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Oct. 26, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:19:23
Mass Murder in Maine
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Dennis Prager here.
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Hello, everybody.
I'm Dennis Prager, another mass murderer in the United States.
In Maine.
A man who's...
Is he still on the loose?
Is that the latest?
Mm-hmm.
They know who he is.
And murdered 18 people injured.
I don't like wounded.
Wounded is, you know, sounds too...
Mild.
22. Excuse me, 18.
It was originally I read 22.
A human being murdered 18 people randomly.
Are there any gun laws that would have stopped him I always ask that when people immediately go to guns.
They say he's mentally ill.
He was in a mental institution until recently.
I don't know what to tell you.
I hate that because I really like to tell you.
I like to explain life.
I like to give you theories that are plausible.
Is there some uptick in mental illness in this country?
If so, why?
Is it the processed food they're eating?
I doubt it.
And within mental illness, how many mentally ill people yearn to murder as many people as possible?
Do they know it's wrong?
Does mental illness preclude you from knowing that it is wrong?
If this guy, whom I would personally execute, if the call came out for volunteers to execute a person, I would volunteer.
I passionately, rationally, morally believe in capital punishment for murder.
A society that treats murderers gently is a society that has lost It's ability to be shocked by the worst crime, murder.
I just finished literally last night.
I finished the fourth of the five-book commentary on the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, my rational Bible.
Now it goes to editor after editor after editor so that there is not even a hope.
There's no hope, not even a chance, although that still is not perfect of any errors.
And there is a law that if you kill somebody, now obviously if you kill somebody premeditatedly, you're put to death.
It's the only law in all five books of the Bible.
But what does the Bible know, huh?
We're much wiser.
We keep all murderers alive and think we're moral giants for doing so.
I don't.
Anyway, if you killed somebody and it was any at all negligent, you went to a city of refuge.
So that would be a good example is the drunk driver.
Negligence wasn't deliberate.
It wasn't premeditated.
Didn't even know his victims or her victims.
But still, something terrible happened.
Innocent human beings were killed.
Stalin is supposedly the person who said...
One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
Everybody, one thing that I think unites left and right, and almost nothing unites left and right, is horror at this mass shooting.
But we have different reactions.
Guns.
is the primary reaction on the left.
I don't know why he did it.
It is obvious if he were mentally ill to the point of where we could relate to understanding the term, he wouldn't be fleeing.
It's an odd thing.
You're mentally ill enough to murder Men, women and children in a bowling, was it a bowling alley?
But you're not that mentally ill that you figure out how to, at least for days, evade the police.
So there's some degree of our choosing what mental illness is.
Gee, I don't know that murdering people is wrong, but I do know that I don't want to get caught.
Okay, then let's look, it's possible.
And again, I asked, why is there an uptick in mental illness?
I'll tell you what there is an uptick in, and I think it is related to the number of mass shootings, but it may not be.
I just offer this for conjecture.
This is a society that is embracing chaos.
So the mentally fragile in a chaotic society will act chaotically.
Did this man have any social bond?
Was he married?
Do you know?
Do we know?
There's no mention of a wife, right?
George Gilder, in a book that I've been actually advertising recently, what is the new title, Men in Marriage?
Yeah.
So I read it in high school, the original edition, Sexual Suicide and Naked Nomads, two different books.
And he pointed out, he said, the one thing that murderers virtually all have in common is that they're single, that they're male and they're single.
The largest percentage of men and women at age 40 who have never been married are living in America today.
The largest percentage ever recorded of never married.
Think that's a factor?
Think never church is a factor?
Or is it all mental illness?
People were not mentally ill.
In the 1930s and 40s?
You know that people were happier?
I read this to you.
The data, there was less suicide and less depression during the depression than today.
Because people had bonds.
There was no chaos reigning around them in their lives.
This chaos, the left creates chaos.
It loves it because their inner life and conscience are chaotic.
So, chaos breeds chaos.
That's my take.
Mental illness alone It doesn't do it for me.
Maybe it is.
I'd like to know if the man was on any medicines.
I'm not against psychiatric drugs.
I'm also less inclined to think that they have no ill effects than I once was.
Well, it's certainly not the ubiquity of guns.
Guns were available to Americans.
In the early part of the 20th century, and there was so little of this, my heart breaks for these people.
I know that many of you differ with me.
I believe God made a world in which randomness, or luck, if you will, does play a role.
I don't think God chose every one of those 18 to die.
If you don't believe there's any luck in life, that's your belief.
I respect you.
I find the belief untenable.
I believe there's an afterlife where things are worked out and some divine justice.
But as far as this life is concerned, those poor souls were, as they say, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We return.
1-8 Prager 776.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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Call on you, my friend.
Call on you.
All right, can you please play Mike Johnson, the newly elected Speaker of the House?
I call them the seven core principles of American conservatism, but let me concede to you all, I think it's really quintessentially the core principles of our nation.
I bowl them down to individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law.
Peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity.
Those are the foundations that made us the extraordinary nation that we are.
And you and I today are the stewards of those principles.
The things that have made us the freest, most powerful, most successful nation in the history of the world.
The things that have made us truly exceptional.
Yeah, so...
What's bad about that?
The left hates that.
Here are our principles.
All we need to do is live by them, and we'll have a reign of peace in America.
But they hate it.
This is the way the New York Times...
Attacks him.
New House Speaker Champions Fossil Fuels and Dismisses Climate Concerns.
That's the headline.
By the way, that alone means that he actually thinks and is not a left-wing robot.
Or in this case, even a liberal robot.
The robotic response is, take a vaccine.
Of course, why?
Why would you take it?
Because the CDC said so.
