Columnist.
Imagine a Jewish Congress member accusing the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) of wanting to see Jews gassed. How would any decent American -- on the right or left -- describe such a statement? Loathsome? Morally reprehensible? An obvious lie? All three descriptions would be entirely accurate. ... So here's a real question: If a black congressman charged that members of Congress who support the tea party "would love to see you and me (blacks) hanging from a tree," what's the difference between that libel and the made-up libel about the CBC wanting to see Jews gassed? The answer, of course, is that there is no difference.
Next month, the UN-sponsored hate-Israel festival known as Durban III takes place. Under the heading "anti-racism," the great bulk of the conference, like Durban I and Durban II, consists of condemning Israel for racism and equating it to an apartheid state. Of the world's many great lies, this is among the greatest. How do we know it is a lie? Because when South Africa was an apartheid state, no one accused Israel of being one. Even the UN would have regarded the accusation as absurd.
There is only one solution to the world's problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth. It is 3,000 years old. And it is known as the Ten Commandments. Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs to make a beautiful world. While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas in order to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.
Can Islam be reformed? The question is in no way meant to be provocative, let alone insulting. But the world, including vast numbers of Muslims, needs this question answered. After having studied Arabic at college and lectured on comparative religion for decades, and having devoted years to writing my upcoming book comparing American values with leftist and Islamist values, I have become convinced of two things regarding Islam: It must be reformed, and it can be reformed.
The citizens of San Francisco will be voting on a proposition that seeks to ban circumcision in that city. Though I am strongly opposed to the proposition, if it passes, some good may come of it. Let me explain. I am a passionate advocate of Jewish ritual known as the brit (often pronounced bris) -- the ritual circumcision of 8-day-old Jewish boys. I am even an advocate of circumcision generally. I was recently in Africa -- in Zimbabwe and Zambia -- where I delivered mosquito nets and seeds to the poorest of Africa's poor. I saw giant billboards there, as well as in neighboring Botswana, exhorting men to get circumcised. The World Health Organization estimates that male circumcision reduces the rate of heterosexually transmitted AIDS by about 60 percent.
While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons: 1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.
South Korea has joined with only two other countries in the world in dropping the name of the forthcoming film "Captain America" and using the subtitle, "The First Avenger." The other two countries are Russia and Ukraine. According to the New York Times report, "Although that country (South Korea) is one of Hollywood's top-performing territories, resentment about the continued presence of the United States military runs deep." For years now, I have intended to write a column about the most glaring case of international ingratitude of which I am aware. The "Captain America" story has finally pushed me over the edge.
Four years ago, I wrote a column titled "America Needs a July Fourth Seder." In it, I explained that "national memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies." Many readers and listeners to my radio show responded by creating their own rituals to make the day far more meaningful than watching fireworks and eating hot dogs. I now present a simple 10-minute ceremony that every American can easily use on July Fourth. It is a product of the Internet-based Prager University that I founded nearly two years ago. We call it the Fourth of July Declaration, and here it is. (A paginated and printed version can be downloaded at the website www.prageruniversity.com).
On June 9, a man boarded a US Airways flight from Fort Lauderdale to Phoenix, dressed in women's panties, a bra and thigh-high stockings. No US Airways employee at the Fort Lauderdale airport asked him to cover himself. Nor did any flight attendant ask him to do so. And obviously, no one demanded that he get off the plane. US Airways spokeswoman Valerie Wunder was asked how the airline allowed a nearly naked cross-dresser to board a plane and sit next to other passengers who, one assumes, did not appreciate being seated next to an exhibitionist.
Anthony Weiner, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger -- these are just the most recent examples of powerful men who have ruined their lives because of some inappropriate (or, in the case of Strauss-Kahn, allegedly much worse than inappropriate) sexual conduct. Can you name a single woman politician caught in a similar sex scandal? If not, why not?
