PRAGER: The Middle East Problem

Join Dennis Prager of Prager University as he gives a lucid and knowledgeable synopsis of the Middle East conflict. There is nobody today who knows how to simplify the arguments for Israel better than Prager. When there is so much noise that muddles the issue, he cuts right through it like swiss cheese.

Where Are the Moderate Muslims? PragerU

After every new Jihadist attack against the West, politicians reassure us that the atrocity does not represent the true nature of mainstream Islam. Of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, they constantly reassure us, the overwhelming majority are as law abiding as any members of any other monotheistic faith. Only a tiny fraction engage in terror. And Islam is a religion of peace. Furthermore, we are told, the great majority of Muslims hold moderate views. 

But what does that mean? How moderate are moderate Muslims? Given the threat of radical Islam, it would seem to be a fair question. Let me start to answer it by telling you something of my own story. 

I was raised in a middle class Muslim home in Cairo, Egypt. Growing up, I was told, among many other things, the following: That every day that passes on the Islamic nation without a caliphate is a sin. That the failures and miseries of the Muslim world started the moment we Muslims gave up conquests and wars against the infidels. That our prosperity depended on conquering new lands and converting new believers. That anyone who leaves the faith must die. And I also remember how my teachers and my mosque imams reacted to the news of 9/11 when it happened: joy.

My experience was typical, and there is data to prove it: According to the Pew Research Center, 88% of Muslims in Egypt, 62% in Pakistan, 86% in Jordan and 51% in Nigeria believe that any Muslim who choses to leave Islam should be put to death. Similar, if not identical, numbers are in favor of stoning people who commit adultery, severely punishing those who criticize Muhammad or Islam, and chopping off hands for theft.

All of these practices are a part of the penal code of Islamic law, which is known as Sharia. And 84% of Muslims in South Asia, 77% in Southeast Asia, 74% in the Middle East and North Africa and 64% in Sub-Saharan Africa support Sharia as the law of the land. Less drastic, yet significant, percentages are to be found even among Muslim communities in the West.

So, too, most of the world's Muslims believe that any acts of violence against Israel, including suicide bombers in buses and restaurants, are justified. Now, does any of this sound moderate to you? Yet if anyone raises these inconvenient truths here in the West, he is sure to be called an Islamophobe, a hater of Islam. Again, my own story is instructive. 

In February of 2015, I was yelled at, cursed at, and successfully prevented from speaking at Swarthmore College by students and others who did not agree to what I was saying. Some of them were Muslim women who fit the image of the unveiled, perfect English-speaking, moderate Muslim young woman. Other seeming “moderates” tried and failed to do the same during my speech at Temple University the next day. Some of them, sadly, were students of journalism.

For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/courses/polit...

PRAGERU: Why Isn't There a Palestinian State?

How many times have you heard that the only way to achieve peace in the Middle East is through a two-state solution?

Among most politicians, journalists, and academics, that’s a given.

But have you heard that Israel has already offered the Palestinians a state five times? And every time, the Palestinians have turned down the offer.

When were Israel’s five offers of peace? Why do the Palestinians keep saying no? And what can be done about it?

David Brog, author and Executive Director of the Maccabee Task Force, explains.

A Black South African on Israel and Apartheid

Is Israel an “apartheid state,” as its enemies claim? Who better to answer that charge than a Black South African who lived through apartheid? Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African parliament, fits that bill. He examines the evidence against Israel and draws a compelling conclusion.

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An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth Dennis Prager Matti Friedman

The Jewish State in a Morally Sick World D.PRAGER:

Let’s drop the names “Hamas” and “Israel” and make a list of the characteristics of two imaginary warring entities. We’ll call them Entity A and Entity B.

