Prager offers 4 explanations for Jew- hatred

 

By Caren Ford and Donald H. Harrison

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, California—Radio commentator and print media columnist Dennis Prager says Israel is isolated in world opinion because it is the “Jewish state.”

Prager, in an evening address Thursday, Oct. 30, sponsored by the Conejo Jewish Academy, offered four reasons why Jews and the Jewish state are hated with such passion.  These included: 1) jealousy of Jewish accomplishments; 2) the Left’s sponsorship of class warfare; 3) European feelings of guilt for the Holocaust, and 4) misunderstanding of the notion of Jewish chosenness.

Chabad Rabbi Moshe D. Bryski introduced Prager to a crowd thought to be half Jewish and half Christian that filled the ballroom of the Westlake Plaza Hotel. Prager responded with praise for Bryski’s work spreading Jewish knowledge.

Just the reverse of knowledge is being propagated by anti-Israel professors at such institutions as Harvard, Stanford and UCLA, said Prager.  They teach their students that Israel is an “apartheid state,” even though its Arab citizens can and do vote, and elect Arab members to the Knesset, which is Israel’s national Parliament.  To call such a system “apartheid,” he said, is not only to demean Israel, it is to diminish the experiences and bravery of black South Africans who suffered and finally overcame the oppressive system.

Prager noted that investor George Gilder in the book The Israel Test stated that Jews “excel in creativity, invention and wealth” and suggested that how people respond to such accomplishments is a test of what kind of people that they, and not the Jews, are.

“The great divide in the Middle East is not between Arab and Jew but between admiration of achievement along with the desire to replicate it and envy accompanied by violent resentment,” he quoted Gilder as writing.  People who pass this Israel test tend to be wealthy and peaceful, while people who resent Israel, tend to be poor and violent.

But envy alone does not explain all the people who hate the Jews.  The political Left, which counts among its numbers some Jews, doesn’t see the world in terms of good and evil, Prager averred.  Instead, “it thinks in terms of rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight.  There is always a division, but not divided by morality.  The rich are wrong, the poor are right.  Israel is rich, Israel is strong, (therefore) Israel is wrong, despite the fact that half of Israel isn’t white.  It doesn’t matter: Israel’s are considered white and Arabs are considered not white.”

Because it doesn’t involve whites versus blacks, that is why, according to Prager, “it doesn’t matter to the Left when blacks slaughter blacks.  It is a non-issue to the Left.  It is a non-issue when Arabs slaughter Arabs.”  However, when Gazans are killed by Israelis, who are responding to repeated rocket attacks, “it is a big issue” to the Left.

“Do you understand how sick the Left is – which is at best neutral and at worst pro-Gazan?” Prager asked his audience to applause.
Why is Europe in the forefront of the Israel haters?  Why does Sweden which recently recognized the Palestinian state consider itself morally superior—this country which sat out World War II as a neutral?

“There is nothing more embraced than the idea that the Jews are doing to the Palestinians what the Europeans did to the Jews,” Prager declared.  It doesn’t justify what Europeans did during the Holocaust, but it gives them some comfort to believe that the Jews are just as bad.”

Spreading the notion that Israel committed “genocide” in its war against the Hamas terrorists of Gaza, said Prager, “is the blood libel of the Middle East,” as great a calumny against the Jewish people as the European blood libel that accused Jews of killing Christian children to use their blood in their matzoh.

The notion of “chosenness” is the fourth reason for some Jew hatred.  Believing Christians understand and appreciate the concept, which is well articulated by God in Genesis 12:3:  “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.”

These words rankle Jew-haters, but why is it that China is not resented for believing it is the center of the earth, or Japan not resented for believing that it is where the sun rises?  The answer, suggested Prager, is that while the other claims are not taken seriously, Jew-haters fear the Jewish claim of chosenness just might be true.

He said the most blessed nation in the world is the United States of America, which has protected the Jews and allowed them to live in full freedom.  The most troubled region is the Arab world, which oppresses Jews.   “It is the most benighted part of the world and the most self-consuming.”

He warned, to applause, that “the day the U.S. abandons Israel is the day it sinks as a civilization.   It means its moral compass is broken, and no country survives forever without a moral compass.”

Prager said that the notion of chosenness does not mean that Jews are better than other people, or that all Jews are good.  Individually, Jews come with all tendencies, good and bad, stupid and smart.

However, Prager said, God has assigned to the Jewish people, as a whole, a unique role: to become an obsession, a focus, for the evil-doers in the world.  Jews, he said, are the miner’s canary in the world.  Just as a canary in a mine will die before miners are aware that a noxious gas is spreading, so too will Jews be attacked by evil-doers, before the rest of the world recognizes their evil.   Had the world cared about how the Nazis were treating the Jews, the persecution and murder could have been stopped and World War II, in which 100 million perished, could have been averted.

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Ford is a freelance reporter who is based in Agoura, California, and Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  They may be reached via editor@sdjewishworld.com