QOTD: Mean Mister Mustard

Mean Mister Mustard on the limits of waiting for Islamic reform.

If you listen to [Dennis] Prager on the radio with any frequency, the tone and general thrust of his remarks would be fairly familiar to you: Israel cannot make peace with a population that is so overwhelmingly focused on death in general and Israel's destruction in particular.

Which is certainly true enough, but Prager, though I respect him, is constantly frustrating on questions like these in that he seems to refuse following the implications of his beliefs to their logical conclusions. [Michael] Berenbaum [in a debate with Prager] actually went farther in explicitly advocating separation between Israel and the Palestinians. Prager's rhetoric is still useful as a corrective to the vague and unreal suggestions about the peace process and moral equivalence that still litter the media landscape, but the fact that he doesn't speak beyond the present means that he can't offer any strategy or goal beyond an aggressive holding pattern modeled on the current situation, wherein Israel will presumably continue to kill Palestinians it considers threatening, but not do anything more ambitious or long-term. The underlying assumption that makes this at all tenable is that the Palestinians will eventually change and become acceptable neighbors.

This goes to the more basic problem that liberals like Prager have in discussing the wider problem of Islam: they are, for ideological reasons, unable to extrapolate a conclusion that Islam is inevitably (or nearly so) unreconcilable to the western world, no matter what the evidence says. On this point, Prager likes to say, "I don't judge religions, I judge practitioners," and he's quite willing to say that a huge proportion of Muslims are actively dangerous or at least hostile to us. But he categorically will not say that the belief system of Islam itself is such, holding always to the assumption that anything can happen in the future and that Islam will be whatever Muslims want it to be.

Which is true, up to a limited point. I suppose Muslims could tomorrow decide that the mandatory imposition of Sharia over the world is not one of Allah's commandments. But it fails to take Islam seriously as a religion. Indeed, it fails to take the entire idea of religion seriously. Either the Koran is the words of an all-powerful Creator or it itsn't. If it is, then by its own clear and unambiguous terms, it's impossible for a sincere Muslim to not "fight those who do not believe in Allah ... until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection." It would be like telling a Christian that they can continue to be Christians, just so long as they drop this whole "Jesus is the son of God" stuff. I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility that you could convince Christians to do that, but let's at least be honest enough to say that what you're really asking is for them to stop being Christians and become something else.

One of Prager's more frequent complaints about Jews is that most of them are only Jews in the ethnic sense, including those who profess to be believers. It's difficult, for instance, to find a (non-Orthodox) Jew who will express agreement with the statement that homosexual sex is an abomination. But he's essentially asking the same thing of Muslims, and in an even more egregious way, since there are some creative (but unconvincing) ways that one could try to abrogate Leviticus' banning of homosexual acts, but the Koran's orders to spread Sharia and politically subvert the non-Muslim world seem obvious and unquestionable in comparison.

QOTD: Dennis Prager

QOTD: Dennis Prager on the cultural divide in America.

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? ("Divinity" does not necessarily mean "literalism.")

I do not ask this about "the Bible" as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the Christian Bible and generally confine divine revelation even within the Hebrew Bible to the Torah and to verses where G-d is cited by the prophets, for example. But "Bible-believing" Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

Name the issue: same-sex marriage; the morality of medically unnecessary abortions; capital punishment for murder; the willingness to label certain actions, regimes, even people "evil"; skepticism regarding the United Nations and the World Court; strong support for Israel. While there are exceptions — there are, for example, secular conservatives who share the Bible-believers' social views — belief in a G-d-based authority of the Torah is as close to a predictable dividing line as exists.

What the world owes "Palestinians" and their ideological benefactors

QOTD:Dennis Prager

Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, has devoted his life since his son's murder by Muslims in Pakistan to building bridges to the Muslim world. He told me on my radio show that he is sad to report that '99.99 percent' of the Muslim world does not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. It is no wonder, then, that so few Muslims religiously or morally condemned Palestinian terror against Israeli Jews. At best, some Palestinians condemn Palestinian terror as counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Period. It may be impractical, but not immoral or un-Islamic.

Judeo-Christian Values

Dennis Prager has begun writing a series explaining Judeo-Christian values.

Now, it is time to make the case for Judeo-Christian, specifically biblical, values. I believe they are the finest set of values to guide the lives of both individuals and societies. Unfortunately, they are rarely rationally explained--even among Jewish and Christian believers, let alone to nonbelievers and members of other faiths.

It should be interesting to read the series as it develops.

QOTD: Dennis Prager

QOTD:Dennis Prager

...liberal positions are far more emotion-based than reason-based.