Entity A:

• Declares that its raison d’etre is to annihilate Entity B.
• Sends missiles to explode in the most populated parts of Entity B in order to kill as many civilians as possible.
• Uses families and individual civilians as human shields to protect its own leaders from attack.
• Tortures and kills domestic political opponents.
• Has no political or religious freedom and has no freedom of speech, press, or assembly, and no independent judiciary.
• Is a theocracy.
• Violently oppresses gays.
• Saturates its education and airwaves with a demonic hatred of Entity B.
• Rated a “6″ by Freedom House in its 2013 report on freedom in the world. Seven is the worst possible rating. Entity A ranks 6 in freedom, 6 in civil liberties and 6 political rights.

Entity B:

• Recognizes the right of Entity A to an independent existence.
• Has never begun a war with Entity A.
• Has never targeted civilians in Entity A. In fact, it has sacrificed soldiers in order to avoid killing Entity A civilians.
• Domestic political opponents — including even supporters of Entity A — not only have freedom of assembly, press and expression; they have political parties with representatives in Entity B’s parliament.
• Has freedom of the press, assembly, religion, and a completely independent judiciary.
• Allows gays full civil rights.
• Has innumerable human rights groups dedicated to the welfare of people belonging to Entity A.
• Has no education or broadcasts comparable to the daily hate in Entity A.
• Freedom House rating for 2014 is 1.5 in freedom (“1″ is best possible); 2 in civil liberties; 1 in political liberties.

So, then, with which entity does nearly every government in the world side? Entity A.

And what is the primary concern of the United Nations, nearly all the world’s media, and nearly all the world’s intellectuals? That Entity B, while hundreds of missiles are launched at its most populated cities, not kill any of the civilians among whom Entity A’s leaders hide.

The moral gulf between Israel, our Entity B, and Hamas, our Entity A, is as clear and as great as the one that existed between the Allies and Nazi Germany. It is one of the few instances in today’s world when the Nazi analogy is accurate.

It is clear that while free and democratic countries such as those in Western Europe value the freedoms of speech, assembly, and press for themselves, the absence of these freedoms among Israel’s enemies means nothing to the Europeans in morally assessing the Middle East conflict.

The news media, too, have no moral focus. They are preoccupied with Gazans who have died, and with the disparity between the number of Gazans killed and the number of Israelis killed — as if that is morally dispositive. Imagine that during World War II, the Western press had converged on German hospitals and apartment buildings and repeatedly announced the huge disparity between German civilian deaths and British civilian deaths. More than 10 times the number of German civilians were killed as were British — but did that have anything at all to do with the morality of the British war against Germany?

The big question, then, is why? Why is decent, free, democratic Israel not fully supported by decent countries against the genocidal Islamist regime of Gaza?

Is there any other example in history of a free state and a police state at war in which the free state was deemed morally equivalent to the police state, or, even more implausibly, deemed the aggressor? Last week, a New York Times editorial put the equivalence this way: “an atmosphere in which each side dehumanizes the other.”

Here, then, are some reasons:

• The West has lost its way. Europe gave up on its values after World War I. And the American left, which dominates the media, gave up on America’s distinctive values after the Vietnam War.
• Unlike during World War II, there is a United Nations today, and it is dominated by over 50 Islamic countries, their dozens of allies, and a Security Council on which sit Russia and China as permanent members.
• The current American president is a product of the postwar leftist morality. Wherever the left is in power, Israel is unpopular at best and loathed at worst. Thus, Israel’s best friend today is the conservative government of Canada.
• The world’s news media relentlessly show images of wounded and dead Gazans. Israel, on the other hand, though the target of mass-killing missiles, has thus far been able to avoid such casualties.
• Israel is Jewish.

If there are more valid reasons for why the world equates Israel and its morally primitive enemies — or actually deems Israel the villain — I have yet to hear them.

Civil trial attorney Baruch C. Cohen meets Dennis Prager at the Prager University fundraiser in Brentwood, CA

Dennis Prager is an American nationally syndicated radio talk show host, syndicated columnist, author, and public speaker. He is noted for his conservative political and social views grounded in "Judeo-Christian" values.

How the New York Times Covers Evil by Dennis Prager

The way in which the New York Times reports good vs. evil is one of the most important stories of our time.

