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May 18, 2012
Dedicated lobbyist for Israel
JNF hosts author and radio personality Dennis Prager here.
BASYA LAYE
On Thursday, May 31, the Jewish National Fund in Vancouver will host author, syndicated conservative talk radio personality, columnist and pundit Dennis Prager for an evening to support the Arava Peace Route, a JNF project along the Israeli-Jordanian border. The topic of his lecture, Why Does the World Pay So Much Attention to Israel/Jewish State?, is bound to permit the well-known commentator to touch on many of the social and political issues that have concerned him since his days in yeshivah and then as a student at Brooklyn College and Columbia University.
In an interview with the Jewish Independent, Prager discussed his newest book, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (Broadside, 2012), and what he sees as the world’s enduring fixation on Israel and Jewish state.
“My preoccupation with good and evil [has been] since I was a child,” he said. “Otherwise, politics as such does not enthral me. That is why so much of [my] radio work, lecturing and writing is not about politics, but about happiness, religion, male-female issues, etc.”
The outspoken and sometimes controversial Prager has published several books, including Why the Jews: The Reason for Antisemitism, co-written with Joseph Telushkin, which was initially published in 1983 and then reissued in 2003.
The reasons for Jew-hatred he and Telushkin discussed in the 1983 book haven’t changed in the intervening years or, indeed, ever, said Prager. “Regarding the thesis of the book, nothing has changed – the Jewish people, in the words of a Roman Catholic scholar, ‘have carried the burden of God’ throughout history,” he said. “For those Jews and others who do not believe in God, there is another way to put this: great evil focuses first on the Jews. That has been true from ancient times to Hitler and Ahmadinejad.”
That the world seems particularly attuned to what’s going on in Israel and with Jews does not surprise Prager in the least.
“As the Passover Haggadah put it nearly two thousand years ago: ‘In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.’ There is ultimately no completely secular explanation for the centrality of the Jews, and now the Jewish state, in history,” he said.
Prager plans to offer some prescriptions in dealing with the phenomenon of untoward international focus on Israel in his May 31 lecture. To the Independent, he praised the effectiveness of the Israeli prime minister in getting the Jewish state’s message across.
“Binyamin Netanyahu defends and explains Israel better to Western audiences than any other living Israeli,” he said. “The last one to do this as effectively was the late foreign minister Abba Eban. He was on the left, and Netanyahu is on the right. The issue is, therefore, not a political one.
“The issue is that Israelis don’t generally know how to make their case effectively,” he continued. “During the intifada, I went to Israel to broadcast my radio show from there and to make a documentary, Israel in a Time of Terror – available on Amazon.com. In the documentary, I asked Israelis of every background why they don’t make the case for themselves. As incredible as it may sound, I learned that most Israelis don’t think they need to. They are so certain that the righteousness of their cause is obvious that they don’t think it is necessary to argue on its behalf.”
Israel in a Time of Terror is not Prager’s only film-based case for Israel. “I made a five-minute video, The Middle East Problem (at PragerUniversity.com) that has millions of hits,” he said. “I note this because it went viral in Israel, where at least 10 percent of all Israelis watched it. Why? Because few in Israel had ever seen the case for Israel made succinctly. It took an American Jew to do it.”
Criticism of Israel can sometimes blur the line between policy differences to full-fledged antisemitism, but Prager believes that the line can be navigated more easily by keeping one aspect of criticism in check. “No one in any position of media or political influence – and I mean no one – has ever called critics of Israeli policies antisemites. One is an antisemite when one seeks to delegitimize Israel or wishes to delegitimize Zionism – the two are the same,” he argued.
In his new book, Prager proposes that humanity today is confronted by a “monumental choice” about the future and lays out what he calls the “American Trinity” of essential principles that get to the heart of where that choice lies. The book also refers to the importance of exporting those values.
“There are three ideologies competing for humanity’s future,” he explained, “Leftism, Islamism and Americanism. The latter consists of what I call the ‘American Trinity’ – Liberty, In God We Trust and E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One), the three values found on every American coin and paper note.
“I explain these three ideologies in detail my book, and argue that only the American value system will make good societies. And, yes, those values are virtually universally applicable. Indeed, Canada under Prime Minister [Stephen] Harper comes quite close to applying these values to Canadian society.
“Liberty demands small government because the bigger the state, the less individual liberty there is. God is necessary because only if rights emanate from the Creator, are they inalienable. And E Pluribus Unum means that society makes people of every racial and ethnic background full members of the society – and that the society affirms a strong national identity. I want Canadians to feel strongly Canadian (unless Canadian merely means not-American).”
Prager has been known to refer to what many perceive to be a “culture war” going on in the United States and in the West, and the front line of that battle is described in Still the Best Hope.
That war “is essentially between Americanism and leftism,” he explained. “The latter has been the most dynamic religion (albeit a secular one) in the Western world since World War Two. Leftism values material equality more than liberty, seeks a secular society rather than a God-based one and aims to replace E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.”
Prager has a simple message for those JNF critics who may picket his Vancouver talk, as they have previous JNF and other Israel-related events: “‘You live in a free country, so If you are peaceful, welcome,’” he offered. “Having said that, I regard those who protest against Israel or the JNF and other supporters of Israel – one of the most humane, open and civilized countries on earth – as having broken moral compasses. The world is filled [with] barbarism, and they protest against Israel!”
In such a world, Prager said he admires Harper: “I say this just as much to American as to Canadian audiences,” he noted. He also holds in high esteem “the former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, Binyamin Netanyahu and, in the United States, Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Paul Ryan, Gov. Nikki Hayley, among quite a few others. If Mitt Romney is elected president,” he added, “he may turn out to be a great leader.”
A preference for “clarity over agreement” ties many of Prager’s opinions together. “‘Clarity over agreement’ is one of the mottoes of my national radio show in the U.S.,” he said. “I am much more interested in arriving at clarity regarding exactly where I differ with someone than in winning an argument with the person. This is as useful in personal life – for example, relations between a husband and wife – as it is regarding political or other issues.”
If Prager’s prolific schedule can afford any “down town,” he fills some of that time as a “part-time” maestro, and is partial, he said, to composers Joseph Haydn and Johann Sebastian Bach: “The former when I want to increase joy in my life; the latter when I want to feel closer to God,” he shared. He hopes, at some point, to write his autobiography, as well, “tentatively titled A Man, A Jew, An American. And, most of all, I want to publish my commentary on the Torah. I have taught the Torah my entire adult life, and my commentary is on about 200 CDs and downloadable (from my website). I am a non-Orthodox Jew who believes the Torah is from God.”
As for the event at which Prager will speak, the Arava Peace Route that is the focus of local JNF support in 2012 features scenic look-out points, which offer views of cultivated agricultural fields, the Edom mountains and the Arava streambed, reports the JNF-KKL website. A hike into the Lissan Marl Badlands is also available from the road. The route was named for the 1994 peace accord with Jordan that saw the agricultural areas cut off from Israel by the drawing of the border down the middle of the nahal ha’Arava (the Arava streambed). Those communities were retained by Israel in exchange for a land swap. The new route will feature enhanced access “to and from farmers’ fields, will improve security and will inspire tourists to explore the beautiful scenery of the area.”
An Evening with Dennis Prager happens on Thursday, May 31, 7:30 p.m., at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. A desert buffet follows Prager’s talk and attendees will have a chance to win a signed copy of one of his books. Advance tickets ($36) are available online at vancouver.jnf.ca, and tickets will also be available at the door ($40). For more information, call 604-257-5155 or e-mail [email protected].
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