By Donald H. Harrison
LA JOLLA, California –Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Bret Stephens suggested in a public dialogue with radio commentator Dennis Prager at Congregation Beth El that Jews are appreciated in America, a country where success is admired, but are reviled in Europe and the Arab world, where success is envied.
Stephens, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and former editor of the Jerusalem Post, and Prager, whose Los Angeles-based radio talk show is syndicated around the nation, shared this and other thoughts during a two-hour long program Wednesday, January 21, sponsored by Charles Wax, Julian Josephson, John Howard and Dane Chapman. Among those listening attentively in an audience of nearly 800 was Pete Wilson, California’s former governor, U.S. senator and mayor of San Diego.
In his question to Stephens, Prager said he believes that there is Divine interest in how Jews are treated wherever they live, and later made reference to the passage in Genesis 12:3, in which God tells Abraham, “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.”
For his part, Stephens said he is not a religious Jew, but is a “proud Jew” and went on to draw an analogy between Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and the Jewish people. People can either admire Gates or envy him. “In America the admiration gene runs strong. We have an economic system where one man’s gain is another man’s or woman’s gain. A man getting rich means I can invest in his company and get rich with him… Jews for a variety of reasons happen to be a very successful cultural-ethnic group,” said Stephens, who like Prager is Jewish.
“There are other very successful cultural ethnic groups – Mormons for example—and there are many all over,” Stephens continued. “Jews, wherever they have gone, they have risen. Only in America, the Jews came to a place where that admiration gene was so entrenched—part of the DNA of our country, part of our economic system.”
In contrast, he essayed, Europeans and Arabs don’t admire Jewish success. They want to know “what are they doing, what’s the secret, what’s the Zionist conspiracy that connects them.” He added: “Envy is a powerful force in the world and Jews have been at the homicidal edge of the envy gene around the word.” He suggested that when Arabs see a people who came with nothing to the Middle East, and turned it into a land of milk and honey, cities and skyscrapers, nuclear missiles and tanks, they did not feel admiration, but outright envy.
While it is good that Israelis share the benefits of their knowledge—for example, bringing modern hospital equipment and aid to Haiti after its big earthquake, Stephens added, “Aristotle instructs us that no one hates a benefactor so much as a beneficiary.”
The dialogue between the two media personalities moved quickly, despite the fact that both being political conservatives, they had very little to disagree about. If they tried to outdo each other, it was in cheerfully plugging the other’s radio show, or book, Stephens having recently authored America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.
Prager and Stephens agreed that President Barack Obama has a particular dislike for Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu—whom House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday invited to address a Joint Session of Congress without first advising the President. Prager ascribed Obama’s animus for Netanyahu to the radio commentator’s maxim that “those who don’t fight evil hate those who do fight evil.”
Stephens said it is “not my business to psychoanalyze the President. What I do think is that in foreign policy people need to understand the value of friends.” He said Obama seems not to appreciate his country’s friends, and “this goes well beyond the relationship with Israel. When your friends don’t trust you, they will begin to freelance their foreign policy in ways that we might not like. And when your foes don’t respect you they will cross your lines with glee and abandon…. When your foes do not think that you will be seriously opposed to aggression, they will aggress.” He added that “the red line is crossed flagrantly in Syria; we do nothing. Six months later we have the Ukraine crisis. We’re negotiating with the Iranians and the Iranians clearly are not particularly concerned that they have to come to terms with the United States…. They sense this President is desperate for a deal, and that is a worrisome place for America to be.”
The Wall Street Journal columnist also commented on what he described as the political Left becoming “fellow travelers” with totalitarian governments such as Iran and Palestine. He said Iran “hangs gay people, stones women, abuses minorities, and you would think that people on the left would think that ‘this is the regime most antithetical to our core values.’ It is all well and good to be for gay rights here in San Diego—by all means – but what about gay rights in Palestine? The people who are marching to ‘free Palestine’ don’t have a word to say about the treatment of gays, or the treatment of religious minorities, or the quality of governance…”
Prager asked Stephens for his impression of President Obama saying in his State of the Union message that he will veto any bill that would impose more sanctions on Iran. The President had said that such sanctions would separate the American position from that of its Allies, and also prompt rather than retard Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.
Stephens said the sanctions proposed on a bipartisan basis by Senators Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey) and Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) “would only take effect in the event that negotiations fail to come to an agreement by this third deadline.” The deadline, he said “was supposed to be last June, was extended to November, and it has been extended to next June” so the suggestion that these are sanctions that would immediately take effect is “simply false and misleading and I think it is a betrayal of fellow Democrats.” He further opined that President Obama’s intention seems to be to “kick the can” down the road so that the situation with Iran will still be unresolved when his successor takes office, whoever he or she may be. Instead of leaving that successor with good options, said Stephens, the effect of Obama’s actions will be to leave him or her with a stark choice: either to acquiesce to Iran’s nuclear armament or to engage in a much larger military action than might be necessary today.
Asked if he thought Iran would use nuclear weapons, knowing that Israel also has them, Stephens responded that “the character of the Iranian regime is fundamentally different from the character of other regimes. Even North Korea, being an evil cult that it is – Socialism, or Communism, is not a death cult. There are no North Korean shahids… Iran is a regime that was capable of sending tens of thousands of young children through mine fields through the Iraq War as a way of clearing mines. A regime that is capable of doing that is capable of doing a lot.”
Prager next asked why some Jews often work against their own people’s interest, as he said was the case of Jews who reject the friendship of evangelical Christians. “How do you explain a portion of the Jewish people who are more preoccupied with evangelical views of salvation than existential threats to Israel?”
Stephens suggested that perhaps because they were exiled from politics for 2,000 years, Jews have not yet been able to separate what he described as two overlapping, yet separate, considerations: politics and ethics. Political choices are not between the virtuous and the evil, he said, but rather are often between two competing courses of action, either one of which may have bad consequences. For example, he said, Netanyahu’s choices are “if you invade Gaza and seize the city you will end Hamas but you will lose 150 soldiers, so the price of bringing an end to this terror will be 300 grieving Israeli parents.” Such a choice becomes complicated, said Stephens.
“The ethics that served us as a people in exile is not the ethics of politics,” he said.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. You may post your comment in the space provided below or send it directly to the author at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
Good article, Don. (As usual!) Interesting points.