Columnist.
I spent Thanksgiving debating at the Oxford Union. Oxford University is the most prestigious university in the world. And the Oxford Union, hosting debates since 1823, is the world's most prestigious stage for competing ideas. These facts made what transpired all the more depressing. The proposition debated was: "Hamas is a greater obstacle to peace than Israel." When first apprised of the topic, I was so certain that an error had been made that I called both my debating partner, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Oxford to confirm it. Outside of the Muslim world and the far left, who would even think to argue that Hamas is not the greater obstacle to peace?
Since 9/11, the Western world's academic, media, political elites have done their best to portray Islam in a favorable light, treating it very differently from all other religions. Criticism of every doctrine, religious or secular, is permitted, often encouraged. But not of Islam. Only positive depictions are allowed. We'll start with an example of pro-Islamic bias that is so ubiquitous that no one seems to notice it. Why do Western media -- overwhelmingly composed of irreligious people, one might add -- always deferentially refer to Muhammad as "the Prophet Muhammad" in news articles and opinion pieces? When Jesus is mentioned, the media never refer to him as "Christ, the Lord" or as "the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." Just "Jesus." In fact, "A.D." ("anno Domini" -- "year of our Lord") has been completely dropped by the very academics and media who always write "The Prophet Muhammad."
One of the rarest and most important things a pope does is issue encyclicals. In the eight years of Pope Benedict's papacy, he issued three encyclicals. In the 27 years of Pope John Paul II's papacy, he issued 14 encyclicals. Since his ascendancy to the papacy in March 2013, Pope Francis has issued one. But Pope Francis is about to issue an encyclical to the world's 5,000 bishops and 400,000 priests that tells us a great deal about him, about Latin America and, most of all, about the influence of what has been the most dynamic religion in the world for the last hundred years.
In my fifth and final column on the greatest guide ever devised for a good world -- the Ten Commandments -- I offer my readers what may well be the best single thing you can do -- that you are probably not doing now -- to improve the quality of your life, your family's life and, ultimately, the life of our society. Many people -- even among those who revere the Ten Commandments -- do not think that the fourth commandment, the Sabbath Day, is particularly important, let alone binding. Once you understand it, however, you will recognize how both life-changing and world-changing it is.
The Ten Commandments is the most morally influential piece of legislation ever written. To give a good idea of how relevant each of the ten is, take the third commandment, one of the two most misunderstood commandments (the other is "Do not Murder," which I explained previously). Is there such a thing as "the worst sin" -- one sin that is worse than all others? In fact, there is. I am aware that some people differ. They maintain that we can't declare any sin worse than any other. "To God, a sin is a sin," is how it's often expressed. In this view, a person who steals a stapler from the office is committing as grievous a sin in God's eyes as a murderer.
I have been devoting my columns this month to the Ten Commandments because we need a fixed moral anchor to solve the problem of evil. And nothing is as effective as the Ten Commandments. Two weeks ago PragerUniversity.com released 11 five-minute video courses -- one for each Commandment and an introduction. It has received over two million views. Everything needed to make a good world is contained in these Ten Commandments.
We don't have to love our parents. We have to honor them. Last week PragerUniversity.com released 11 five-minute video courses: each of the Ten Commandments and an introduction. We received over one million views this first week. The reason we made these videos is that we believe that everything needed to make a good world is contained in the Ten Commandments.
Ask almost anyone to recite the commandment in the Ten Commandments that prohibits taking a life and you will be told, "Thou Shall Not Kill." That is the King James translation of the sixth commandment. It is a magnificent translation. But this one has led to much moral confusion. Yesterday, PragerUniversity.com, which has had more than 20 million views this year, released 11 courses (each five-minutes long) -- the Ten Commandments and an introduction.
As we await protests and riots scheduled for Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere if a grand jury in Missouri does not indict the white officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, a little moral clarity is called for. For decades now, we have been told that there is a black-white divide in America. The problem with this belief that is that it renders moral judgment -- of white police, of black crime and black incarceration rates, of white judges and jurors, and of black riots and protests - impossible. It is, we are told over and over, all about "perceptions" -- a "black-white divide" in the way each race perceives racial matters. This is how it works:
One of the first clues that this Columbia-educated, liberal, Democrat, New York Jew had that there was something wrong at the heart of progressive/left-wing thought was when I read and was taught over and over that "poverty causes crime." I knew from the first that this was dogma, not truth. How did I know?
