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Oct. 11, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:17:53
Immoral Equivalence
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Dennis Prager here.
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Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Dennis Prager Show coming to you today from Nashville, Tennessee, where it seems to me vast numbers of my fellow Los Angelenos have moved.
If you want to visit with many of my friends from L.A., you come to Nashville, or as they say, Nashville.
I'm at the home of the Daily Wire, which is located here.
They moved from LA a few years ago.
I totally understand it, but I'm still in LA. Except when I'm in free states like Tennessee.
Welcome to the show.
One of the most important pieces on the moral state of the world today is in the great, great city journal.
A piece by a woman I wish I had been familiar with earlier.
I'll have to have her on.
Juliana or Juliana Geron Pilon.
Immoral equivalence.
Do you know that this has been the single most consistent, I think the most consistent message of my life, along with the consequences of secularism, and it has been the notion of moral equivalence.
I had this at Columbia when I was a graduate student, where Constantly, the United States and the Soviet Union were morally equated.
The Cold War was not between liberty and tyranny, according to vast numbers of intellectuals, which gives you an idea of how long ago the moral rot had begun in academia.
The battle was not between liberty and tyranny.
If you spoke that way, you were considered Oh, perhaps an American chauvinist.
No, that was not the battle.
The battle was between two superpowers, or as the imagery I always heard was, two scorpions in a bottle.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America.
And that was the world in which I lived.
It has not changed.
We are now witnessing it, as this writer points out, in the Middle East.
I'll read to you, for example, True to form, the mainstream media in the West covered the attacks with soulless rhetoric.
The New York Times, for example, refused to apply the word terrorists to the murderers.
By the way, she does not make the point, but it is worthy of being made.
The monsters who went into homes and shot the parents, in some cases the grandparents and the grandchildren, and the children of, in most cases, just the children, the grandparents may not have been present, but grandparents were murdered.
So they would murder entire families, point-blank range.
They're not terrorists.
But right-wingers in America, those January 6th people who entered the Capitol, that's domestic terrorism.
The left is morally bankrupt, but the tragedy is it spreads its moral blindness to the rest of the world, and people accept it because anything repeated enough is believed by many people.
So yes, we're filled with domestic terrorists, namely right-wingers.
But Hamas, they're militants.
Why didn't they just say militants?
Militants entered the Capitol on January 6th.
Unarmed, I might add.
Hurt nobody, I might add.
One of them got murdered or killed, depending on which verb you wish to use.
But nobody else.
But those are domestic terrorists.
It doesn't matter whether you agree with January 6th.
It matters what language you're using.
That's what I'm talking about.
The New York Times refused to apply the word terrorist to the murderers, even as images of the atrocities flooded social media.
The Washington Post, PBS, NPR, and Reuters all opted For the far milder militants.
Militant.
I don't even know what the word means.
Is a militant one who engages in military action?
Is it just a fierce individual?
You know what?
I think I'll do.
Live, I will define.
Let's see.
Define militant.
And the answer is, let's see.
Combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause.
That's it.
Now I know what Hamas is.
They're combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause.
The social cause is genocide.
They admit it.
They want to wipe out every Jew.
Militant.
I didn't even realize it was this.
How shall I put it?
Minimal.
Militant.
Oh my god.
But they wouldn't apply the word to the January 6th people.
They're not militants.
They're terrorists.
They're insurrectionists.
An antiseptic moral equivalence infuses mainstream media coverage in the West.
Reports routinely take pains to emphasize That there are victims on both sides.
See, I always point out, was this done in World War II? Well, you know, it's true Germany is running death camps, but look at all the Germans that are being killed in Dresden and elsewhere.
The reporting then had a greater moral clarity.
There are those who later went on to say that Dresden was completely immoral.
Okay, that's still not a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Nazis.
You can say that was not a tactic worth doing.
I do believe Hiroshima was morally defensible, given the fact that Japan had started the war.
And the way the Japanese treated the Chinese and the Filipinos and the Koreans and other Asians, they treated them, only the numbers differed, numbers are important, but they treated them in ways similar to the way the Nazis treated captive peoples.
They did medical experiments.
They had entire units of the Japanese army doing medical experiments on live Chinese people without anesthetic.
They would cut them open.
Cut them open.
And yet there are really, really, really, really foolish people who still believe people are basically good.
For those people, there is no amount of cruelty, sadism, and evil on earth that would change their minds.
One of the realizations I've come to in my long life is that most people, thank God not all, most people believe what they want to believe.
The age of reason spawned almost no commitment to reason.
That's an irony.
My view of the only achievable good on earth is a combination...
Of the God of the Bible and reason.
The God of the Bible without reason leads to fanaticism.
Reason without God leads to men give birth.
Here is hours after the invasion PBS's NewsHour announced in an unprecedented surprise attack.
The militant Hamas rulers of Gaza.
That's it.
They're combative on behalf of their political cause.
That's it.
That's what they are.
I guess Nazi militants would now be appropriate too.
If militant is the description of Hamas, militant should be the description of the Nazis in World War II. The rulers of Gaza sent dozens of fighters.
Fighters.
But they didn't fight anybody.
They only slaughtered people.
Even that isn't accurate.
There were no fights.
There was massacre.
It's like saying Timothy McVeigh fought in Oklahoma City.
He didn't fight.
He blew up a hundred, whatever, sixty, a hundred sixty, whatever the number is, people.
He was a militant too.
