The Patriot Post® · Abraham v. Muhammad

I am Jewish, but not very Jewish. I had Jewish parents and Jewish grandparents, but I am not religiously observant, don’t keep kosher and never even had a bar mitzvah because my secular parents left it up to me whether after six hours of junior high I wanted to spend my afternoons attending Hebrew school or playing ball.

I only mention this as a matter of full disclosure, so you will understand that when I take Israel’s side against its Arab and Muslim neighbors, it’s understood that I do so because it is a western-style democracy that shares America’s traditional values and not because it is a Jewish state.

When I hear liberals in the media, academia and the Protestant hierarchy, condemning Israel and taking up for its enemies, labeling Israel an apartheid nation oppressing the so-called Palestinians, I get the queasy feeling that I’m in a surrealistic universe as it might have been imagined by George Orwell and painted by Salvador Dali.

After all, Israel is so religiously tolerant that Arabs and Muslims serve in its legislative body. It guarantees freedom of speech, religion and financial opportunity to all of its citizens, whereas in neighboring states, Jews have been banished, Christians have been burned and crucified, women are stoned for adultery – although not their male partners in sin – and prevented from working or attending school. They also have to wear burkas in sweltering heat and are vulnerable to honor killings if they fall in love with a non-Muslim or even consider converting to another, less restrictive, faith.

If ever there was a clear line separating good and evil, this would be it. But our campus and cultural elitists nevertheless insist on siding with the barbarians and giving full vent to their inherent anti-Semitism, going so far as to insist that universities, corporations and individuals, divest themselves of investments in Israeli companies, even those turning out life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

I am not one of those Jews who wrap Jewish contributions to the world around myself like a comfort blanket, pretending that the accomplishments of others somehow reflect gloriously on me. But from strictly an objective point of view, when you compare the gifts that a few million Jews have bestowed on an unfriendly world compared to what billions of Arabs and Muslims have contributed, it is an embarrassingly lopsided competition.

In whatever field you can name, but particularly in medicine, science and the arts –both classical and popular – Jews have excelled. Even a partial list includes the likes of Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, Felix Mendelsohn, Jonas Salk, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Aaron Copland, Frank Loesser, Leonard and Elmer Bernstein, Paul Ehrlich, Boris Pasternak, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Charles Krauthammer, Nathan Rothschild, Sidney Howard, Benjamin Cardoza, Benjamin Disraeli, John Garfield, Marc Chagall, Louis Brandeis, Hedy Lamarr, the Marx Brothers, Levi Strauss, Jack Benny, Sidney Kingsley, Clifford Odets, George Burns, Danny Kaye, Arthur Miller, Bernard Malamud, Ayn Rand, Philip Roth, Baruch Spinoza, Paddy Chayefsky, Joseph Heller, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Felix Frankfurter, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Edna Ferber, Arthur Rubinstein, Edward G. Robinson, Sid Caesar, Sigmund Freud, Jon Stewart, Phil Silvers, Al Jolson, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Joseph Mankiewicz, Jerome Kern, Bob Dylan, Haym Solomon, Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Weill, Harold Arlen, Benny Leonard, Hank Greenberg, Woody Allen, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Joel, Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifitz, Vladimir Horowitz, Billy Crystal, Milton Berle, Sholem Aleichem, Jerry Herman, Burt Bacharach, Albert and Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Ben Hecht, Tony Randall, Alan King, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Jerry Seinfeld, Oscar Levant, Sandy Koufax and the young Cleveland kids, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who gave birth to the mild-mannered Clark Kent and his alter ego, Superman.

Let’s face it, without the Jews, Americans would be stuck singing and humming commercial jingles and we’d be about as funny as the Swiss.

It’s not as if Arabs and Muslims haven’t also made their mark on the world. They did, after all, introduce clitorectomies, suicide bombings and an intolerance of good-natured spoofing not seen since the Salem witch hunts.