To cite but one of many examples, take the widely held liberal slogan 'War is not the answer.' It is pure irrationality. War has ended more evil than anything the left has ever thought of. In the last 60 years alone, it ended Nazism and the Holocaust; it saved half of Korea from genocide; it kept Israel from national extinction and a second Holocaust; it saved Finland from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian state; and according to most of the people who put 'War is not the answer' stickers on their bumpers, it saved Bosnian Muslims from ethnic cleansing.

QOTD: Heinrich Heine

Dennis Prager quotes Heinrich Heine:

In 1834, 99 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the great German poet Heinrich Heine, a secular Jew, predicted what would happen if Christianity ever weakened in Germany:

'A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless walk in the park. Christianity restrained the marshal ardor of the Germans for a time, but it did not destroy it; once the restraining guard is shattered, savagery will rise again . . . the mad fury of the berserk of which Nordic poets sing and speak.'

In Black and White

Sometimes statistics don't lie; they lay things bare in black and white.

Dennis Prager writes of the statistics in the Israel-Arab Wars in the article, Explaining the Arab-Israeli conflict through numbers.

www.jewishworldreview.com For the many readers who have requested a brief synopsis of the moral arguments in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I offer the following list of numerical data.

Number of times Jerusalem is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible: over 700
Number of times Jerusalem is mentioned in the Koran: 0
Number of Arab leaders who visited Jerusalem when it was under Arab rule (1948 to 1967): 1
Number of Arab refugees who fled the land that became Israel: approximately 600,000
Number of Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries: approximately 600,000
Number of U.N. agencies that deal only with Palestinian refugees: 1
Number of U.N. agencies that deal with all the other refugees in the world: 1
Number of Jewish states that have existed on the land called Palestine: 3
Number of Arab or Muslim states that have existed on the land called Palestine: 0
Number of terrorist attacks by Israelis or Jews since 1967: 1
Number of terrorist attacks by Arabs or Muslims since 1967: thousands
Percentage of Jews who have praised the Jewish terrorist: approximately .1
Percentage of Palestinians who have praised Islamic terrorists: approximately 90
Number of Jewish countries: 1
Number of Jewish democracies: 1
Number of Arab countries: 19
Number of Arab democracies: 0
Number of Arab women killed annually by fathers and brothers in "honor killings": thousands
Number of Jewish women killed annually by fathers and brothers in "honor killings": 0
Number of Christian or Jewish prayer services allowed in Saudi Arabia: 0
Number of Muslim prayer services allowed in Israel: unlimited
Number of Arabs Israel allows to live in Arab settlements in Israel: 1,250,000
Number of Jews Palestinian Authority allows to live in Jewish settlements in Palestinian Authority: 0
Percentage of U.N. Commission on Human Rights resolutions condemning an Arab country for human rights violations: 0
Percentage of U.N. Commission on Human Rights resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations: 26
Number of U.N. Security Council resolutions on the Middle East between 1948 and 1991: 175
Number of these resolutions against Israel: 97
Number of these resolutions against an Arab state: 4
Number of Arab countries that have been members of the U.N. Security Council: 16
Number of times Israel has been a member of the U.N. Security Council: 0
Number of U.N. General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel: 322
Number of U.N. General Assembly resolutions condemning an Arab country: 0
Percentage of U.N. votes in which Arab countries voted with the United States in 2002: 16.6
Percentage of U.N. votes in which Israel voted with the United States in 2002: 92.6
Percentage of Middle East Studies professors who defend Zionism and Israel: approximately 1.
Percentage of Middle East Studies professors who believe in diversity on college campuses: 100
Percentage of people who argue that the Jewish state has no right to exist who also believe some other country has no right to exist: 0
Percentage of people who argue that of all the countries in the world, only the Jewish state has no right to exist and yet deny they are anti-Jewish: approximately 100
Number of Muslims in the world: more than 1 billion
Number of Muslim demonstrations against Islamic terror: approximately 2

Prager Looks At the World

Dennis Prager takes a step back and looks at the world.

I have contempt for "the world." I cherish and admire countless individuals, but I have contempt for "the world" and "world opinion." "The world" has never cared about evils inflicted on human beings. The Communist genocides meant nothing to humanity. The Holocaust meant nothing. With almost no exception, the mass atrocities since World War II have likewise absorbed humanity less than the Olympics or the Miss World Contest. I have contempt for the United Nations. It is one of the great obstacles to goodness and decency on this planet. Its moral record — outside of a few specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization — is almost entirely supportive of evil and condemnatory of good. It is dominated by the most morally backward governments in the world — those from the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Communists during their heyday and African despots. It appointed Libya, a despotic, primitive state, to head its Human Rights Commission, whose members include China, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Neither the United States nor Israel sits on the Commission. I regard the European Union with similar revulsion.