A fighter on behalf of his cause.
Well, one can say at least this with regard to the events of this past Saturday.
It is providing more moral clarity.
Black Lives Matter saluted Hamas.
When I've called Black Lives Matter a despicable, racist organization, I've been called a racist for doing so.
But I was morally right.
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So I'm talking to you about the clarifying moment.
This is such a clarifying moment.
Washington Post had a piece by a Palestinian-American professor and explaining, look, you know, of course what Hamas did is terrible, but you have to understand The way the Palestinians are treated, it makes it perfectly understandable that they would lash out and they would kill babies.
Who doesn't understand that?
It shows you how effective the anti-Israel lies have been over the course of the last half century.
Does anybody even know, let alone remember, that under Bill Clinton, Israel offered to give the Palestinians a state?
And Arafat not only rejected it, and Clinton, to his credit, said this is Arafat's fault.
We had a peace agreement.
Arafat blew it up.
Because the Palestinians don't want a separate state.
They want Israel destroyed and they want the whole state.
Hamas makes no bones about it.
Hezbollah makes no bones about it.
And Arafat went to Camp David.
But in fact, he didn't want a state.
Then you have to worry about collecting garbage and plumbing and electricity and all that stuff.
That's not romantic.
Blowing airplanes up.
Now you're talking, man.
That's exciting.
Not exciting to run a state.
They were offered a state.
They rejected it because it meant Israel would continue to exist.
That's it.
A gigantic world of lies.
Israel is not...
In control of any of these areas because it wants to be in control of these areas.
It's in control of these areas because if it's not, they will get slaughtered, just as I put in my video that went viral, and you should watch it.
It's called The Middle East at PragerU.
It's five minutes.
One side wants the other side dead.
And if Saturday did not make that clear to you, then truth is irrelevant to you.
Some Harvard alumni have been shaken up by the fact that...
How many organizations at Harvard?
Let's see.
I'll get that for you, too.
The very existence of all these organizations also was a sick part of...
Of left-wing residue in our Harvard anti-Israel declaration.
I guess that'll come up.
Let's see.
Harvard student group issued anti...
Let me see how many it is.
I know that.
I want you to get an idea of the number.
Let's see.
Well...
Alan, give me the number.
Alan's in New York.
I'm here in Nashville.
Let's see.
The CNN doesn't seem to give a number.
But it is a very large number of organizations at Harvard that did this.
And it has shaken up a lot of Harvard alumni.
You mean we're producing such moral scum at Harvard?
That more than a dozen Harvard student organizations have said it's Israel's fault and not Hamas?
Maybe it's a wake-up call.
Don't give a penny to wherever you graduated.
It is much better if you flush the money down a toilet.
If you flush money down a toilet, it's wasted.
But if you give money to a university, it harms the society.
That's the way it has come.
There are exceptions, obviously.
Almost not.
And don't tell me, well, I made sure to give it only to the engineering department.
God, that's a perfect example of a decision to be naive.
You think if you give money to the engineering department at Columbia University, it doesn't free up money to give to the gender studies department?
Oh, God.
The human condition's pathetic.
That is why I celebrate the United States.
Given the fact that human nature is so crappy, it is an amazing thing what America made.
The bad stuff in American history, and there is bad stuff, the bad stuff in American history is the residue of the fact that the human being is a very flawed creature.
What is amazing about America is not the bad stuff.
That was universal.
Slavery was universal.
What is amazing about America is the good stuff.
How many kids have ever heard that in their life, that one sentence?
The bad about America was not unique.
The good about America was unique.
Not a good way of understanding.
Not an accurate way of understanding life.
So this is a clarifying moment.
About the New York Times, about the Washington Post, about Harvard, about the Harvard issued a statement.
They condemned what happened, but they want people to understand that there's vibrant discussion at Harvard and so on.
Yeah, that's a vibrant discussion.
I agree.
By the way, they have the right to advocate cruelty.
All these pro-Palestinian groups.
Pro-Palestinian group means Israel is not worthy of existence group.
That's what it means.
You know what I spent a lot of time doing last night?
Reading the comments in the Washington Post.
Remember, you can't comment, at least at the New York Times.
I think it's at the Washington Post as well, unless you're a subscriber.
I'm going to read to you some of those comments so you will understand the convoluted world, not just of the left in this case, but of liberals.
Well-intentioned liberals, they don't think clearly.
They don't.
The left is evil, but liberals are just confused.
Profoundly intellectually and morally confused.
It's very sad.
I'll read to you some of their comments.
As we continue.
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Brett Stephens, who is the most pro-Israel columnist, one of the only ones at the New York Times, he wrote a piece about how the left is morally bankrupt with regard to what has just happened.
The title of his piece, what is the title?
The Anti-Israel Left.
Needs to take a hard look at itself.
So guess how many comments from, again, New York Times subscribers.
This is critical.
1,907 comments.
So I always click on Reader's Picks.
What are the most popular comments among the subscribers to the New York Times?
And you will have an idea.
These are not all leftists.
Many of them are liberals.
But whereas the left, leftism and liberalism have nothing in common, liberals don't know that.
That's the tragedy.
So listen to the comments.
I would like to read to you 1,000 of the 1,900 comments.
And you wouldn't get bored.
It is an insight into the mindset.
Of the college and graduate school educated liberal elite of the country.
They don't think clearly.
Here's the most popular comment of all.