Why would you do X, Y, or Z with regard and have society spend trillions of dollars completely wasted on batteries and the like and funding China, which is the maker of so many of these car batteries, for the same reason you believed in the COVID vaccine?
You were told so.
Ah, science says I follow science.
That's what they believe.
So all the scientists who say, you know what, there's no reason to panic over global warming.
We may be getting warmer, but there's no reason to panic and change the entire economy of the world and crush people's livelihoods and make the dollar worthless or moving in the direction of it.
No, no, no.
I... I'm a liberal or a leftist, and I believe my government.
That's it.
I believe my government.
That is the motto of people on the left.
They don't know a damn thing about fossil fuels or about fracking.
They don't know a damn thing about nuclear power, which could solve the whole problem and proves that they don't want to solve the problem.
They want to restructure the Western world.
That's what the New York Times and the others are about.
Fundamentally, we're five days away from fundamentally transforming our country.
That's what Barack Obama said before he was elected.
It's a fascinating thing.
The left admits they want to fundamentally transform something that is fundamentally good.
Isn't that bad?
Isn't the fundamental transformation of something fundamentally good bad?
It's like two minuses equals a plus.
Representative Mike Johnson comes from Louisiana oil country and has said he does not believe burning fossil fuels is changing the climate.
I'd like to see the actual quote.
So rarely.
That's what they do to me all the time.
Dennis Prager says, but they never give a source.
It's a fascinating thing.
Almost never.
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the newly elected House Speaker, has questioned climate science.
No.
If anything, he has questioned climate scientists.
In the New York Times, if you question vaccine, the vaccine, or any vaccine, you are, what is the word they use?
Questioning science.
You can't question science.
Oh my God.
The thought of questioning science.
Opposed clean energy.
The language is opposing clean energy.
That's right.
Carbon dioxide is dirty.
And received more campaign contributions from oil and gas companies than from any other industry last year.
So, it's interesting.
That's what they say about PragerU, funded by oil companies.
I have no idea any oil company that has funded us.
A fracking organization.
Fracking is not the same thing as an oil company.
Fracking is a very much cleaner, if you want to use the term, way of extracting energy from the earth.
And the reason that they did fund us, I would say 2%, Of what we have raised comes from them.
But the New York Times and others just claim PragerU is funded by energy companies.
I would be very happy if they did.
It's true, but they never tell you what percentage of the money we've raised comes from them.
It's about 2%.
If we never got 10 cents from them, we would be the same PragerU.
We're very grateful for what was given at an early stage.
Please understand that.
But we existed before that, and we exist after that.
This is the way they write it.
As if the reason we have videos that offer a different way of looking at the energy issue is because we're funded.
But it's the opposite.
We're funded because we have the videos.
And because of other values.
Even as other Republican lawmakers increasingly accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is dangerously heaving the planet.
The unanimous election of Mr. Johnson on Wednesday suggests that his views may not be out of step with the rest of his party.
Well, it's one reason to vote Republican.
Indeed, surveys show that climate science has been politicized in the United States to an extent not experienced in most other countries.
Because we have a vibrant conservative movement in America.
The fact that they began closing farms in one of the most food-producing countries in the world, the Netherlands, is proof that this statement is right.
But that did energize the Dutch.
They did start fighting back.
We'll be back.
Want you to think about this?
We have a 100% volunteer military men and women who raise their hands to sacrifice for this country.
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Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here.
Come on, pretty baby, won't you want A very important book has just been published.
Buy a great imprint, Bombardier Books.
I know them well.
The Diversity Con.
What a great title.
The Secrets and Lies Behind the Shady DEI Industry.
Two authors, David Johnson and Kent Heckenlively, wrote it.
I have David Johnson on the line, and you can see him at Salem News Channel.
And the foreword was written by someone named Dennis Prager.
I have to check him out.
Heard good things about him.
I heard a lot of good things about Dennis Prager, too.
Yeah, but I want you to know there are a lot of bad things to be heard about Dennis Prager if you read the mainstream media.
Anyway, congratulations on the book.
When did it come out?
It came out about three weeks ago.
What prompted you to write it?
I was an engineer working with Hasbro, and in my time there, they brought all the engineers and some of the other departments into a meeting to tell us how they wanted to start designing the products, packaging, and marketing with critical race theory in mind and critical gender theory.
And it's something I'd been following through alternative media for a few years, but when they...
When that came to my place of work and they wanted me to participate in what I consider vile indoctrination, I just had to take a stand and I brought that story to Project Veritas.
And then that story went nationwide.
And following that, I decided that more people need to understand this ideology.
And the best way I could think to do that was to write a book and go in-depth on how this praxis is performed in companies and schools.
Did you end up going to one of these re-education sessions at your place of work?
Were you able to avoid it?
I was not.
I was fairly new at the time, and it was mandatory for me, so I did sit through the entire, about an hour-long presentation.
And then in the process of writing this book, I went through several more.
Several more?
Several.
I am an expert on DEI now.
So here is a...
A question I ponder a lot.
How many people at any random business sit through this and think, wow, she's right.
It's usually a she.
She's right.
So, hey, by the way, was it a she?
The presenters threw the original one.
It was a man and a woman, but the woman was leading it.
Right.
That's almost always the case.
But in any event, how many people, maybe it's not knowable, the answer, how many people at an average business think, I gotta sit here, but this is nonsense?
I would guess a fairly high percentage, obviously, depending on the...
I think most people just go along with it because, one, standing up against something that your company is promoting is a really good way to not work at that company anymore.
And a lot of people are probably seeing the social pressures from people who do stand up and think that they don't want any part of it.
So what did you do?
I did the exact opposite.
I've never been one to kind of go with the crowd.