Take the war between Israel and Hamas that is taking place right now.

This war is as morally clear as wars get. Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty and no freedom of speech or press. In a nutshell, Hamas is a violent, fascist organization.

Israel, meanwhile, is one the world's most humane states, not to mention a democracy that is so tolerant that Arab members of its parliament are free to express admiration for Hamas.

Over the past decade, Hamas had launched thousands of rockets into Israel with one aim: to kill and maim as many Israeli citizens as possible -- Israelis at work, at play, asleep in their homes, in their cars. Finally, Israel responded by killing Ahmed al-Jabari, the chief organizer of Hamas violence, the Hamas "military commander" as he was known among Palestinians.

The next day, three more Israelis were killed by rockets.

Then Hamas targeted Tel Aviv, Israel's most densely populated region, and Israel shelled Hamas rocket launching sites.

In other words, an evil entity made war on a peaceful, decent entity, and the latter responded.

How has the New York Times reported this?

On Friday, on its front page, the Times featured two three-column wide photos. The top one was of Gaza Muslim mourners alongside the dead body of al-Jabari. The photo below was of Israeli Jews mourning alongside the dead body of Mira Scharf, a 27-year-old mother of three.

What possible reason could there be for the New York Times to give identical space to these two pictures? One of the dead, after all, was a murderer, and the other was one of his victims.

The most plausible reason is that the Times wanted to depict through pictures a sort of moral equivalence: Look, sophisticated Times readers, virtually identical scenes of death and mourning on both sides of the conflict. How tragic.

If one had no idea what had triggered this war, one would read and see the Times coverage and conclude that two sides killing each other were both equally at fault.

This is the mainstream (i.e., liberal) media's approach. The Los Angeles Times headline on the same day was: "Israel and Gaza veering down familiar, bitter path,"

Same presentation: two scorpions fighting in a bottle.

Examples are endless. Here is one more:

In 2002, there was widespread Nigerian Muslim opposition to the Miss World pageant scheduled to take place that year in Nigeria. Defending the pageant, a Nigerian female reporter wrote a column in which she said that not only were the contestants not "whores," as alleged by the Muslim protestors, but they were such fine women that "Muhammad would probably have taken one of the contestants for a wife."

That one sentence led to Muslim rioting, the beating and killing of Christians, the burning of churches and the razing of her newspaper's offices.

How did the New York Times report the events?

"Fiery Zealotry Leaves Nigeria in Ashes Again."

No group is identified as responsible. "Fiery zealotry," not Muslim violence, was responsible.

The article then begins: "The beauty queens are gone now, chased from Nigeria by the chaos in Kaduna."

Again, Muslim rioters weren't responsible for chasing the beauty queens out of Nigeria; it was "chaos."

The article concludes that what happened in Kaduna was another example of Africa's "difficulty in reconciling people who worship separately." In other words, Christians and Muslims were equally guilty.

As the flagship news source of the left, the New York Times reveals the great moral failing inherent to leftism -- its combination of moral relativism and the division of the world between strong and weak, Western and non-Western, and rich and poor, rather than between good and evil.