To their credit, most Democratic Party leaders have (finally) called for New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's resignation. But among liberal commentators and millions of other Americans, there is a great deal of flawed thinking about whether Weiner should resign. The two most common arguments offered against his resigning have been that (1) what Weiner did was not illegal and (2) it was not even as bad as an extramarital affair because he never met, let alone had physical contact with, any of the women to whom he sent naked and semi-naked photos of himself.
While dining out last week, I periodically looked up at one of the television monitors to see the score of the first game of the NBA finals. As there was no sound on to interrupt diners' conversations, the monitor was in caption mode: One could read rather than hear the words spoken. At the conclusion of the game, an announcer was interviewing a member of the victorious Miami Heat players. I saw from the captions the player saying the words "they isn't." Closed captions display the words spoken. They don't correct for poor grammar.
Osama Bin Laden -- a man whose purpose in life was to inflict death and suffering on as many innocent people as possible -- was finally killed, and much of the Western world's religious and secular elite have expressed moral objections to those who celebrated this death. Pastor Brian McLaren, named one of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America" in 2005, expressed this objection. Reacting to television images of young Americans chanting "USA! USA!" the night bin Laden's death was announced, the pastor wrote, "I can only say that this image does not reflect well on my country. ... Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?"
It appears that the Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, 2011 did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening, Pacific Time, yielded more than 32,000 articles -- in English alone -- in the world media. The secular, especially the anti-religious, left, enjoy these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm for them not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general.
I assume that the type of person who reads columns such as this one has wondered at one time or another why, for thousands of years, there has been so much attention paid to Jews and why, today, to Israel, the one Jewish state. But how do most people explain this preoccupation? There is no fully rational explanation for the amount of attention paid to the Jews and the Jewish state. And there is no fully rational explanation for the amount of hatred directed at Jews and the Jewish state.
If your sister were among the nearly 3,000 people murdered in the World Trade Center on 9/11, how would you react to Osama Bin Laden's death? More specifically, if you were to write an opinion piece on the subject for a major newspaper, what would you most want to communicate? One would think that anyone who had lost a loved one on 9/11 would write about bin Laden's guilt, about evil and about experiencing some degree of moral and emotional satisfaction that the loved one's murderer had been killed by American forces. But not Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. He had other, more pressing, things to say.
The following comments were made in a public speech last week by a man considering running for president of the United States: On gas prices: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, 'You're not going to raise that f---ing price.'" On what he would say as president to China: "Listen, you mother f---ers, we're going to tax you 25 percent." On Iraq and America: "We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school; we build another school, we build another road, they blow them up, we build again. In the meantime, we can't get a f---ing school in Brooklyn."
In the contemporary world, where left-wing attitudes are regarded as normative, it is a given that capitalism, with its free market and profit motive, emanates from and creates selfishness, while socialism, the welfare state and the "social compact," as it is increasingly referred to, emanate from and produce selflessness. The opposite is the truth. Whatever its intentions, the entitlement state produces far more selfish people -- and therefore, a far more selfish society -- than a free-market economy. And once this widespread selfishness catches on, we have little evidence that it can be undone.
In 1969, at the age of 21, I was sent to the Soviet Union. I was a young American Jew who spoke Hebrew and Russian and who practiced Judaism. My task was to bring Jewish religious items into the Soviet Union and the names of Jews who wished to leave the Soviet Union out of that country. Upon returning to the United States, I became the national spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, one of the most effective organizations for Soviet Jews in the world. As such, I spoke before synagogues of every denomination, Hadassah groups, Jewish federations, Jewish groups on college campuses. If there was a Jewish organization, it cared about the plight of Soviet Jews. For decades, virtually every synagogue in America had a "Save Soviet Jewry" sign in front of it.
Given the preoccupation of the American media with the possible closing down of the American government, and the preoccupation of American and world media with Japan's travails and the revolts in the Arab world, many Americans may have missed the news about the April 1 massacre of United Nations employees in Afghanistan. That is unfortunate because it was as significant as it was instructive.