And I just thought, even if I lost my job at Hasbro, which I did, that it was far more important to get this information to the public and especially to the parents that they were trying to subvert.
Now, where does the parents part come in?
Because this was not at a school that you got this DEI lecture.
No.
This was when I was working with Hasbro.
So their goal was to, through the packaging and marketing, to introduce racial ideology and gender ideology in a manner that the parents would not notice it, but it would influence the children.
And then as a result of influencing the children, it would also influence the parents in sort of a backwards manner.
But it was subversive.
And that's the part that I found the most troubling.
It's one thing if you were to go to parents and say, hey, we want your children to start thinking in terms of racial and gender lines.
We want them to start judging people based on race.
And if you go to someone and tell them that, they're probably going to reject you because most Americans are not racist people.
But to do it through the subversive and covert manner that is very...
Typical, and it is the intended...
Alright, hold on one second.
The book is The Diversity Con.
Really important, up at DennisPrager.com.
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Hello everybody, Dennis Prager here.
here.
Welcome to the show.
I want to take some calls.
They're They're still on because last hour produced interesting calls, so I'll get to you hopefully.
Brief note again about the mass murder in Maine.
The issue of guns has really for me one question.
And the question is, what law...
See, the left...
There's really only one thing other than destroying good institutions they're good at, and that is smearing their opponents.
They're really, really good.
So I think a lot of leftists believe that we care less about...
Innocents being murdered than they do.
It's an amazing thing, but they really believe that.
The belief, because they don't judge actions, they judge intentions, and they are convinced their intentions are pure.
That is how people supported communism in the West.
They judged the intentions of communism and not its mass murdering, mass enslavement action.
In real life, the left judges intentions.
It's part of its stupidity.
Communists mean well.
They're a world of equality, equity.
We're all comrade.
Comrade Stalin!
He's no higher than anybody else.
The fact that he led 20 to 40 million innocent people to death.
The fact that he made a pact with Hitler, which enabled World War II to take place.
Nobody even knows that.
I'll bet you that the number of seniors at Harvard who know that Hitler made a pact with Stalin is in single digits, including history majors.
They know nothing.
It doesn't matter what college.
They know a lot about, often, arcane matters.
but not about what matters.
So I would like to know, since I am very troubled by this, it breaks my heart, the people who were killed, murdered, I should not use the word killed, in the people who were killed, murdered, I should not use the word killed, in Maine, bad person.
There are sick, not bad people, there are sick, He should be executed, even if he's mentally ill.
There is an incredible law in the greatest books ever written, the Torah.
That is the solution to evil.
It's why I have spent decades working on my commentary.
I have one more volume to go.
Genesis is out.
Exodus is out.
Deuteronomy is out.
Numbers was finished last night.
And Leviticus is left.
That, thank you, that is the antidote to evil, the Torah.
It is the foundational document of both the Old and New Testaments.
So they have an interesting law there.
If God hates anything, it's murder.
It's fascinating.
After the flood destroys the world, God gives the Noah and his offspring a handful of laws to make a decent world.
One of them is that man, not God, will execute those who murder.
It is foundational.
If you are anti-capital punishment, You are stating, and certainly you're right to do so, I'm right, and the Bible's wrong.
Not only wrong in one verse, it has that law in all five books.
The only law in all five books of the Torah is to execute murderers.
So I was talking about what if this man is mentally ill?
Should he be executed?
My answer is yes.
First of all, it's an insult to the mentally ill.
To even hold, they don't know that murdering children is wrong.
They don't know this?
Really?
I'm very curious.
They don't know that?
I don't believe that.
He knows it enough to be fleeing the police.
Why does he think the police are chasing him because he did a good act?
He hears voices in his head, we have been told.
He might.
It doesn't matter.
And why did I cite the Torah?
It's an interesting law in the Torah that if an ox gores a man to death, obviously a woman as well, but if an ox gores a human to death, the ox is put down.
The ox is killed.
But it's not because the ox is punished.
And there are people who would say, why do you take it out if the ox doesn't know?
Like this man.
The ox and this man, I am told, are the same.
The ox doesn't know killing a human is wrong, and this man doesn't know killing a human is wrong.
And I believe that the law in the Torah, that you kill an ox that killed a person, is there to say, It is not relevant to the fact that a human was killed.
The most serious thing you can have is the taking of innocent life.
We don't believe that.
Misgendering provokes far more anger on parts of the left.
But that's why an ox is killed.
It took an innocent human life.
So, a mentally ill person who does this would be equivalent, in that sense, to an ox.
The ox doesn't know it's wrong.
He doesn't know it's wrong.
Sorry.
If you are at such a moral level that you don't know that murdering children is wrong, then you have lost the right to live.
Somehow or other, a monster is amongst us.
Would you not call someone who murders children a monster?
What would you call them?
Okay.
Well, we don't differ on the tragedy.
We differ on, I think, the seriousness, perhaps.
I don't know.
Certainly what to do to the person.
Anti-capital punishment is so weird.
The Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated years ago.
Israel doesn't have the death penalty except for Nazi mass murderers like Eichmann.
Well, not like Eichmann.
I think there were two cases that they executed, so on.
And they didn't execute the man who murdered the Prime Minister of Israel.
They even allowed him to get married in prison.
It's disgusting.
He certainly wasn't mentally ill.
He was morally ill.
That's a different story.
But it's not going to happen.
The defense will be...
By the way, why won't the defense be not guilty by reason of insanity?
Maybe the guy will murder 18 people and be found not guilty, right?
Doctor in Connecticut years ago, his home was invaded.
I did.
His wife and daughters were raped.
He was beaten, but he escaped.
The girls were tied up.
Doused with gasoline and the house was set on fire.
His family was sadistically murdered.
Why are the murderers alive?