3,207 subscribers to the New York Times recommend this comment.
It's the number one from Wide Awake.
Doesn't even say where.
They all have pseudonyms.
So apparently, not apparently, Brett Stephens criticized AOC. And so the writer writes as follows.
What would establish her bona fides for Stephens?
Calling for the bombing and invasion of Gaza?
Neither course is likely to end the cycle of bloodshed in the region.
So let me begin.
There's one more sentence for me to read to you, but let me begin with the cycle of bloodshed.
Was there a cycle of bloodshed in World War II? Of course there was.
The Allies did this to the Germans and the Japanese, and the Japanese did this to the Allies.
And then the Allies did this to the Japanese and the Germans, and the Germans and the Japanese did this to the Allies.
That was a cycle of violence.
But did anybody use the term?
No.
Because in the 1940s, there was a lot more moral clarity.
Same in the Korean War.
Was there a cycle of violence between the communists in Korea and the 30 or so nations that fought the communists?
Cycle of violence.
Okay.
The next sentence.
Only a political settlement establishing a Palestinian state can do that.
And Stephens is silent on that question.
Only a political settlement establishing a Palestinian state.
The average reader of the New York Times doesn't think clearly.
Lives in a make-believe world.
The Palestinians were offered on occasion after occasion.
We have a video up at PragerU on that.
All the times, I think it was six times, they rejected a Palestinian state.
But if you went to college, you're an ignoramus.
The odds are you're an ignoramus of anything important.
We have a nation of ignoramuses.
They're called liberals and leftists.
Every one of these rights, oh, political settlement, Palestinian state.
They don't want a Palestinian state.
They want Israel destroyed.
There would have been a Palestinian state from the beginning.
1948, there was a Palestinian state established by the UN, and they rejected it because the Jews got some sovereignty, just a tiny bit, half of what they have now, and that was too much.
Who knows this?
Watch that video.
It is so powerful.
It just documents all the times they were offered a Palestinian state.
The most popular commenter at the New York Times is an ignoramus, and most of the readers of the New York Times are also.
They live in a make-believe world.
Oh, just give Hamas and Fatah and the PLO. Just give them a state.
And by golly, it'll be like Canada and the United States.
Yeah.
And you know what else?
Men give birth.
We'll be back.
Hello, everybody.
The battle against the moral chaos of the left is profound.
Internationally, as should be obvious now, given the left's reactions to the massacres in Israel, and given the belief that men who say they're women should be allowed to compete in women's sports,
this young woman phenomena, phenomenon, I did phenomena thinking it was feminine, but phenomena is plural, not feminine.
Just explaining my error.
Riley Gaines, I had her on yesterday.
Quite an exceptional young woman.
Sort of person that gives you hope, as I think I do for many people.
It's not self-serving.
If I don't give hope to many people, it's a bad sign.
Well, she gives hope to me.
So all I ask you to do is know what she's doing.
That's it.
She's at the Leadership Institute, and it's at the Riley Gaines Center there.
And just, let's see, where do you go?
TeamRiley.org.
TeamRiley, R-I-L-E-Y.org.
Find out what she's doing, and then see how much you would like to get involved or not.
But please.
Just at least go to TeamRiley.org or text 30102. And let's see.
Text REAL to 30102. R-E-A-L. 30102. Or TeamRiley.org.
Dennis Prager here.
It's truly eye-opening to read the comments of New York Times readers.
With regard to what has happened.
So, let me get back to this.
Let's see here.
Okay, here we go.
Yep.
So, Bret Stephens had a piece about the left and Israel, and nearly 2,000 comments of New York Times readers.
So, I click on Reader's Picks, so I know what the most popular are.
I read to you the most popular.
Here's the third most popular.
The second, I'm only avoiding.
It's equally, it's so convoluted I didn't even bother with it.
So here's number three from, oddly enough, Amherst, Massachusetts.
Who'd have thunk?
Brett, I am part of the quote-unquote left.
And as Israel is the clear victim of this horrific terrorist attack, On ongoing action.
I don't know what that means.
I support its foundational premise as a sovereign state, along with the right to protect itself.
By the way, he or she spelled it's wrong.
I-T apostrophe S. Do you realize how many college graduates don't know the difference between it's and it's?
ITS and IT apostrophe S. Do you understand how pathetic our teaching is in our schools?
You should know the difference at least by seventh grade.
Now, I find it depressing.
This would not have happened 50, 100 years ago.
People wrote better.
They knew grammar.
I don't know what the hell they learned in elementary school and high school.
I really don't.
Preferred pronouns.
That's what they were.
Okay.
My support, however, is not blind and unequivocal.
Oh, very nice.
And taint, I do not taint other.
Other is in quotes.
I do not taint other.
And paint with a narrow black and white brush as seems to be your want.
That's your meaning, Bret Stephens.
Oh, there's no black and white here.
No.
I would like to ask Leslie of Amherst, the Times reader, was there black and white during World War II? Was there black and white during the Cold War?
Is there ever moral black and white?
Yes, I support Israel, but...
What does it mean to support?
It doesn't matter.
But if, in retaliation, Israel chooses to commit its own atrocities and slaughter innocents, then my support ends there.
So, again, my question.
Since the Allies did bomb innocents in Germany, would her support of the Allies against the Nazis have ended?
How much would I give to meet Leslie and ask this question?
The Allies slaughtered innocents in Germany.
Would you have stopped supporting World War II's battle against the Nazis?