With little opposition, Europe murdered nearly every Jewish man, woman and child in its midst, and a half-century later provides cover for those in the Middle East who seek to do to the Middle East's Jews exactly what the Nazis did to the European Jews. For the European Union to condemn Israel's killing of a Hamas leader, when Hamas's avowed aim is another Jewish genocide, is so loathsome as to board the incredible. For Germany and France (who, unlike America, have almost never shed blood for the liberty of others) to do everything they can to undermine America's attempt to liberate Iraq is similarly repugnant.

As for the international news media and journalists, I regard most of them as aides to evil.

A Number of Passion-ate Reviews [Updated 3/17/04]

Interesting Times: The Difference By Saul Singer

I am happy for the millions who, like Novak, will have their faith strengthened by this film. Christianity provides a powerful religious model that has attracted two billion adherents. It engenders a fear of God that is much preferable to common alternatives such as atheism, nihilism, and paganism. Recently, moreover, the more relevant threats to Jews have come not from the medieval Christianity Gibson seems to favor, but from Nazism, communism, and radical Islam, against which believing Christians are staunch Jewish allies.

But the Christian model is not for everyone. Jews believe that everyone is born with both a good and an evil inclination, that we must struggle to reinforce our good side, and that we can atone for sins through prayer and correcting what we've done. Though faith and actions are important to both religions, Christianity is more faith-centered and Judaism more action-centered. We believe that God judges us more on what we do to bring a better world than on what we believe.

Christianity and Judaism are close in many respects, but if there is any event that accentuates the differences, it is the release of The Passion. This could be awkward, if only because it may be strange to many Christians that Jews have trouble identifying with what for them is a powerful, affirming experience. But it is also an opportunity to explain what may be for some a more reasonable and accessible approach to God and our role in the world.

Islam means "submission" (to God). Christianity is built on being "saved" through faith. Judaism, by contrast, stubbornly tries to preserve free will and personal responsibility in the face of God's omnipotence.

Gibson's Blood Libel by Charles Krauthammer

In Gibson's movie, Satan appears four times. Not one of these appearances occurs in the four Gospels. They are pure invention. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found . . . where? Moving among the crowd of Jews. Gibson's camera follows close up, documentary style, as Satan glides among them, his face popping up among theirs -- merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd. After all, a perfect match: Satan's own people.

Essay: Jews and Christians after 'The Passion' By Yossi Klein Halevi

I had assumed - hoped - that the Jewish critics of The Passion were exaggerating. The critics, after all, have a habit of assuming the worst of Christianity, and of underestimating the positive changes in Christian attitudes toward Jews. They turned the Pope's beatification of Edith Stein into a nefarious Catholic plot to "Christianize" the Holocaust, and transformed a debate among historians over the role of Pius XII into a campaign against the church headed by John Paul II, who has devoted himself to Christian atonement for anti-Semitism.

But this time the critics weren't exaggerating. Mel Gibson has produced a medieval passion play, reviving the whiff of deicide at the most vulnerable Jewish moment since the 1940s.

The Passion: Jews and Christians are Watching Different Films by Dennis Prager

When watching "The Passion," Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films.

For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.

In order to avoid further tension between two wonderful communities that had been well on their way to historic amity, it is crucial for each to try to understand what film the other is watching and reacting to.

Think Again: 'The Passion' & the Tar Baby By Jonathan Rosenblum

The Catholic Church cannot be terribly enthusiastic about a cinematic presentation of a theology that rejects current papal teaching on the Jews. Indeed, a group of mostly Catholic New Testament scholars, affiliated with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, submitted a study pointing out the departures of Gibson's original script from the Gospels and from papal teaching, as well as the "lurid details" imported from the ecstatic visions of an 18th-century German nun.

While evangelical Protestants will have little truck with such historical analysis of New Testament texts, they tend to overwhelmingly be philo-Semites and, unlike the Catholic Church, continue to view Jews as the Chosen People. With them, the proper approach is that adopted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center: an open appeal to Christians of goodwill to do for Jews what we cannot do for ourselves - i.e., work to ensure that The Passion does not become a vehicle for arousing anti-Semitic furies.

The Wiesenthal Center's "Appeal to People of Faith" expressly eschews any request that Christians renounce or censor their most holy texts. It places the focus on actions, not beliefs. And that is as it should be.