Does that not bother even, if it doesn't bother an opponent of capital punishment, I mean, they may have other arguments, might execute the wrong person and so on.
But if it doesn't bother you that they're alive, the people who did this to this doctor's family, you and I have different hearts and different minds and different consciences.
It's a pretty big gap.
1-8 Prager 776. I'm Dennis Prager.
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Okay, let's see what you have to say here.
Okay, Columbus, Ohio.
They're trying to name it Indigenous Ohio, but still Columbus.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
Yeah, I have to disagree with you on this, because your analogy of the ox, Killing a human being.
The ox will remain in the barnyard after he's killed or gored a human being.
This person, this murderer in Maine, is on the run.
He knows what he's done is wrong, and he's on the run.
Where do we differ?
That was my whole point.
No, to those, no, no, okay, I understand.
Forgive me, and I'm not letting you go, so let me clarify.
If I wasn't clear, it's my fault.
My whole opening was, of course he knows it's wrong.
If you asked him, is it right to murder children, he wouldn't say, of course it's right.
And he's fleeing the police.
Is he fleeing the police in his mind because he did something good?
Because he was jaywalking?
So to those who say, however, that he's mentally ill, that's to whom I was addressing my comments.
He is then indistinguishable from the ox that gores a human.
And I said, the Torah says, that's the first five books of the Bible, if an ox gores a human and kills him, it's to be put to death.
So I used that analogy to say, even if he doesn't know what he did, like an ox doesn't, he should still be put to death.
That was my argument.
Okay.
Well, I agree on that.
I know.
That was clear.
I hope that he's put to death today by an officer or by an armed citizen defending himself.
I hope he doesn't commit suicide.
I hope he is put to death by a good guy, whether it's a sworn policeman or a citizen.
I'm with you, my friend.
100% with you, and I knew it as soon as you started talking.
I was addressing those who say, oh, he doesn't know what he did.
And then I said, yeah, but the Bible teaches an ox, which doesn't know what it did, is put to death.
So that was the analogy there.
I'm glad I took your call because if I was not clear to you, I was probably not clear to some others as well.
Okay, let's see here.
El Segundo, California, Mike.
Hello.
Hello, Dennis.
Thank you for your wonderful show.
We've seen over many, many of these mass murders and school shootings, even going back to the January 1989 shooting in Stockton, California by Patrick Purdy at Cleveland Elementary School, that the investigation determined that the mass murderers did the mass murder because they wanted to become famous.
They knew the news media would make them famous because the news media does that in their agenda to campaign and lobby to ban guns from law-abiding Americans.
And that's why some of these murderers use the AR-15 rifle, because they know if they use, say, a 12-gauge shotgun, which could do the same job, that they won't get as much news media coverage.
That's an interesting point.
I never thought of that.
You know what?
One minute, one minute.
Sean, will you visit Mike and El Segundo and give them a cigar?
Yeah.
All right.
You've earned it.
That was an original point.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the news media creates the problem or so-called crisis and then exploits the crisis because they never want to let a crisis go to waste to lobby for the genocidal, truly genocidal policies of gun control, which are actually modeled after Nazi Germany's three-step gun control program to first register the guns and then to...
Right.
All right.
Okay.
So, hold on.
Okay.
I wouldn't say they're genocidal.
The...
Australia is...
Ban them to a large extent.
They're not having genocide there.
It depends who's doing the banning.
I would say, however, that I have no trust in American authorities at this time.
My view of the institutions of my country has changed 180 degrees.
I have contempt for my government.
It is not my friend.
It is not decent.
It is filled with indecent people.
It is filled, if they're not indecent, with nothing bureaucrats who will do anything they're told, just as in a fascist or communist society.
It is bigger and bigger.
Big government is always destructive.
Always.
Does it do any good?
What government did not do any good?
Stalin electrified the Soviet Union.
Hitler built the Autobahn and the Volkswagen.
There's no such thing.
It's not possible to do no good.
I'm sure the Iranian regime has done some good in Iran.
I can't think of anything offhand, but it's almost impossible not to do any good if you have that much power.
Big government is a curse.
All genocides were created by big government except for the Hutus against the Tutsis.
Every single one.
And the left believes bigger and bigger government.
One of the reasons is it gives them power.
That's the biggest.
But there's another reason.
They have more people voting for them.
Right?
If you're a government bureaucrat, you're going to vote Republican, you may get fired.
Conservatives want to abolish the Department of Education.
Probably half the cabinet positions should be abolished.
Maybe a third.
Let's put it this way.
Education in America has only deteriorated since the Department of Education was created.
Everyone listening knows this to be true.
Even on a lie detector, the editors of the New York Times would acknowledge it's true, but they would have to be put on a lie detector.
Question.
Has American education deteriorated or improved since the Department of Education was created?
Okay?
If that is not a perfect illustration of big government only does harm, there is no...
persuading the unpersuadable.
Hello everybody, I'm Dennis Prager.
If you want to understand what's happening in the Middle East, I believe...
No, I don't believe.
I know that the best investment you could make is to simply watch the 10 or 15 videos.
20?
Really?
We're up to 20?
On the Middle East?
That's great.
Every one is a masterpiece.
And I mean it.
They're all five minutes, so it's not exactly a challenge to your time.
This is a really important thing that PragerU has done.
There's a gentleman on now who's made two of those videos, David Bragg.
David Bragg is the head.
I think you're not only the head, you're the founder.
Is that correct?
I would say Sheldon and Miri Adelson were the founders.
But they asked me to run it.
Okay, that's fair.
Yes, that's right.
Yes, you are the first and only director of it.
That's correct.
And the purpose of this group is it's generally directed to college students.
Is that correct?
Correct.
