The Middle East Problem Explained in Five Minutes

Dennis Prager's five-minute video sums up the conflict succinctly by saying, "it may be the hardest to solve, but it is the easiest to explain." 




What's interesting, listening to this brief presentation, is the news reports yesterday about the Supreme Court's ruling siding with the Obama administration about a Jerusalem passport dispute (see article linked at end of this post), as well as the disturbing kindergarten graduation ceremony at a school in the West Bank where little boys performed on stage wearing military uniforms and carrying weapons and singing a song about Palestine destroying Israel. Here's the video, with the transcript following:

Preschoolers with Toy Guns Parade in West Bank Kindergarten Ceremony 

Transcript: 

On the mountains, behind the hills, within the valleys – you will be defeated, you will be defeated. Whether you come by sea, or by air – you will be crushed, you will be crushed. If you stretch your hand, it will be chopped off. If you just look with your eye, it will be gouged out. The defeated army will be too terrified to come back. We come for you before, and woe betide you if we come back again. You come to this land alive, but you will leave it as body parts. On the mountains, behind the hills, within the valleys – you will be defeated, you will be defeated. Whether you come by land, by sea, or by air – you will be crushed, you will be crushed. 

On the mountains, behind the hills, within the valleys – you will be defeated, you will be defeated. Whether you come by land, by sea, or by air – you will be crushed, you will be crushed. If you stretch your hand, it will be chopped off. If you just look with your eye, it will be gouged out. The defeated army will be too terrified to come back. We come for you before, and woe betide you if we come back again. You come to this land alive, but you will leave it as body parts. 

According to the Middle East Media Research Center who reported on this story, "At a kindergarten graduation ceremony held at Anabta, in the West Bank, pre-schoolers wearing uniforms and carrying toy guns performed a song routine. A picture of Arafat is visible on stage. The kindergarten belongs to the Anabta women's charity association. The performance was broadcast on June 1 on Al-Sheraa TV, a local TV channel in the Tulkarm area. 

I find it helps to visualize, so here's a map of the general region, as well as a closer look at Israel with the West Bank.

Court Sides with President Over Congress in 'Jerusalem' Passport Dispute (Nina Totenberg, NPR, June 8, 2015).

Naiveté, Ignorance, and Idealism: A Dangerous Combination

Breitbart article (below) about Kayla Mueller who was abducted and killed by ISIS paints a different picture of this young woman than I previously understood. 

She seems to have been more in sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would put her at odds with much of what I believe about this conflict (short version: I do not view Israel as an "occupier"). 

A dangerous combination, naiveté, ignorance, and idealism. 

While I sorrow for her untimely death, and am angry at the slowness and passivity of the Obama administration in terms of responding to the evil that is Islamic State ("we missed rescuing her by this much..."), I'm also disappointed in the fact that this twenty-something literally died for a cause that I don't think she fully understood. Millennials in general, and leftists, in particular, don't tend to listen to both sides of an issue. 

Dennis Prager explains the Middle East problem in five minutes in the video below: 



Perhaps people like Kayla would be less likely to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon if they learned more about Israel's history. Nevertheless, I am sorry for this loss. Such a brave soul. I wish I had a fraction of her courage. 

Mueller Appears to Have Been Misled, by Joel B. Pollack

Recommended Reading: Books by Telushkin and Prager

Just finished reading two books on Jews and Judaism. The first, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews, is written by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. Published in 1992, this is one of countless books on Jewish humor (a simple Google search, "books on Jewish humor," generated 2.4 million results), not to mention Telushkin's own annotated bibliography (63 items). 

As one would expect, the book is sprinkled with very funny stories, so if you wanted to skim the book for humor alone, you wouldn't be disappointed. But Telushkin obviously has a point to make, as he says in his introductory comments ("Jewish humor reveals a great many truths about the Jews, but no one great truth"), so he takes the reader through various characteristics that typify the Jewish experience, chapter by chapter, illustrating but also commenting upon, so that the humor is almost an afterthought. The characteristics he focuses on in this book are family, logic, business ethics, materialism, self-deprecation, sex, antisemitism, assimilation, intermarriage, religion. The book is engaging, interesting, informative, well-documented, insightful, and, at times, laugh out loud funny. 

The other book I read, co-authored by Joseph Telushkin and radio personality Dennis Prager, is called Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism. Originally published in 1983, it was recently updated (2003) to reflect the current political climate, not only in the United States, but in the Middle East, as well. The thesis of the book is clear: Unlike other forms of bigotry, Jew hatred is "an inevitable consequence" of Jewishness, specifically, God, Torah, Israel, and Chosenness. The authors' stated purpose in writing this book is to counter the attempt by modern historians to "dejudaize" Jew hatred by lumping anti-Semitism together with racism of other types. 

