sex as almost exclusively a biological act has been one of contemporary liberalism’s greatest sins against young people.
8. “HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.”
Response: Who ever said that? HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of their owners or stockholders at heart. The question is not whether companies want to make profits, it’s whether individuals will have a choice about how to obtain health care, and whether the state should massively expand to create Canada-like socialist medicine with its triage and long waiting periods. […]
12. “Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness, and you need our prayers for your recovery.”
Response: Most conservatives and liberals believe that legalizing drugs would result in large numbers of young people using life-destroying drugs. As for Rush Limbaugh, he illegally acquired prescription painkillers for chronic back pain. Only people with hatred in their hearts can liken that to using heroin and other nonprescription drugs that crush lives.
Before Sending Your Child to a College, Ask these Questions (Mar. 4)
Before you take out a second mortgage or otherwise deplete your savings in order to pay for your child’s college education, you might want to ask the colleges to which your child is applying some questions.
1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible? If so, why attend such a college?
2. Does the college allow military recruiters on its campus? […]
3. In the political science, English, sociology, anthropology and history departments—or any other liberal arts department—what is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the professors? […]
4. What are the names of the speakers invited and paid with college funds to speak last year at the college? […]
5. Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed? […]
6. Is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” the most widely assigned American history book?
If the answer is yes, you should consider sending your son or daughter to another university or at least be aware that you will be paying a lot of hard-earned money for your child to be manipulated into believing that America is a bad country, certainly no better than others, as he or she reads what is essentially a proctologist’s view of American history. Zinn believes, as he told me in an interview on my radio show, that America has done “probably more harm than good in its history.”
7. Would a typical graduate of your university be able to say anything intelligent about Josef Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cain and Abel, the Gulag Archipelago, Franz Josef Haydn, Pol Pot, Martin Luther, Darfur, how interest rates affect the dollar, dark matter, and “Crime and Punishment”; explain what the Korean War was about and when it was fought; identify India on a map; and know the difference between the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council? […]
Unfortunately, the chances are that if you receive any response at all to these questions, it will be a discouraging one. Outside of the natural sciences, colleges are either more interested in liberal indoctrination than in a liberal arts education, or they enable students to take courses that are so narrowly focused that your child graduate will likely graduate as a cultural and historical illiterate. Why so many Americans go into debt paying so much money to such failed institutions is one of the riddles of the universe.
It is time to demand that universities teach. Forcing them to answer the above seven questions is a good way to begin. Because granting a Bachelor of Arts degree on someone who never heard of Cain and Abel and never heard a Haydn symphony is a fraud.
Why Do Palestinians Get Much More Attention than Tibetans? (Mar. 25)
The first reason is terror. Some time ago, the Palestinian leadership decided, with the overwhelming support of the Palestinian people, that murdering as many innocent people—first Jews, and then anyone else—was the fastest way to garner world attention. They were right. […]
The second reason is oil and support from powerful fellow Arabs. […]
The third reason is Israel. To deny that pro-Palestinian activism in the world is sometimes related to hostility toward Jews is to deny the obvious. It is not possible that the unearned preoccupation with the Palestinians is unrelated to the fact that their enemy is the one Jewish state in the world. Israel’s Jewishness is a major part of the Muslim world’s hatred of Israel. It is also part of Europe’s hostility toward Israel. […]
A fourth reason is China. If Tibet had been crushed by a white European nation, the Tibetans would have elicited far more sympathy. But, alas, their near-genocidal oppressor is not white. And the world does not take mass murder committed by non-whites nearly as seriously as it takes anything done by Westerners against non-Westerners. […]
A fifth reason is the world’s Left. As a general rule, the Left demonizes Israel and has loved China since it became Communist in 1948. And given the power of the Left in the world’s media, in the political life of so many nations, and in the universities and the arts, it is no wonder vicious China has been idolized and humane Israel demonized.
The sixth reason is the United Nations, where Israel has been condemned in more General Assembly and Security Council resolutions than any other country in the world. […]
The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. […]
The world is unfair, unjust and morally twisted. And rarely more so than in its support for the Palestinians—no matter how many innocents they target for murder and no matter how much Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates their media—and its neglect of the cruelly treated, humane Tibetans.
Time Fights Carbon Emissions; Military Fights Evil (Apr. 22)
The state of the liberal mind is on display on this week’s cover of Time magazine.
The already notorious cover takes the iconic photograph of U.S. Marines planting the American flag on Iwo Jima and substitutes a tree for the flag. Why Time’s editors did this explains much about contemporary liberalism.
The first thing it explains is that liberals, not to mention the left as a whole, stopped fighting evil during the Vietnam War. As I wrote in my last column, whereas liberals had led the fight against Nazism before and during World War II, and against Communism after the War, the liberal will to fight Communism, the greatest organized evil of the post-War world, collapsed during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War did to American liberals what World War I did to most Europeans—it rendered them anti-war rather than anti-evil. […]
It is much easier to fight global warming than to fight human evil. You will be celebrated at Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the BBC and throughout the media world, no one will threaten your life, there are huge grants available to scientists and others who fight real or exaggerated environmental problems, and you may even receive an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. Individuals who fight Islamists get fatwas.
The Time cover is cheap heroism. It is a liberal attempt to depict as equally heroic those who fight carbon emissions and those who fought Japanese fascists and Nazis. [...]