Just college campuses, just undergraduates.
And if you know, folks, what's happening on college campuses, it is sort of the opposite of when I was a kid.
It is now hostile to Jewish students, and it is very hostile, of course, to Israel.
those two are connected.
In other words, if you are pro Hamas, It is indistinguishable from having been pro-Nazi in the 30s and 40s of the 1900s.
And yet campuses are filled with such groups.
And he is trying to combat this with his group.
What is the official name?
The Maccabees?
Or is it longer than that?
The Maccabee Task Force.
Maccabee Task Force.
Okay.
Excellent.
What do you do?
Again, you send young people, including anti-Israel young people, to Israel.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Basically, our mission was to try to go in and combat the demonization and delegitimization of Israel on campus, which has been a problem for a couple of decades.
Although we saw in the last week just how deep and severe and horrific a problem that actually is.
So our mission was to go and change hearts and minds, and we tried through various means to do it.
The problem we found is that people who dominate campus politics on the woke left live in a silo where the social media they consume, the media they consume, the professors to whom they listen, all share a view of Israel, an anti-Israel narrative completely at odds with reality.
But one that motivates them to hate Israel.
And we tried to find an intervention that could reach into that ideological silo and get people to see the reality of Israel.
And the intervention we found that works is unfortunately a very expensive intervention.
It is to bring them to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and let them see it for themselves, the reality for themselves.
And it's the only way to get them to actually see the reality.
And the good news is the reality of Israel, even on a bad trip.
It's so much at odds with the anti-Israel narrative that dominates this silo that the trip changes those who go on it more than I ever would have expected.
And we only bring people who dominate campus politics, which means we only bring people from the center-left through the far-left.
Most of the people we bring express views that are anti-Israel skeptical, if not hostile to Israel before they go.
Almost all of them express sympathy upon their return.
Why do they go if they're anti-Israel?
Because it's a free trip to see an interesting region of the world, and we made this concession.
We show them both sides.
We spend our money to take them to the Palestinian Authority to hear the anti-Israel narrative once again.
They've heard it often on campus.
We take them to hear it once again from Palestinian leaders.
But it's important.
Because otherwise, the very people we most need to see the reality would not agree to go see the reality because they'd be afraid somehow they would only hear one side.
I should add, Dennis, this was a concession to reality.
But I find that day or two in the Palestinian Authority to be extraordinarily effective.
Because we need to shatter two myths when we bring students to Israel.
Myth number one, that Israel is a racist, apartheid country, you know, bent on dispossessing and harming Palestinians.
And that myth is shattered by seeing Israel walking down the streets of this multicultural, multiracial, open society and meeting Israelis who hunger for peace.
But we have to shatter a second myth, myth number two.
That the Palestinians are just a race of Martin Luther King Jr.'s, Ghandis, sitting and praying peacefully for the day when Israel will take their boot off of their neck.
And the visit to the PA opens their eyes to the fact that that is not the reality.
These Palestinian leaders will defend terror.
They will not condemn things like what happened in the massacre of two weeks ago.
And they will express often their views of Jews, not just Israelis, in a way that is very eye-opening for American students.
God, is that valuable, what you're doing.
Oh, my God.
So, this wasn't even in my mind, and it certainly wasn't in your mind.
Do people contribute, or how do you fund your work?
MacTaskForce.org, M-A-C. MaccabeeTaskForce.org, short for MaccabeeTaskForce.org.
We welcome donations.
We need donations.
When we are able to do our program on a campus, we invest a lot of money in a campus.
To do what we do costs $140,000 per campus.
We were on 100 campuses last year.
We try to go to the worst, the ones that are most prestigious.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Here's the first moment that I may differ with David Brog, ladies and gentlemen.
It is impossible to find the worst campus.
There are thousands tied for that title.
Fair point.
You're right.
It is a combination of prestige, which in itself can be a negative.
Uh-huh.
Well, yeah, that's right.
You went to a prestigious.
Where did you go again?
Princeton?
Princeton undergrad, Harvard for law.
Oh, my God.
So let me ask you in light of that to switch here.
It's incredible what you guys at Maccabee are doing.
Really.
It's so everything.
So, do you sense that alumni are getting disenchanted with the Princetons and Harvards of our country?
Or is this a passing phase?
Unclear.
I definitely sense that this is a moment when people are finally waking up.
To what you've been saying for years and I've been saying for years, that the woke left is a threat to everything we hold dear.
It's a threat to our ally Israel.
It's a threat to our freedoms as religious people in America.
It's a threat to the meritocracy that has enabled our success in America.
And I think a lot of people have nodded and listened and said, we are exaggerating.
It's not that bad.
When you see these same woke students...
Marching after a brutal massacre over 1,000 Israelis, and they're marching not in solidarity with the victims, but in support of the perpetrators.
A lot of people are waking up and saying, wow, this is more threatening, more dangerous, more ugly than we ever realized.
And they want to do something about it.
Will that last?
Will this be more than a passing phase?
I don't know, but I think a lot of it is in our hands.
If we can...
Take the anger and the ugliness of this moment and use it to mount persistent campaigns to make sure those who are upset by what they've seen this week stay in the game.
Don't give one more dime to these institutions that all of a sudden are in support of free speech.
They were never in support of free speech when you wanted to speak there.
They were never in support of free speech when our pro-Israel speakers wanted to speak there.
But now that students are speaking out in support of a massacre of Jews, Now they're in support of free speech.
Let the anger of this double standard, let the anger of this moral blindness encourage people not to give one more dime in that direction and instead give it to groups like the Maccabee Task Force or PragerU or people who are going to share the truth.
Yeah.
It's a real question whether there will be a prolonged memory on the part of these alumni.