What is Israel supposed to do for all those writers in the New York Times, the entire liberal, forget left, liberal world?
That thinks it's equivalent.
If Israel bombs Gaza, then innocents die.
How do you wager war against Hamas and no innocents die?
Can you please tell me how?
Believe me, I have no doubt Israel would love to do that.
They'd love to find out from the well-educated readers of the New York Times.
How exactly do you do that?
So, yes.
Let us support Israel with military and humanitarian aid, but let us also recommit ourselves to providing steadfast military and humanitarian support to Ukraine.
What does that have to do with this?
As well as providing vast amounts of humanitarian aid and diplomatic support to the innocents of the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and other disputed territories.
Oh, really?
So vast amounts of humanitarian and diplomatic support to the innocence of Gaza and the West Bank.
Golan Heights.
Golan Heights is now part of Israel.
Does she regards this?
I assume it's a she.
These are the liberal readers.
Oh, no.
I said she's part of the left.
Okay.
Wow.
If this doesn't provide moral clarity, what happened on Saturday about the left?
Nothing will.
Back in a moment.
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Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here, and I pretty much always tell you what I'm thinking.
And I'm thinking that I had an internal debate whether I do the male-female hour today or I continue on the earth-shattering evil that just took place this past weekend.
But I have devoted all the hours since then to it.
That is Monday and Tuesday.
And including the Ultimate Issues Hour, when I devoted the first hour to the subject.
So I am, in fact, having the Male-Female Hour, and only God knows whether it is the right call.
But I try not to interrupt the flow of the program.
The second hour of my show on Wednesdays is the Male-Female Hour, and with rare exceptions.
Like the day after an election, because elections are on Tuesdays, I do not cancel it.
Okay, so I've explained to you.
Maybe we need a respite for an hour in any event.
Well, respite is a very interesting term because I don't know, given the intensity of the subject that I'm about to raise, whether it's a respite.
It is a respite from the horrors.
But it is not a respite from difficult talk.
I think it's difficult, I may be wrong, but that's really part of the subject.
It came up, it's come up periodically on the Male Female Hour, but I never devoted an hour to it.
Because it's such a tender subject that nobody really, not only do couples often not discuss it, but even people talking about men and women don't talk about it.
And I often say, I believe that this hour is the most honest talk about men and women in the American media, so this will be an example.
Because all you do is get attacked for even raising the issue.
And I'll explain why you get attacked as well.
So, the question is, there are two issues.
One, let me lay the foundation, which even that you're not allowed to say any longer.
Because all uncomfortable truths are avoided.
That's what it is.
We don't talk about the uncomfortable, whether it's macro or micro, whether it's about men and women or something else.
So here goes.
In the human condition, women's looks are more important than men's looks.
It is not true among peacocks.
It is true among humans.
That's the way either God or nature built, you choose, built the human condition.
A woman physically attracts a man.
Thanks to that attraction, they will engage, hopefully when married, in intercourse and that will produce further members of the human race.
Women have the burden of the looks issue more than men do.
Okay, that's a fact.
It is not an anti, or it's not an anti-male.
Oh, they're superficial.
It's not anti-female.
Oh, you're just speaking about the physical worth of a woman.
That's absurd.
Who's speaking only about that?
But it matters.
And as I said, it matters more than in men.
That is why it is common for very beautiful women, or what the society regards as very beautiful, to be with wealthier men, not handsomer men.
When you're 18, a guy's looks is more important.
Than when you're 28 and for the rest of your life.
Unless he's truly a turn-off for whatever reason and such people exist.
It's personality, sense of humor, success, achievement, ambition, bearing, confidence, wealth.
Those are what make most men attractive.
Not their looks.
Now, women, if they just look good, for some men that is sufficient.
Most men want something in addition to looks, but the looks are important in women.
That's not my topic.
It's the preface to my topic.
And that is, given the importance of looks in a woman, Of physical attractiveness.
What does a husband do if the woman, not because she has gotten older, that is given, but for whatever reason, for example, has gained a serious amount of weight.
We're not talking about 10 pounds.
But has gained a serious amount of weight.
Can he...
Can he say that to her?
Honey, I'm a male.
It matters.
I wish it didn't.
I wish you would lose some weight.
Can he say that to his wife?
That's the subject of the male-female hour.
There was a Geico commercial that was brilliant.
I'm sure you could find it on the internet.
It's not played any longer, I assume, but I almost never watch TV, so I don't know.
But I remembered seeing it.
So it was about Abraham Lincoln, who was known as Honest Abe.
And he was.
He was known as Honest Abe, a guy who really told the truth.
So there's a scene, the commercial scene is his wife puts on a tight dress, and it's clear that she is overweight.
And she says, how do I look, Abe?
And the poor man basically breaks out into a sweat.
He can't lie because he's an honest guy.
On the other hand, he can't tell the truth because he's afraid to tell the truth to his wife.
So if you are a woman or if you are a man, and I believe that that's all that exists.
I don't believe there's non-binary.
So if you are a woman or a man, I'd be very interested to hear from you.
Have you dealt with this in your marriage?
Are you dealing with this in your marriage?
In either direction.
Have you dealt with it in the sense that, well, the husband has mentioned this?
Now you'll say, well, what about a wife telling the husband, honey, I wish you would lose some weight.
First of all, there's nothing...
It's not analogous.
It just isn't.
It's much easier for a wife to say to a husband, honey, I wish you would lose some weight, than vice versa.