Part One of the book provides an explanation for Jew hatred, focusing particularly on the role the Jews played in introducing what the authors refer to as "ethical monotheism," i.e., one God, one higher set of morals. From the very beginning, the Hebrew religion ran counter to the religious, cultural, and sexual mores of other groups: "By affirming what they [the Jews] considered to be the one and only God of all humankind, thereby implying illegitimacy to everyone else's gods, the Jews entered history--and have often been since--at war with other people's most cherished beliefs" (page 8).

Part Two traces the history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the ancient world (Greece and Rome), continuing into the 4th century and through the Middle Ages, Christian persecution of Jews (painful to read) which, the authors claim, laid the foundation for the Holocaust; Islamic anti-Semitism which continues to this day; secular anti-Semitism, i.e., the Enlightenment, in France, Germany, and England; Leftist anti-Semitism, beginning with Karl Marx, who was himself a descendant of a long line of rabbis but was a virulent anti-Semite, and continuing with the French socialists, communist, Soviet and leftist anti-Semitism, which, ironically is espoused even by Jews; and finally, Nazi anti-Semitism, which, of them all, is the only form of anti-Semitism that is actually race-based. All the other manifestations allowed for the conversion and/or assimilation of Jews, which brought an end to the persecution; Hitler, by contrast, believed you could "never take the Jew out of the Jew." Hence, the "Final Solution." After the Holocaust, although anti-Semitism went underground thanks to the efforts of many in the west to organize (Anti Defamation League, for example), it manifests itself today not as anti-Jew but as anti-Israel: "To hide their anti-Semitism, enemies of the Jews nearly always use the word 'Zionist' when they mean Jew," write the authors (page 157).

Part Three, "What is to be Done?", offers five solutions for dealing with anti-Semitism, only one of which, the authors concede, is realistic, which is for the Jews to do what they were always expected to do: "resume their original task of spreading ethical monotheism" (page 190), the very thing that elicits such hatred. The irony is not lost on the authors. 

I read this book once, marked it up aplenty, and hope to read it again. There is much to be learned, unlearned, and relearned. I am ignorant of world and religious history, a slow, methodical learner. But I intend to keep at it, page by page. 

Thinking a Second Time: Recommended Reading

Just finished this book by Dennis Prager, Think a Second Time, a collection of essays published in 1995. Though dated (wish he'd consider updating), it's still worth a look-see. I especially appreciated the selections in Part Three, dealing with questions related to good and evil, ethical monotheism, and belief in God after the Holocaust. 

A section in Part Two focuses on how idealists can be dangerous, and one chapter in particular was very good, "When Religion Makes People Cruel." Here he speaks to cruelty found in each of the major religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and summarizes by quoting the 18th century rabbi Elija ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer (the Gaon of Vilna), who said, "Religion is like rain: it brings forth both beautiful flowers and poisonous weeds."

The last section of the book is devoted in its entirety to the case of Baby Richard, the young boy who was adopted at birth by a loving family, but was later returned to his birth father at age four and a half when the Illinois Supreme Court, by a vote of 5 to 1 (the majority all men, the dissenter, a woman), overturned lower court decisions and decided that the adoption was illegal. 

The story is a tragedy on many levels, the most poignant being that the court did not order that the child be permitted to have continued interaction with his adoptive family. Prager is particularly incensed about the issue of blood (i.e., genetics) taking precedence over family bonds, the societal trend towards the rights of the birth father ("the inseminator") over the rights of the child. He reserves his strongest vitriol for the five judges whom he refers to as evil men,  justifying the use of the word "evil" by recalling Hannah Arendt's use of phrase, "the banality of evil," the sub-title of her book about Adolf Eichmann. As Prager sees it, the evil perpetrated by the Illinois justices was not a deliberate, malicious evil but rather a "combination of mediocrity, willful ignorance of the consequences of one's actions, and an overriding...belief, " in this case, the belief in the inviolability of blood.

Baby Richard, whose real name is Danny Warburton (Warburton is the name of his adoptive family), is now presumably in his early 20's. This would be another good reason to update Prager's book. At the time of writing, the story was big news, and though there was some attempt by the media to report that Danny was doing very well, was adjusting to his new family, was happy, etc., it's obvious (to me) that there's no way this could have been determined so soon. Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune was the journalist who covered the story at the time, and I don't know if he's done a follow-up story on the case. I see here that he's had some personal and professional issues in the last decade. 

I guess my next non-fiction book will be the text I've adopted for my fall English 50 class, The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition, by Thomas Cooley. If Prager would update Think a Second Time, I'd seriously consider adopting that as a text. Thinking a second time could do these millennials a bit of good.