I have said, David, For years to alumni, it doesn't matter almost what college.
It would, and I never exaggerate, so this is my belief, it would be better if you burned a million dollars than if you gave it to a university.
That's right, because at least that way it would do no harm.
Do no harm.
All right, when we return, I want to review this.
You have a video there that is as powerful as any we have ever put out, and that is the five times Palestinians were offered a state and rejected it.
I bet there aren't five students at your alma mater, Harvard, that know that.
We'll be back in a moment.
I'm speaking with David Bragg, the director of the Maccabee Task Force.
I'm Dennis Prager.
David Bragg, who is the executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, a special, special group, takes leaders on campuses who are anti-Israel to Israel, and he's made two videos that are special for PragerU.
So I welcome you back to the show, David.
Thank you, Dennis.
There you are.
Good.
You're welcome.
So, I don't know which is better, and it doesn't really matter.
But one of them is something people don't know.
The Palestinians were offered states five times and refused them.
Because of my video, that's why I say if you watch all the preview videos on the Middle East, you will truly understand everything going on.
One side wants the other side dead.
That was the first video we made on the Middle East.
I made it.
Needless to say, I make a small fraction of the videos of PragerU.
But I did do that one, and that was the thesis.
And that's the reason the Palestinians turned down states.
They're not interested in a state.
They're interested in destroying Israel.
Is that fair to say?
It is fair to say, Dennis, when it comes to their leadership.
There have been Palestinians over the decades who've wanted, much like the partners to the Abraham Accords, who've understood that the partnership with the Jews, living side by side in peace with the Jews, could be the path to a greater future of peace and prosperity for everyone.
Unfortunately, those leaders didn't last very long because the Palestinians had been controlled throughout their existence as a people, throughout their national existence.
They've only had three leaders.
And those three leaders have been rejectionists who don't recognize any Jewish rights in the land, don't recognize any Jewish claims to the land, and want all of the land for themselves.
That was, of course, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajime al-Husseini, the first leader of the Arabs of Palestine, who...
As you know, spent World War II in Berlin, sending Nazi propaganda out in Arabic and trying to convince the Nazi leaders in Berlin that once they're finished with Europe's Jews, they must take the final solution to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.
His successor was Yasser Arafat, an unrepentant terrorist who, even though he played along with peace, ultimately rejected peace and instead launched the Second Intifada to blow up, murder, and maim Israelis.
And his successor is Mahmoud Abbas, who refuses to acknowledge Jewish rights in the land, refuses to acknowledge the Jewish claim, and has turned down every offer of peace given to him.
Again, folks, there were five different occasions, and they're documented in our five-minute video, PragerU, which David Bragg gives.
It is so powerful, and it is so counter.
All of these people who say, The solution is a two-state solution.
Israel has offered a two-state solution throughout its history.
And when they do, they end up being murdered.
They lead like the Oslo Accords, which, by the way, David, you will now be disappointed in me.
I support it.
Dennis, I should make a confession to you.
I have family in Israel.
Named Braag, but one of them changed his name from Braag to Barak.
Ehud Barak is my cousin.
I deeply admire him for his service to the state, but he, of course, was a strong supporter and ultimately brought that peace process to its logical conclusion with the offer he made to Yasser Arafat at Camp David for everything the Palestinians said they wanted.
He was even willing to negotiate sovereignty on the Temple Mount.
And to give the Palestinians the Arab areas of Jerusalem.
And Arafat's response was not just a no.
It wasn't a no, but here's a counteroffer.
It was to launch a wave of suicide bombings that, until two weeks ago, was the worst murder of Jews in recent history.
Well, look, you're embarrassed by your cousin.
I'm embarrassed by me.
But I'll say this.
Until Barak, you know, and I give Barak credit for this.
If there was a belief that the Palestinians actually would settle for a state living in peace with Israel, and there was reason to believe it, and there was a lot of reason not to believe it, but I guess there's something in the human spirit that wants to believe the best.
If there was reason to believe it, he was the one who took that thesis to its logical conclusion and proved it was false.
And until he proved it was false, it was hard to know it was false.
Also, by the way, forgive me, but it's so interesting that Barak is the Hebraization of your name, Braag.
Although, he says the name was always Barak.
It was Europeanized to Braag.
He was just changing it back.
Oh, I'm sure.
But it shows you this man is the most decorated soldier in the history of Israel's army.
Wow.
He's seen the evil up close, but even he wanted to believe.
That these people wanted what we all wanted.
Yeah, that's what I believed.
And this is why that video we did together, The Five No's, is so powerful, because I think most people around the world believe if Israel would just take its boot off the Palestinian neck, give the Palestinians what the Jews themselves wanted in Israel, independence, control of their own destiny, money with their own leaders on it, their own flag, there would be peace for all.
And everyone believes it, even people close to this, like you and I, wanted to believe it.
But we now have definitive proof, sadly, to the contrary.
One side wants the other side dead.
That is as good a summary, and I hate to agree with it.
Yeah, that's right.
But it is the truth, and those who do not see it will continue to make excuses for it.
the most horrific Palestinian violence.
Now, I don't know if you've discussed this Harvard-Harris poll, Dennis.
It was, to me, the greatest of the blows of the last two weeks.
I know Hamas wants to murder Jews, and they had an opportunity to do it, and they did it.
I know campus radicals are going to march in support of that horrific massacre, but I'd like to believe that they were only 5%, 10%.
Harvard-Harris poll came out a couple of days ago that showed that, asked whether these this Palestinian atrocity is justified.
76% of Americans said no, it is not justified.
That's great.
America is still sane.
When you go into the demographics, however, you realize that those are mostly older Americans.
You look at the age group 18 to 24. 51% of them said that atrocity was justified.