It just is.
Most men will not be insulted, and they may well go on some regimen to lose some weight.
It's not...
Nearly as frightening for a woman to say, honey, I wish you'd lose some weight as it is for a man because looks are not as central to the being of a man.
That's why.
That's the proof.
So the idea that, well, it goes in both directions is not fully accurate.
An overweight guy who has...
A very large yacht is going to attract a beautiful woman.
That's just the way it is.
But an overweight woman with a beautiful yacht will have a harder time attracting men.
That's the way it works.
1-8 Prager 776 Male Female Hour Okay, this is the male-female hour, and it's a tough subject, and I already prefaced it with everything about the difference in importance and looks.
So, can a man say to his wife without incurring deep hurt or perhaps even anger, and if there's anything men don't want, it's their wife to be angry with them.
It's a fascinating aspect of marriage.
I actually did this on the air.
I asked some men, would you trade in half the amount of sex for a consistently happy wife?
if everyone said yes.
Now it doesn't even matter if you agree with any of this.
What matters is that it be talked about.
Fear governs discussions in America today.
That's not a good thing.
Certainly not if you're pursuing truth.
Anyway, women and looks is an extremely fraught subject.
And women frequently don't have a realistic View of themselves.
They're often more attractive than they think, as an example.
Okay, let's take your calls here.
Pam in Columbus, Ohio.
Thank you for calling.
Hi.
Hi, Dennis.
Hi there.
So my comment is, if we equate men making money with women's good looks, which is fine, It still leaves us with a problem.
Because men can continue to make money all the way into old age.
Women cannot.
It's absolutely impossible to get younger as you get older.
A man can get richer as he gets older.
A woman cannot get younger as she gets older.
That's impossible.
So to base your attraction to your wife only on her youth and beauty is impossible.
So any man who does that is completely fooling himself and is clearly not really able.
Okay, so I didn't want to interrupt you, but the notion that that's the only thing that matters to a man...
To any man for whom that's true, first he's a fool, and he's so superficial, he's not worthy of my conversation.
Number two, he's a fool not only because he might as well buy a Japanese doll, a sex doll, if that's all that matters to him, but also because it's not going to work in the long run.
A man whose only attraction to his wife is based on her looks is without question either going to leave her or have an affair.
But the number of men for whom that's true, I hope this comes as good news to you, but it's sad if it is news to you, is very small.
I don't know any such men.
The only reason I love my wife is because she's beautiful.
So, you were implying that that's what I'm implying, but I'm not.
To say that there's a big difference between that's the only thing that is important and it's not important.
Am I clear?
You are, but it seems like you emphasize a lot the whole physical attractiveness thing.
Which I understand.
Right.
No, no, no, no.
I emphasize it because it's true to life, but I don't emphasize it because it's the only thing.
I emphasize that men have to take care of families.
I don't emphasize that less.
I emphasize that men have to commit to a woman, that they have to be faithful.
But you hear this, and I understand it.
So it sounds like it's the gigantic subject.
And maybe it is a gigantic subject.
Now let me tell you the good news.
How old are you?
I'm 48. Can I make one more little comment about this?
Yeah, you can.
Just let me say one thing about that, okay?
Do you think that you are already at that point of the older woman whose looks are disappearing?
I definitely am, but it wouldn't matter because the style of what's beautiful keeps changing anyway.
Okay, well, the second point I don't happen to fully agree with.
It's pretty much been consistent all of my life.
If you look at the film stars, even before I was born...
They would be regarded as beautiful today, just as they were regarded as beautiful then.
But in any event, I just want you to know that I am not alone.
I don't know if I represent all men, but women in their 40s are stunning.
But you don't know that because one of the troubling...
Factors that makes this whole subject difficult is women don't know how attractive they are.
That is true even when they're 25, let alone 48. You don't know.
I mean, obviously I don't see you, but my suspicion is you have a husband?
Yep.
Do you think he thinks you're attractive?
Sometimes.
Like, what, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays?
How does it work?
Stay on with me.
This is too interesting, and I know you wanted to ask something, so fine.
All of this is done, dear listener, to help men and women have better relations.
Back in a moment.
Hi, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
And I am broadcasting from The Daily Wire, an organization that is having an immense impact for the good in America and the world.
And Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire is on with me.
So, Ben, thanks for coming on the show.
I have so many things to bounce off you.
I'm so curious to get your take on, but I'll begin with this.
Do you think, and I really don't know your answer, do you think that given the astounding moral clarity of the events of Saturday, of pure evil like we have not seen Almost ever since the Holocaust.
Do you think this will have an effect in the West on the perception of the Arab-Israeli dispute?
Long term, I think that it will have some, but not a full effect.
And I know that's sort of a wishy-washy answer.
But what I mean by that is that the burden of proof for years had been completely ignored with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
And the basic idea had been that we were going to ignore all of the moral atrocities perpetrated by the Palestinian Authority, by Hamas, by Islamic Jihad.
I mean, Dennis, you and I have been talking about this for literally decades.
For me, it's nearly my entire life.
I mean, it was obvious from the get-go exactly what Israel's supposed peace partners were, and the world ignored that in favor of pseudo-diplomacy that ended with dead Jews and dead Palestinian civilians because, again, Palestinian terrorists hide behind Palestinian civilians.
But I think that the effect of this is going to be that people will have more skepticism as they...