Since the Bolsheviks inaugurated the first edition of their party newspaper Pravda (the Russian word for truth), the left has shaped truth to serve its goals. On an individual level, there are plenty of progressives who are honest and plenty of conservatives who aren't. But truth is just not a left-wing value -- feminism, environmentalism, material equality, and fighting racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia are far more important. The myriad falsehood-based hysterias unleashed by the left in our country -- the alleged heterosexual AIDS epidemic in America, the number of homeless people, the number of deaths from anorexia, the current charges of a "war on women" in our society and of a "culture of rape" on American college campuses, the immediate assertion that the killing of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri was caused by racist police -- testify to the left's cavalier attitude toward truth.
Last week, I was a speaker and the emcee at a rally convened by the Republican Party and WLSS, the Sarasota station that carries my radio show. The other speakers were Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. I spoke for about 25 minutes, about two minutes of which drew national attention from the left. I spoke about "the divisions that the Democrats have engaged in making in this country." Then I said, word for word: "On issue after issue, these are manufactured divisions: the black-white division, the male-female division, and the old-young division. These are all manufactured. There is no 'war on women.' It's absurd. It is just an absurdity. It is a lie. It's a gargantuan lie to get votes. It's as big a lie as 'culture of rape' on your campuses. What nonsense. There is a 'culture of rape' on campuses run by the feminist left? Why are you trying to sell me this nonsense?
In almost every area of American life, the better things are, the worse it is for the Democratic Party. And vice versa. Marriage. Even today, after decades of feminism, most Americans agree that it is better for women (and for men) -- and better for society -- when women (and men) marry. Yet, when women marry, it is bad for the Democratic Party; and when women do not marry, even after -- or shall we say, *especially* after -- having children, it is quite wonderful for the Democratic Party.
Why do some things scare people more than others? One reason is that people engage in a rational assessment of risk and conclude the appropriate level of fear. For example, people feel free to walk alone at midnight in Times Square but not in Central Park because they have made a rational assessment: Times Square, which at midnight is almost as bright as day and filled with people -- usually tourists -- is safer than Central Park. A second reason is that emotions rather than reason cause people to fear something. Some years ago I was a guest on the television show "Politically Incorrect," the Bill Maher-hosted predecessor to his current HBO show, "Real Time with Bill Maher." One of the other guests was the late Christopher Hitchens. At one point, he lit up a cigarette. There were some negative reactions, so I looked at the audience, and asked: "If you think the smoke from this cigarette is endangering your health, clap."
There is a noble-sounding attitude that many Americans hold regarding whom they vote for. "I vote for the candidate," they say. It sure sounds good. Voting for the best candidate, rather than the party, sounds as American as apple pie. But as the Democratic Party has become a doctrinaire left-wing party, this sentiment is no longer noble. It is actually foolish and dangerous. There was a time when there were terrific Democrats whom an independent and even a Republican could vote for. Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman was such an example. He was a liberal -- he believed in the good that he thought an expanding government could provide -- but he was a hawk on foreign policy.
Last Friday night a rare dialogue/debate took place on American television. It was rare because it involved criticism of Islam, one of the many taboo subjects that are labeled "politically incorrect." And it took place on the program "Real Time with Bill Maher," a show not generally known for taking politically incorrect positions. But on this night the host, Bill Maher, along with atheism-advocate Sam Harris, had a vigorous debate with Actor Ben Affleck, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.
At least since the early part of the 20th century, aside from oil, the Arab world has produced and exported two products. It has produced essentially no technology, medicine or anything else in the world of science. It has almost no contributions to world literature, art or to intellectual development. According to the most recent United Nations Arab Human Development Reports (2003-2005), written by Arab intellectuals, Greece, with a population of 11 million, annually translates five times more books from English than the entire Arab world, population 370 million. Nor is this a new development. The total number of books translated into Arabic during the last 1,000 years is less than Spain translates into Spanish in one year.
President Obama declared in his recent address to the nation that "ISIL is not Islamic." But how does he know? On what basis did the president of the United States declare the a group of Muslims that calls itself "Islamic State" "not Islamic"? Has he studied Islam and Islamic history and concluded that ISIL, Boko Haram, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group that slaughtered 166 people in Mumbai, most especially guests at the Taj Hotel,and which tortured to death a rabbi and his wife), the various Palestinian terrorist groups (all of which have been Muslim, even though there are many Christian Palestinians), and the Muslim terror groups in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere are also all "not Islamic"?
Last week at the inaugural summit of the organization, In Defense of Christians, founded to help the most persecuted religious communities in the world today, Christians in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world, Senator Ted Cruz was heckled and booed, and decided to walk off the stage. This is how he began his speech: "Today we are gathered at a time of extraordinary challenge. Tonight we are all united in defense of Christians. Tonight, we are all united in defense of Jews."
Last week, it was revealed that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls -- in just one relatively small English city (Rotherham, population 275,000) had been raped by gangs of men over the past decade. As summarized in a British government inquiry: "It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators."