Years from now, Time’s cover will be regarded as another silly media-induced fear. But, as with Time’s 1974 article warning its readers about “another ice age” and its many articles on the threat of heterosexual AIDS in America, Time will just let public amnesia deal with credibility problems. Until then, however, one fact remains: Today, conservatives fight evil and liberals fight carbon emissions. That’s what this week’s cover of Time is about.
Liberalism and Victimhood (June 3)
If you want to understand the negative impact of feminism on women (and men) and, by extension, the destructive effects of liberal teachers, Democratic politics and liberal news media on African-Americans, here is Katie Couric last week on the CBS Evening News:
“A new study on teens and sexual harassment should give every parent pause.
“Most teenage girls report they’ve been sexually harassed. … In a study that appeared in the journal Child Development, 90 percent of teen girls say they’ve been harassed at least once.”
Millions of American parents and their daughters were told on one of the most widely watched evening news reports that nine out of every 10 American girls aged 12 to 18 are sexually harassed.
Suspicious that the feminist and liberal I-am-a-victim ideology was at play here far more than some real plague of sexual harassment, I decided to look into the report cited by Ms. Couric.
... Girls subjected to feminist indoctrination are undoubtedly more likely to interpret innocuous behavior as sexual harassment. Almost the entire liberal-left Weltanschauung is predicated on portraying every group in America except white, male, heterosexual Christians as oppressed. Women are oppressed by men. Blacks and Hispanics are oppressed by whites. Gays are oppressed by straights. Non-Christians are oppressed by Christians.
Of course, the fact is that American women have more opportunity and more equality than just about any women in the world today and certainly in history. Moreover, if either sex is “oppressed” today, it is far more likely to be males. If women were incarcerated, let alone murdered, as disproportionately as men are; if only 40 percent of those getting a bachelor’s degree were female; if girls dropped out of high school at the rate males do, there would be a national outcry. It is men who are, in fact, suffering. But for feminists, academics and CBS News, it is women who are still oppressed. And that is what they are taught in high school and college by feminist-oriented teachers. [...]
To an ever greater extent, schools and the news media do the same thing to African-Americans—tell them over and over that they are oppressed. And the effects have been even more corrosive. Just think of the wildly enthusiastic receptions the NAACP gave to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the black members of Trinity United Church of Christ gave to Father Michael Pfleger when he spoke of America being “the greatest sin against God” because it is so racist. The number of blacks who perceive of their lives as oppressed by whites can only lead to estrangement from the greater American society, not to mention anger toward and resentment of it.
Barack Obama’s Naive Berlin Speech
[This segment is from Part Two (Aug. 5). See Part One (July 29) here.]
Sen. Barack Obama’s recent speech in Berlin may have been a hit with American journalists. That, however, is due to most journalists’ politics, not to the profundity of Obama’s remarks. They were neither profound nor stirring. Indeed, a careful study of the speech should lead an impartial observer to be concerned about Obama’s grasp of the world. I started my analysis last week; I conclude this week. […]
Obama: “The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.”
In the seven years since 9/11, I have not seen a study that relates terrorism to poverty. And, as everyone knows, all of the 9/11 terrorists came from relatively wealthy homes. Obama’s assertion is simply a statement of faith. That faith is liberalism—increasingly a doctrine with more non-empirically based beliefs, i.e., dogmas, than most traditional religion: “Poverty causes crime”; “black incarceration rates are a result of racism”; “war is not the answer”; “capital punishment doesn’t deter”; “tax increases on ‘the rich’ help the economy”; “more money for education” and countless others. […]
Obama: “Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world …”
Which Europeans? What new burdens? Where are they taking more responsibility?
What new burdens have Spain, France, Norway or Sweden taken on? It seems to many of us that most European countries work hard to ensure that their welfare states prosper and, beyond that, do little to promote liberty on earth or even ensure their won security and values. [...]
Obama: “The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”
Those thoughts are lovely. But what matters is who is responsible for erecting these walls. For example, is it Christians or Jews or Muslims who today are erecting walls between “Christian and Muslim and Jew”? Obama seems to imply that all are equally responsible.
The Gibson Doctrine (Sept. 16)
… When [ABC News’ Charles Gibson] 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. […]
… 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? […]
… 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.
Jewish Left Wins, Jews and Israel Lose (Sept. 30)
… 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. … 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.
Why Reporters—and Judges and Professors—Are Biased (Nov. 25)
… 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. […]
Minorities Should Express Shame, Not Only Pride (Dec. 16)
… Why does one almost never hear expressions of group shame from members of any American group other than white Christians (specifically, white Christian male heterosexuals)? Are the only evildoers in America white male heterosexual Christians? Is there something inherently wrong about members of minorities expressing anything but group pride? Are there no minority sins worthy of shame? The latter is in fact the argument advanced by many intellectuals concerning black racism, for example. For a generation, college students have been taught that it is impossible for blacks to be racist because only the racial group in power, i.e. whites, can express racism.
Of course, that is nonsense. A black can be a racist just as a white can be one. A minority race might not have the power to implement racist national policies but that hardly means that no minority group, or any individual, can be a racist. […]
Expressing group shame when morally necessary is not airing dirty linen or giving solace to ones ideological enemies. It is, rather, one of the highest expressions of moral development. And it is therefore universally applicable. Being a minority doesnt exempt its members from moral responsibility. It will be a great day for America and the world when minorities begin to express shame as well as pride. In fact, there is real pride in expressing shame. Minorities should give it a try.
Keep it up, Mr. Prager. 2009 is going to be one doozy of a year!
Recent Comments