Should have had from the beginning about the intentions of many of these groups.
The reason I say it won't have a full effect is because I think that the natural tendency is going to snap back into place, which is to pretend that they are like us.
And what I mean by that is that Westerners have a peculiarly narcissistic view of the world in which we believe that everybody thinks the same way that we do.
And so when we see People launching suicide attacks or when we see people going into houses and murdering babies, we say to ourselves, well, you know, I might not do that, but if I were really pushed to the wall, what would I do?
It must be that I was pushed to the wall.
And they don't understand, Westerners, that people don't think like we do, that offering them economic inducements or suggesting that what they really want is a life of freedom.
That's not true for a very large swath of the planet.
Now, I'm not talking about everybody.
I'm not even talking about a broad majority.
But there's a large swath of the planet that really wants very, very different things.
And that is certainly true of Hamas and its acolytes.
It's true of the Palestinian Authority and its acolytes and Islamic Jihad and its acolytes.
And so I think that, you know, the amazing capacity for self-deception is going to kick back into place.
So is it going to fully switch over?
No.
Is it going to make the argument in favor of Israel stronger?
Obviously, yes.
So here's an example.
That was a great answer.
So here's an example.
BLM, Black Lives Matter, has come out full force in favor of defending Hamas here.
Will, forget the leftist, will the liberal who supports Black Lives Matter rethink it?
I think that they will just transmute their support for Black Lives Matter into another similarly named group with similar priorities.
It's easy enough to say I'm not going to give to Black Lives Matter, the organization.
But the next time there's an ugly video that comes out of a white police officer and a black victim, the first time that happens, there's going to be a snapback into place where people say, we're going to march in the street with a group of leaders who may not have said exactly what the current Black Lives Matter leadership has said, but have formed a new group.
And sure, they have some statements about Palestine, but is that really their top priority?
Again, what's astonishing to you and to me, Dennis, people who watch this on a granular level, is the supposed revelation that people are undergoing right now.
I don't understand why there's a revelation.
I mean, this was all in BLM's organizing documents.
We've been talking about this since 2014. When it comes to Hamas, we've been talking about this since 1987-88.
But the sort of revelations, as we know from the Bible, revelations tend not to stick.
It's long-term principle changing that sticks.
And I think that the brief moments of clarity, unfortunately, have to be followed up by long-term educational projects or people revert back to type.
So, you know, one of my hopes, and it's just a hope, I'm not confident, but I do hope, at least more than I would have last Friday.
For example, the number of, and you went to Harvard, so this might be interesting to get your reaction.
The number of alumni of Harvard who were just appalled.
And I don't know, 17 Harvard student groups that said it is entirely Israel's fault that Jewish babies and grandmothers were slaughtered.
And they're saying, wait a minute, 17 or whatever the number was, Harvard groups are saying this?
That's the college or the law school that I went to?
What do you think is happening there?
I think that there are a lot of alum who are shocked by it, but the question is what's going to placate them and how deep that shock is going to run.
And you and I remember 9-11, when it seemed like there would be a political realignment in the country, people would wake up to the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, for example, and that lasted for a couple of years, and then it sort of reverted back.
And I think that the first time there is a controversy on an American college campus about race or about transgenderism...
I think that a lot of these people are going to go right back to their old habits.
Call me cynical, but I have very little faith in the power of moral suasion for large groups of people who have ignored the truth that's right in front of them for a long time.
I'm not talking about everybody.
I'm thinking that if you take 100 people who are suddenly disabused of their notions that these are all allies of theirs, I would say 50 of those people maybe are changed for the better permanently.
I think 50 of those people, 30 of those people, You said you might be cynical, so let me feed your cynicism.
The first hour I read to my listeners, Comments on Bret Stephens' piece in the New York Times.
Bret Stephens, one of the only pro-Israel columnists at the New York Times.
And there were 2,000 comments.
And I always click on Reader's Pick because I want to see what are the most popular comments.
And every single one I read from number one, I guess through 10. I didn't get to 2,000.
But I did do the first 10, the most popular.
Well, of course, what Hamas did is horrible.
But if Israel responds with its atrocities, then what's the difference?
These are the New York Times readership.
Yeah, I mean, again, unsurprising.
Because they have a paradigm, and the world has to fit inside that paradigm, and the paradigm is what they've been trained to think.
I mean, the media have been training people to think this way for literally decades, that there is a cycle of violence, that there's a moral equivalence between Israel and her enemies, that when Hamas murders babies in their cribs and then runs back to Gaza with...
Women and children who they plan on raping or already have raped, and then they hide behind their own children to protect themselves or at least maximize civilian casualties when Israel kills them, then that's exactly the same as Israel actually attempting to protect its own citizens by killing terrorists.
These people have been trained for decades.
Again, the question to me is what it would take for people to wake up.
And at this point, I'm at the point of despair, meaning if you can't wake up from this, there is no waking you up.
Whatever is going to be in terms of people's changing minds is going to be from this.
But if you can't change your mind, if this doesn't shatter your paradigm about what Hamas is, what literally could?
I mean, as I pointed out and others have pointed out, Barry Weiss as well, you know, what we're watching right now is not just Nazi-esque.
It is worse than the Nazis in the sense that the Nazis tried to hide their crimes at the end of World War II, which required enormous amounts of research in order to recompile.
Hamas is just blasting it out online with celebratory music underneath.
And people are celebrating that in the streets in Sydney, in London, in Dearborn, Michigan.