Is `The Passion` Anti-Semitic? By Jeff Jacoby

"THE PASSION of The Christ" is violent, bloody, and sadistic. Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus' last day has to be the most graphic and brutal death ever portrayed on film. It is being described as a masterpiece -- soul-stirring and beautiful. I found it stomach-turning and deeply troubling.I am not a Christian, but I tried to view "The Passion" the way a Christian might view it. I tried to experience it as a message of God's love and mercy, as a depiction of self-sacrifice so complete and all-embracing as to transform human history. I tried to imagine believing that all that blood -- and "The Passion" is drenched with blood -- was shed to wash away my sins. I tried to understand this grim nightmare as an enactment of mankind's redeemer being tortured and killed, to accept that this was the purpose for which he was born, to feel that I, no less than the howling mob on the screen, was responsible for -- and the beneficiary of -- his death. I tried -- but I failed.

Marc Howard Wilson discusses the interesting paradox of the movie being very Catholic yet receiving the backing of (according to him, generally anti-Catholic) Fundamentalist Protestants.

Centuries have passed, and the bulk of Catholics and Protestants have made peace with each other, occasionally uneasy, but peace nonetheless. As one would expect, however, animosity and hostility still drive the attitude of Fundamentalist Protestants toward Catholicism. Go to the Web sites and see how salacious their hatred of Catholics still is: They are damned. Their doctrines are false. Their worship is idolatry. Their interpretation of the Bible is heretical. The Pope is the antichrist. The Vatican conspires for world domination. Catholic political aspirants will be puppets of Rome. The Jesuits plotted with the Nazis to mastermind the Holocaust. How often have I heard a Fundamentalist preacher refer to "Christians, Catholics and Jews," inferring that Catholics are not even genuine Christians?

Some time ago, a Fundamentalist institution honored one of the most vituperatively militant anti-Catholics, Rev. Ian Paisley, with a Doctorate of Humanities. The same institution would allow on campus neither Jerry Falwell nor Pat Robertson, whom most of us consider staunch Fundamentalists, because they engaged in dialogue with Catholics. That very institution is now one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for Gibson's film.

This is precisely the oxymoron: A significant segment, perhaps a majority, of Fundamentalist Protestants think that Catholics are a bunch of hell-bound heretics who subscribe to false doctrine. Likewise, radical Catholics like Gibson have little regard for the integrity and salvation of the Protestants. Yet, somehow in this lunatic world, the most fundamentalist Fundamentalists are actually turning to a fanatical Catholic to teach the world "the Truth" about Jesus and his sanctifying death.

Dennis Prager's Ten Lessons

Dennis Prager in the WSJ.

Ten lessons from Saddam Hussein's capture:

1. America is the greatest force for good on the planet. America, with the support of Britain and some other countries, and against the rest of "world opinion," liberated Iraq from evil. If it were up to the U.N. or the EU, or the editorial boards of most major American newspapers, Saddam would still be happily making palaces for himself and torture dungeons for his people.

2. The positive effect on humanity of good vanquishing evil cannot be overstated. When evil people get away with what they have done, it has a dispiriting effect. Even those of us who believe that a just God dispenses justice after this life ache to see justice done here and now. In this regard, it is not only good that Saddam was captured; it is good that he lived in holes, and aware that his sadistic sons had been killed. It is nice to know that he has been suffering.

3. No Muslim or Arab country lifted a finger to help the Iraqi people. This is because the Muslim and Arab worlds do not divide the world between good and evil, but between Muslim and non-Muslim and Arab and non-Arab. Since Saddam was a fellow Muslim and Arab, the fact that he tortured and murdered so many was as irrelevant to the Muslim and Arab worlds as the Islamic regime's genocide in Sudan and the subjugation of women in Taliban Afghanistan.

4. Not everyone is happy about Saddam's capture. Palestinians, for example, are weeping. Saddam was their hero. Iraqis were forced to march with his posters, but Palestinians did so voluntarily. Many on the Left are also not particularly happy. Saddam's capture is a victory for American force and for George W. Bush, and the Left hates both more than it hates Saddam.

5. The Left seeks power, but is incapable of leading because leadership and wanting to be loved are mutually exclusive. Leftists, including liberal politicians, want to be loved and want America to be loved. That was President Clinton's great desire, and that is why, with all his abundant talents, he could never lead. Much of the Left's criticism of Mr. Bush revolves around this issue: "Look at how popular we were right after 9/11 and how unpopular we are now."

