Dennis Prager looks with a sane eye at the insanity that has overtaken so many in this WND column (thanks to Nicolei).
If you love goodness and hate evil, this is a tough time to stay sane.Israel has killed Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas terror leader, and almost every nation in the world – and the nations' theoretical embodiment, the United Nations – have condemned Israel for doing so.
World leaders and the world organization have said almost nothing about Communist China's ongoing destruction of one of the world's oldest civilizations, Tibet. World leaders have said almost nothing about the Arab enslavement and genocide of non-Arab blacks in Sudan. But they convene world conferences to label Israel, one of the most humane and decent democracies on earth, a pariah.
In order to retain my sanity, I ask the reader's indulgence as I use this column to express personal thoughts.
I have contempt for "the world." I cherish and admire countless individuals, but I have contempt for "the world" and "world opinion." "The world" has never cared about evils inflicted on human beings. The communist genocides meant nothing to humanity. The Holocaust meant nothing. With almost no exception, the mass atrocities since World War II have likewise absorbed humanity less than the Olympics or the Miss World Contest.
I have contempt for the United Nations. It is one of the great obstacles to goodness and decency on this planet. Its moral record – outside of a few specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization – is almost entirely supportive of evil and condemnatory of good. It is dominated by the most morally backward governments in the world – those from the Arab and Muslim worlds, the communists during their heyday and African despots. It appointed Libya, a despotic, primitive state, to head its Human Rights Commission, whose members include China, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Neither the United States nor Israel sits on the Commission.
I regard the European Union with similar revulsion. With little opposition, Europe murdered nearly every Jewish man, woman and child in its midst, and a half-century later provides cover for those in the Middle East who seek to do to the Middle East's Jews exactly what the Nazis did to the European Jews. For the European Union to condemn Israel's killing of a Hamas leader – when Hamas' avowed aim is another Jewish genocide – is so loathsome as to board the incredible. For Germany and France (who, unlike America, have almost never shed blood for the liberty of others) to do everything they can to undermine America's attempt to liberate Iraq is similarly repugnant.
As for the international news media and journalists, I regard most of them as aides to evil. This is not new. The 1932 Pulitzer Prize – American journalism's highest award – was given to Walter Duranty of the New York Times for reporting from the Soviet Union. In his reports, Duranty repeatedly denied Stalin's forced starvation of Ukrainians that led to the murder of more than 6 million of them. The same "newspaper of record" deliberately toned down reporting on the Nazi annihilation of Jews 10 years later so as not to appear "too Jewish."
The Soviet decimation of Afghanistan was so little reported in the international media – especially radio and television – that when I talked about its scope and horror on my radio show in the 1980s, listeners kept wondering if I was telling the truth – they had never heard anything about it.
In the last years of the Saddam Hussein regime, according to John Burns of the New York Times, major news reporters refused to write stories about Iraqi mass murder and atrocities lest the Saddam regime remove their press credentials. For most journalists, and their newspapers and television stations, it was better to lie for Saddam and have a bureau in Baghdad than to tell the truth but have no Baghdad bureau.
And not one international news organization calls Hamas or any of the other Palestinian terror organizations "terrorists."
I love learning and revere the title of "professor," but with few exceptions, universities, too, merit contempt. The vast majority of professors who take positions on social issues are moral fools. They teach millions of students that America and Israel are villains and that the enemies of those decent societies are merely misunderstood victims who are often justified in their hatred. And they loathe the American Judeo-Christian value system that has made the United States the world's land of opportunity and beacon of liberty.
In sum, I feel that I am living in a world that is morally sick. Good is called bad, and bad is called "militant," "victimized," "misunderstood" and "the product of hopelessness," but rarely bad. Only those who fight the bad are called bad.
I am kept sane by the knowledge that there are hundreds of millions of individuals who can still tell the difference between good and evil; by the knowledge that there was never a time that humanity was particularly decent; and by a strong belief that a good God governs the universe even though He allows evil many triumphs. And I believe this God will judge Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac appropriately.
Well said Mr. Prager.
I used to listen to Dennis on KABC daily when I lived in California. I miss him.
The Worlds system is a septic tank that we have to swim in till Messiah comes and does some ecclesiastical cleansing. A little like ethnic cleansing but on a cosmic scale.
The UN is a political dinosaur anyway. Any decision it attempts can be vetoed by five nations, of which four are western countries which happened to be the most powerful after World War II. There is no representation for India, for Africa, for the Muslim world or for the entire Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world.
As for universities, the University I went to (Aberystwyth) had people of virtually every political hue. There were Welsh Nationalists, Zionists (like William Rubinstein) and various kinds of Socialists, and no doubt many others. Does Prager want only right-wing Zionists like himself to get jobs at universities?
Yusuf, I think you missed the point of Prager's article.
I think Yusuf Smith is playing the Celtic victimhoood card, so often seen by the Scots and the Welsh, on behalf of the poor misundestood muslims. I think it is a curious thing that it seems only the English in the UK are having multiculturalism foisted upon them.
Dear Mr. Prager: The sickness you've discussed so eloquently but not properly identified is a complete absence of respect for human life. Respect for human life does not exist in the Koran, you will notice. When the Arabs overran most of Asia, they took the Koran with them. 800 years of (barbaric) Islamic rule in India enabled the Koranic passages that legaliz mass murder, torture, slavery, and virtually every other horror known to humanity, to poison much of Asia and Africa and even Europe through a seeming cultural osmosis. You will note that Hitler had an alliance going with Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Yasir Arafat's uncle, during the 1930s, a muslim (known as Grand mufti' of Jerusalem) who at least partly authored 'The Final Solution.' The Arab world really began WW2 by inspiring Hitler to do the work of the koran (beginning by eliminating the world's Jewish people). A god that tells its worshippers to 'slay the infidels everywhere'(islam) exists in diametric opposition to a deity that commands of its followers 'Thou shalt not kill'(Judeo-Christianity). This is the center of the moral sickness you have so clearly identified but not really understood. One more thing: Islam at its core is a human sacrifice cult similar to the Aztecs'; all the horrors we witness throughout the Middle East and other muslim parts of the world stem mainly from this reality. Only by a correct understanding of it can we banish it from the earth and heal from its evilness.