And so if that doesn't wake you up, there is no awaking you.
So I'm going to ask you another big philosophical question.
You and I are Jews.
We're both religious Jews.
And we both went to yeshivas, Jewish religious schools.
Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that the greatest sin And religious Judaism is desecration of God's name.
So I've been wondering all of my life, watching so much evil coming from within the Muslim world, with, of course, the understanding there are many wonderful individual Muslims.
I'll stay for me.
I am amazed at the lack of shame in normative I'm going to take a break and have you respond.
I'm talking with Ben Shapiro, as it happens, I am at The Daily Wire here in Nashville.
I assume all of you are familiar with Daily Wire, but if you're not, please go to dailywire.com.
One of the greatest organizations on earth.
We'll be back in a moment.
Delighted to be speaking with Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire.
Yeah.
I'm at Daily Wire in Nashville.
Thank God for The Daily Wire.
That's all I can say.
So, I asked you a question that has bothered me really for...
All my adult life.
If Christians or Jews in the name, again, this is key, in the name, in the first case, in the name of Christ, the second, the name of God or the Torah, did what Muslims did in the Middle East with the beheading people,
the mass rape, or what they did this past Saturday in Israel, Christians and Jews I mean, one of the biggest problems, obviously, in the Muslim world is that high levels of tremendous Jew hatred are commonplace.
And to pretend otherwise is to ignore literally every piece of data we have about large swaths of the Muslim world.
And that is indoctrinated from childhood in many of the educational systems in multiple countries.
It's not every country and it's certainly not every Muslim.
But you're certainly correct that there's been a conspicuous lack of condemnation from the so-called Arab moderates who are outside of, say, the leadership in UAE or in Morocco.
If you're talking about the so-called Arab street or even if you're talking about the so-called moderate factions of, say, the Palestinian Authority, they're pretending Hamas didn't even do what Hamas just did.
Where are the giant Muslim protests of the size that you've seen in Sydney or Dearborn on behalf of the human rights of Israeli children who were just murdered?
I mean, they're non-existent.
And so there is this sort of soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to how the Muslim world responds to these sorts of atrocities.
Again, I wish that weren't the case.
I really, to my core, wish that that weren't the case.
But I'm just seeking data on the other side.
We constantly hear this truism that the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims hate this sort of thing, think that it's awful and that it's evil.
And if that's so, I would love to see more evidence of it because we all would like to be on the same side of this.
This doesn't seem like this should be a very hard one, and yet it clearly is.
I mean, by the way, the entire premise of this attack is that it's a hard one, meaning that the entire basis for Hamas' attack is that it was driven by Iran.
The reason that Iran drove this attack is because Iran desperately wants to put Saudi off of making a peace deal with Israel.
So you ask yourself, why is it that a devastating terror attack on Jewish children would put Saudi off from doing a peace deal with the attacked party, Israel?
And the answer is because the assumption is by both Hamas and Iran.
That the normal person in Saudi Arabia will put pressure on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to side with Hamas.
I mean, that's the core assumption of the entire activity here.
Yeah, plus I would assume that they're relying on the Israel counterattack to say, look, they're just as bad as any of these outliers in our Muslim world.
How can you make peace with them?
Right, I mean, that's obviously the propaganda play.
But the reality is obviously that everyone can see the propaganda play happening in real time.
I mean, the Saudi royal government was forced to, and I'm sure that Mohammed bin Salman is not particularly happy with having to do this, considering that he hates Hamas about as much as the Israelis hate Hamas.
He's at war with the Iranians, and Hamas is an Iranian-backed terror group.
But he was forced to proclaim solidarity with the Palestinians in the aftermath of a vast terror attack that worsens the Holocaust.
Why is Qatar not on the radar of people who loathe what Hamas did?
They are the biggest financiers of Hamas, and the head of Hamas lives in Qatar.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
When Qatar has spread its money...
I mean, Qatar has spent an enormous amount of money on American media.
They've spent an enormous amount of money at American universities.
And so they seem to have bought themselves an extraordinary level of, I would say, immunity from the examination of this entire thing.
I mean, if, again, after 9-11, when this was Israel's 9-11, and if you did it by proportion of population, much more of Israel's population was killed in this particular attack than...
Americans were killed on 9-11.
And I'm not a huge fan of doing that because a life is a life.
But just in sort of impact on society terms, after 9-11, the United States said to the Taliban, turn over Al-Qaeda or we will smash you.
And they didn't.
And we did.
And Qatar is literally hosting publicly the leaders of Hamas who are paying tributes to these attacks and calling, by the way, for more attacks on Jews around the world.
I mean, they suggested that on Friday there should be vast attacks on Jews by Hamas supporters literally anywhere they can find them.
And yet the world seems completely complacent about that.
There have been no demands that I've seen from the international community for Qatar to turn over the leadership of Hamas in any way.
Yeah.
That is quite something.
I didn't ask you, but by virtue of the fact that I'm saying I didn't ask you, I am asking you.
And I don't even expect...
I don't know what I expect.
I'm just curious.
Do you have any thoughts?
Why Israel was not aware of what they were planning?
Forgive me.
I'm going to actually, because I sort of care about you reacting to something I think.
I think that it is inevitable that a free society stops thinking about war over time.
Because they're too busy making a living, enjoying life, going to concerts.
So I actually think it is not that much more sophisticated than that.
What's your take?