6. Most of the Left does not hate evil; hatred of evil is primarily found on the Right. With exceptions such as Tony Blair and Joseph Lieberman, virtually the entire Left finds evil far less disturbing than global warming, smoking, economic inequality, and drug prices. And with the exceptions of "paleoconservatives" such as Pat Buchanan, most of the Right regards the use of American power to vanquish evil as the greatest good the U.S. can engage in.

7. In the Arab world, power is venerated. For years leading up to 9/11, Islamists were respected for their increasing power and America was losing respect as it suffered blows at the hands of Islamic terror. Now America is seen as the powerful one, and is earning the respect once accorded Saddam and Osama. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

8. There are many who respect goodness above all else. But humanity as a whole has far more respect for power, and takes powerful societies more seriously than good ones. That is why China is respected despite its being a dictatorship and its brutal crushing of Tibet. China is powerful. The stronger America is, the more people will take it and its values seriously. As an unprecedented combination of power and goodness, America could reshape the world.

9. The Marxist belief that forces, not individuals, shape history is wrong. George W. Bush is living proof.

10. The reason the president is shaping history is that he has as strong a set of beliefs -- in America's moral mission and in Judeo-Christian religious values -- as those he is fighting. Those who hold bad beliefs can only be defeated by those have equally strong good beliefs.

Kill the Lawyers First

Dennis Prager has some sad but also frightening things to say about the legal profession.

Though there are many fine people in the legal profession, and though law is necessary to protect society from descending into chaos, I now fear the legal profession more than I do Islamic terror.

...

Law in America and internationally is no longer on the side of the decent. It is a weapon in the hands of the indecent.

Dennis mentioned two cases on his radio program today. In this one, the judge allowed Shell to be added to the list of defendents in the Rhode Island nightclub fire because tickets to the concert were given out at a Shell gas station.

Attorney Ronald Resmini, who sued for damages in federal court last month, said he added Shell Oil and its affiliate, Motiva Enterprises LLC, to his lawsuit because The Station nightclub owners distributed tickets to their club from a Shell gas station they owned.

"They were giving away free tickets if you bought so much merchandise," Resmini said.

The second one, the State of California is suing octogenarians and nonagenarians for polluting Chico's water supply when they worked in the dry cleaning industry. Who are these defendents? 93 year old Vart Vartabedian and his wife Jean who is in her late 80s.

Their longtime friends Bob and Inez Heidinger -- he's 87, has Alzheimer's disease and is blind in one eye; she's 83, has bone marrow cancer and needs shoulder surgery -- also are being sued.

So are Betty Rollag, a Chico widow, and about a half-dozen other retired and elderly residents of this college town who the state says are responsible for poisoning much of the city's water.

...

They are former dry cleaners accused of pouring a toxic cleaning substance known as PCE down the drains of their businesses.

But it's not just people who were in the dry cleaning business decades ago.

Also named in the suit are the city of Chico, whose sewers in the contaminated area are cracked and leaking, and Paul Tullius, a 57-year-old retired Air Force pilot, and his wife, Vicki, who own a warehouse that last housed a dry cleaner in 1972 -- 16 years before they bought the building without knowing its entire history.

...

Tullius bought a warehouse in downtown Chico in 1988 to store old cars he used to collect. He said he had no idea it had housed a dry cleaner from 1964 until 1972, and even if he had, he wouldn't have thought much of it.

But because his name is on the title to the building, which he's leasing to a Chico homeless shelter, he's been told that he and his wife are liable, too.

Perhaps, the homeless shelter should be sued as well.

Were these dastardly polluters trying to save a few bucks? No, they followed standard disposal techniques of the time.

In the Heidingers' case, the damage was supposedly done between the time they opened in 1952 and sold in 1974. The state claims the Heidingers' cleaning machines pumped PCE into the sewers.

In a signed affidavit, however, Heidinger said his machines were self-contained and that no PCE went down the drain. Instead, the chemical was recycled through his machines and a sludge residue was placed in 5-gallon buckets and disposed in the garbage -- standard procedure for getting rid of PCE then. Today, companies typically hire disposal firms, and the waste is taken to special landfills.

And what does this do to our civil society?

As for the man who sold him the building 15 years ago, Tullius said: "He's sort of become a friend, but I'm going to have to sue him, and I suppose he'll have to sue the person he bought it from."

It's no wonder that the legal profession is so rightly reviled. Dennis rightly concludes his article with this statement.

And now a trial lawyer is seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for president. He ought to win it. Trial lawyers are, after all, the largest contributors to him and to his party. And if that doesn't frighten enough Americans, we will cease being a free country.