Yeah, let's continue with that point.
young Americans in the Middle East.
Speaking with David Bragg, Executive Director of the Maccabee Task Force, they take anti-Israel leaders on campuses along with some Jews to Israel.
It's a gutsy, brilliant thing that he does.
You know, you mentioned that, and I brought it out of you, you did not volunteer this information, I want to say, on your behalf.
That you went to Princeton and Harvard.
So we'll go back to the Middle East in a moment.
I want to ask you a different question for just one moment.
Do you believe, and only answer what you believe.
You know what I'm leading to, but that's irrelevant.
What do you think?
Do you think that those names have the cachet today that they did throughout their history?
I guess it's hard for me to say objectively.
To me, they do not.
If anything, it's become a negative.
I listened to the Hillsdale plug earlier.
If I see a Hillsdale resume across my desk, I'm impressed.
Less so Princeton, Harvard, or the Ivies.
I don't know.
I wonder if to the average person out there, they still have the prestige they once had.
I suspect they do.
Well, I can tell you, I mean, I went to Columbia, but it doesn't have the cachet that Harvard and Princeton have, which doesn't mean anything to me, but it obviously has some cachet, because it is Ivy League.
Anyway, in my consciousness, it doesn't mean anything anymore.
And it will mean less in five years.
Because it is known that people are taken in for non-academic reasons.
So they're committing, in a sense, they're really committing suicide.
But that's what the left does.
It destroys what it touches, even if people in the building are their own.
It destroys great institutions.
And I suspect, like so many other things, the country will divide into two.
And maybe on the woke left, those names will still carry cachet and still be meaningful.
For those of us on the right of that divide, it's increasingly a negative.
Increasingly a negative.
That's certainly our hiring practice at PragerU.
So what you just said about the Maccabees is echoed.
David Bragg has made two videos for PragerU on the Middle East.
One is the five times Palestinians were offered a state and rejected it because their aim, this is not part of his video, but I'm just explaining, is to destroy Israel, not build a state.
It's very important that people understand that.
Your other video was truly brilliant.
What is it titled now?
What would you do if you were an Israeli leader?
Israel colon, what would you do?
And that, David, is the $64,000 question.
Say, oh, don't invade Gaza.
Okay?
What do you want Israel to do?
I never get an answer.
That's right.
That's right.
There is this rush.
To blame Israel for Israeli suffering, and to blame Israel for Palestinian suffering.
And no one is interested in who's ultimately to blame.
No one's interested in seeing Hamas as the author of the suffering on both sides.
So the goal of the video was to put someone in the shoes of the Prime Minister of Israel.
You've just been attacked, and this was when the attacks were missiles, before it got so up-close, personal, and horrific.
So what are you going to do when your enemy is not only an enemy that seeks to kill Israeli civilians, but it does so while hiding behind Palestinian civilians, the use of human shields?
Both are war crimes.
Targeting Israel civilians is a war crime.
Doing so from civilian areas in Gaza is a war crime.
And because they hide behind civilians, even the best effort...
To go after the guilty, to go after the terrorists and spare innocent civilians.
There are times when civilians are bound to get harmed.
What do you do in light of that knowledge?
What do you do in light of Hamas's use of human shields?
And you have three choices.
Choice number one, you do nothing.
You know, well played, Hamas.
You've used our own humanity against us because we so desperately don't want to harm civilians, and Israel desperately does not want to harm civilians.
And we know that you are hiding behind civilians, and if we go after you, we may hurt civilians.
We can't go after you.
Our hands are tied.
Let's just hunker down and pray you stop firing rockets on us.
You stop slaughtering us.
You stop dismembering us alive.
No government on God's green earth can choose that option.
A government's first obligation is to protect citizens.
That is not possible.
All right, hold it there.
We'll continue with David Bragg.
David Bragg has done two videos for PragerU on the Middle East.
Israel, what would you do?
I mean, they're so relevant.
All of our videos on the Middle East.
God, if they showed these at schools, wow.
You can dream every left-wing medium from the New York Times, the Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, PBS, you name it, and then the left-wing world.
Has attacked any state that has merely announced that schools can use PragerU videos.
Teachers won't be fired.
They don't even tell them to use them.
Just you can.
David Bragg has done these two.
The one on how often the Palestinians have refused to have a state when they could have.
And it's titled, Why Isn't There a Palestinian State?
That's a really important video, as is Israel.
What would you do, which might as well have been made yesterday?
That is how current it is.
What should Israel do?
Whenever I hear, David, all of these things, including the President of the United States, oh, don't go in.
I'm as ambivalent as anyone.
I don't know that it'll succeed.
I don't know.
But Israel can't do nothing.
Or should they do what other countries are doing?
Giving Hamas $100 million?
Oh, you raped all these young women at the festival?
Here's $100 million.
Oh, you burned these Jews alive?
Here's a lot of money for you.
It's a sick world.
There is this inability to understand who is the author of Palestinian suffering.
It is Hamas.
They have total control over Gaza.
Every time your humanitarian impulse leads you to want to aid the people, which would be great, people somehow forget that second part, that Hamas is in the way.
Hamas will use this to further the misery on both sides.
And there's something about the Western mindset that fails to grapple with and understand that reality.
That is to the detriment of everyone.
And that's why Israel has asked.
After suffering atrocity like this, you can respond, but you can't respond in a way that will harm civilians, even though Hamas has made it impossible to respond without harming civilians.
And you know who's to blame for that?
Hamas.
They wanted the violence in dead Jews, and now they want, and people can't understand this, Dennis, because it's so at odds with our humanitarian mind.
Hamas wants and relishes in the Palestinian dead.
Because they know that is a victory for them, the only victory they can hope to achieve.