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
I think that Israelis, because they focus on living and building, they basically accept it as a new normal, that Hamas is going to fire rockets once a year into Israel, and everybody's going to have to hide underground for a week.
And then they'll be able to come out and continue with their lives.
And Hamas was counting on exactly that.
There's an astonishing video that has now come out of a senior Hamas official talking explicitly about the idea that for the last two years, they have been essentially mimicking the role of a government.
They said we wanted to make the rest of the world think that we cared about the 2.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and that we were more interested in a pragmatic solution to the conflict or at least that we wanted to pragmatically govern.
But in the meantime, we were actually building up for this attack, and everybody was lulled into a false sense of security.
Israel prides itself on its robust military, on the notion that Israel's military is disproportionately powerful, which of course it is, and that the security wall, which had held since 2007, 2008, 2006, that that security wall provided at least enough protection along with Iron Dome that Israelis could be expected that that security wall provided at least enough protection along with Iron Dome that Israelis could And when societies go to sleep, this sort of thing happens.
And usually there's a very strong response, and then people go back to sleep again.
Thank you, my friend.
Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire.
And I return to...
Our issues, let me take some calls.
Okay, let's see here.
Stephen in Philadelphia, hello.
Dennis, how are you?
Well, better than the world.
I know, I know.
You know, I think some of the left just accepts a lot of this stuff as collateral damage in order to achieve their political...
And, you know, I would love for some DA in some state to charge Obama with something so that we can maybe seize his phone records, because I think he's intimately involved with this.
What is the this?
I'm sorry.
What is the this that he's intimately involved with?
With the attack on Israel.
You know, remember the Obama, the first Obama administration?
Wait, wait, I don't agree with you.
You think he helped plan the Hamas attack?
Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, of course not.
But what I'm saying is during the first Obama administration, the world was on fire.
And that was part of what I think is his grand strategy.
One of the things I think that he would like to see from this is a mass refugee crisis from the Gaza Strip.
And, of course, the left in this country will say, bring him on over.
Settle him here.
And that's one of the things that they were doing.
So this attack, whoever, they knew that Israel was going to respond ferociously.
Who is they?
Again, the American left.
You mean Iran?
Well, okay.
All right, all right.
So let me, okay.
Barack Obama did a lot of damage.
But you have to, one, you, anybody, has to be very careful in what he's charged with, because when we overcharge, we lose our credibility.
Barack Obama inherited a country that was, every poll shows this, for example, about how good black-white relations were and improving.
They deteriorated under him.
He is a very glib.
The speaker seems very charming, which he is, and did a lot of damage.
Anyway, look, he's the man who said, we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
And that's what they want to do, and they have been doing it.
it.
They have been fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
As I said from the beginning, that's why we have the actual audio.
I said from the beginning, I don't expect anything else from a leftist.
What was depressing to me was not that he said it.
It was that middle-class, decent Americans cheered.
You really want to fundamentally transform your country, our country?
Do you know what you just cheered for?
Are you that ignorant that you don't know how good it is in America compared to virtually every other place on Earth?
You really want to fundamentally transform this?
Why did you cheer?
What was so bad about America?
When Barack Obama was first running for president, in retrospect, doesn't it seem like it was a glorious time?
The human condition, my friends, is generally a pathetic one.
I can't believe God doesn't just check out seeing every generation repeat the same things.
Valiant Springs, California.
Susan, hello.
Hi, Dennis.
Valiant Springs, California.
I am upstate New York, and I saw a Newsmax last night.
I watched the Encore performance on Rob Schmidt, and at the end of the show, he had a professor in the business college there, and my father graduated from Cornell.
My mom was a nurse there, and my twin and I were born there just before he graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
And so I saw this.
My twin called and said, you've got to see this.
And so I tuned in, and he supported everything.
His name is Borders.
He supported absolutely everything the Palestinians have done.
Yeah.
Well, there's a piece in the Washington Post today by a professor, I forgot which university.
condemns the act, but Israel's at fault.
All I do, I must admit, I can't get them out of my mind, the parents who lost their children and grandchildren.
I mean, these people underwent the Holocaust.
That's the way we speak about the Jews who lost their family.
Their children, their grandchildren, or their parents, their grandparents, their children, their spouse.
That was the most Jews killed in a day since the Holocaust.
These are not insignificant statements.
Anyway, the banner of Helping Israel is up at DennisPrager.com.
I've been reading a few reactions of New York Times readers.
The unintelligence is actually scary.
I don't know what to tell you, my friends.
Apparently, you go to college, there's a good chance you won't think clearly.
Yep.
This is one of the ten most popular with 1,555 recommends.
All New York Times subscribers.
Yeah.
Some of us are capable of thinking for ourselves and arriving at a nuanced opinion, condemning Hamas while also understanding that they didn't come to being out of nowhere.
Well, as I said at the end of the last break, the Nazis didn't come out of nowhere either.
Yeah?
Who do we blame there?
Lenin didn't come out of nowhere.
Communists didn't.
Mao didn't come out of nowhere.
Murdered 60 million of his fellow Chinese.
What was that?
I'm sorry.
That was...
That's the case.
Who comes out of nowhere?
What evil comes out of nowhere?
Jeffrey Dahmer didn't come out of nowhere, presumably.
So all evil can be excused.
They didn't come out of nowhere.
And then he goes on to partially blame Netanyahu.
These are liberals, not just leftists.
Dennis Prager here.
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