Not a battlefield victory, a PR victory.
And they know the useless idiots in the West will view the Palestinian dead and not blame them, the ones who made it happen, but blame Israel for defending itself.
They know it, they rely on it, they use it, and anyone who plays into it is aiding and abetting that horror.
What can I say?
Truth is truth.
What is Israel supposed to do?
That's the question.
What would any country do?
What is the number that Israel suffered a proportionate to America, what was it, 40,000 dead in one day?
Isn't that right?
I've seen between 40 and 50,000 on a per capita basis.
How much?
Between 40 and 50,000.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, exactly.
Because...
There are 350 million Americans approximately, and there are 7 million Jews.
So that's 50 times.
So 50 times 1,000 is 50,000, and 50 times 12,000 is 72,000, or 62,000, I should say.
This was a horrific attack.
Israel, like any government on God's green earth, has an obligation to act to defend its people.
Throwing up their hands and saying Hamas uses human shields, I guess we can't do anything, is not an option.
There's another option on the table, though, which is what I would call the Russian option.
When Russia faced a rebellion out of Chechnya, they just went in and leveled the capital of Chechnya, Grozny.
Leveled it without regard for separating the guilty from the innocent.
Just leveled it.
Guess what?
The rebellion stopped.
What China is doing against the Uyghurs is putting them into camps.
There is that option where you fail to distinguish.
It's a way that puts your own people at a lot less risk.
It puts your soldiers at a lot less risk.
Israel has never done it.
Israel won't do it because Israel cares about humanity.
It cares about separating the wicked from the innocent.
And that leaves only one option on the table.
The option of going in and doing everything humanly possible to target the Hamas terrorists while sparing innocent civilians, even though Hamas will make that as hard.
Israel has always done that.
Israel will do it now.
And in the process, I should add, Dennis, it puts its own soldiers at greater risk.
It puts its own civilians at greater risk.
Because when you provide repeated warnings that you're going to a particular neighborhood or particular building, guess who hears those warnings?
Hamas.
And they prepare traps for Israel's soldiers, and they flee and take their arms to fight another day.
And at the end of the day, because Israel so much wants to save Palestinian lives, It puts Israeli lives at risk.
It does it because it's a humanitarian power.
Unfortunately, no one on the left in the United States will give Israel credit for making that effort and taking that risk.
They fall for the Hamas trap of seeing dead Palestinians and immediately blaming Israel for it.
That's another video, my friends, at PragerU.com on the Middle East.
Israel is the Israeli army is the most moral in the world, is the video.
It is delivered by a high-ranking officer in the British army, the head of all British troops in Afghanistan, that Israel is the most moral army in the world.
The inversion of truth here of, well, what else did the Palestinians have as a choice?
That it's an outdoor prison.
I like that.
They come up with these terms.
What choice do they have?
They have a choice.
Make peace with Israel.
They always forget cause and effect.
Palestinians did not resort to terror because Israel put a blockade around Gaza.
Israel put a blockade around Gaza because the Palestinians turned Gaza into a terrorist camp and were finally sent to Israel.
The same thing with the security barrier on the West Bank.
All right.
Listen.
Folks, please go to PragerU.com and watch his videos.
David Bragg, tell them your book, which I think is magnificent, too.
Thank you, Dennis.
Reclaiming Israel's History.
And I proudly have an endorsement from Dennis Prager.
And it basically tells the story of Israel's history.
It does, and it does it brilliantly.
Thank you, David Bragg.
thank you Dennis for all the light you shared let me go to your calls here And Brooklyn, New York.
And is it Raphael?
Is that correct?
Yes.
Raphael in English.
I'm sorry.
It's not clear.
What did you say about your name?
I'm sorry.
Well, in Hebrew it's Raphael, and in English it's Raphael.
So why would you like me to call you?
Raphael.
Okay, Raphael, go ahead.
All right.
I heard that you had mentioned that this suspect that did this mass shooting, that if he were mentally defective, you know, mental health issues and would not be therefore responsible for his crimes, you said that the total opinion on that would be that he would be killed anyway.
And you gave the analogy to the ox that also doesn't know what it's doing.
It's not responsible for that.
Right.
And an ox that kills a human is put to death.
It's a very interesting analogy, and it's thought-provoking, but I think as a representation of the Torah's opinion, it's not correct, in that it's very clear in the Talmud that...
Well, you just switched.
Excuse me.
If you're switching to the Talmud, you've changed the subject.
Somewhat, but...
You did.
No, no, no.
You said it's not fair to say the Torah.
And then you're citing the Talmud.
I love the Talmud.
It's not the Torah.
And the Talmud is divided on capital punishment.
The Torah is divided or the Talmud is divided on capital punishment?
The Talmud.
The Talmud believes in capital punishment?
Absolutely.
The Talmud says, as you know as well as I, if a court killed one person in 70 years, it was called a killer court.
That is called being anti-capital punishment.
But it's still true that it believes in capital punishment.
On the books.
But they did everything they could to make it impossible.
I don't understand what your call is about.
Do you disagree with my view that the Torah, since it puts an ox to death, even though it's not responsible for killing someone, that if I extrapolate...
I'm not saying the Torah would say this.
I'm saying I'm using a Torah principle.
To make a case.
Well, I could make a difference.
So you should have.
You shouldn't have gone to the Talmud.
Unfortunately, we don't have the time.
Listen, God bless you.
I wish we did have the time.
This happens a lot with callers, my friends.
Please, I beg of you, for your sake, talk about the subject that you told the screener you talk about.
If I'm addressing a certain book, don't bring in another book.
Anyway, send me an email because I'll happily read it.
I'll see you tomorrow, folks.
Dennis Prager here.
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