Is Israel an Apartheid State? Get the definitive answer. by Dennis Prager

Is Israel an Apartheid State? Get the definitive answer. by Dennis Prager

Can We Celebrate the Death of Evil People? BY DENNIS PRAGER

We live in a time very different from any in the past. As a rule, little changes in basic human responses. For example, it is probably fair to say that throughout human history, just about all decent people have celebrated the death of those human beings understood to be truly evil. It takes a lot to change such basic human reactions. But over the last generation, a major attempt to do so has been made. And it has somewhat succeeded. Osama bin Laden, a man whose purpose in life was to inflict death and suffering on as many innocent people as possible — the more innocent his victims, the greater his achievement — was finally killed, and much of the Western world’s religious and secular elite has expressed moral annoyance with those who celebrated this death. The argument is that no person’s death should be celebrated. Therefore celebrations of bin Laden’s death are morally questionable. Pastor Brian McLaren, named one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America” in 2005, expressed this view. Reacting to television images of young Americans chanting “USA! USA!” on the night bin Laden’s death was announced, the pastor wrote, “I can only say that this image does not reflect well on my country. … Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?” Another example: CNN reported the reaction of an Episcopal priest, Danielle Tumminio, whose Long Island neighborhood lost scores of people in the 9/11 attacks. When she saw images of Americans celebrating, “My first reaction was, ‘I wish I was with them.’ … My second reaction was, ‘This is disgusting. We shouldn’t be celebrating the death of anybody.’ It felt gross.” Likewise many Jews, including rabbis, have cited traditional — though sometimes seemingly conflicting — Jewish attitudes regarding the death of evildoers. One frequently cited source is a famous talmudic one: “When the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds, the angels wanted to sing. But God said to them, ‘The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing?’ ” Also noted is that at the Passover seder, Jews for centuries have taken drops from their cups of wine as they enumerated the Ten Plagues suffered by Egyptians. The Jews’ joy shall not be unalloyed. And the biblical Book of Proverbs states, “When your enemy falls, do not rejoice, and when he stumbles, let your heart not exult, lest the Lord see and be displeased, and turn His wrath away from him.” On the other hand, the Talmud also states, “When the wicked perish from the world, good comes to the world.” And the Book of Proverbs states, “When the wicked perish, there is joyful song.” So what is one to make of this mixture of sentiments? I do not see them as contradictory. God may chastise angels for singing at the drowning of the Egyptian army. But God does not chastise Moses and the Children of Israel for singing at the Egyptians’ drowning. People may do so; angels may not. Secondly, it is one thing to celebrate the fall of one’s personal enemy; it is quite another to celebrate the fall of evil individuals. The two Proverbs citations are not contradictory. The vast majority of our personal enemies are not evil people. Therefore we should not exult at their downfall. And the vast majority of the truly evil are not our personal enemies. Bin Laden was not my personal enemy. He was the enemy of all that is good on earth. It seems to me that if one does not celebrate the death of a truly evil person, one is not celebrating the triumph of good over evil. I do not see how one can honestly say, “I am thrilled that bin Laden can no longer murder men, women and children, but I do not celebrate his death.” Yes, I know one can argue that bin Laden’s arrest and life imprisonment would have also prevented his murdering anyone else. Indeed, anyone opposed to capital punishment would have to prefer that bin Laden had been captured and tried. But no one could argue that a dead bin Laden is less likely to provoke further terror than a living bin Laden. Celebrating the death of bin Laden is a moral imperative. The notion that Islamists who celebrated 9/11 are morally equivalent to Americans who celebrated bin Laden’s death is the product of a morally confused mind. It places the killing of 3,000 innocents on the same moral plane as the killing of the person responsible for those murders. The British historian Andrew Roberts, whose history of World War II was published last week, has summed up the situation well: “My countrymen’s reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden have made me doubt my pride in being British. The foul outpouring of sneering anti-Americanism, legalistic quibbling, and concern for the supposed human rights of our modern Hitler have left me squirming in embarrassment and apology before my American friends. … Britons utterly refuse to obey the natural instincts of the free-born to celebrate the death of a tyrant. When the Mets-Phillies baseball game erupted into cheers on hearing the wonderful news, or the crowds chanted ‘USA! USA!’ outside the White House, they were manifesting the finest emotional responses of a great people.” When you spend as much time as Roberts has studying real evil, that’s what you write. When you spend your life in Britain or America and know little about real evil, you write about how wrong it is to celebrate the death of people like bin Laden. All those rabbis and others who think it immoral or un-Jewish to celebrate bin Laden’s death will one day have to confront a Jew named Arie Hassenberg, a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As quoted by Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, after one of the Auschwitz sub-camps (Monowitz) was bombed by the Allies, Hassenberg’s reaction was: “To see a killed German; that was why we enjoyed the bombing.” Was Hassenberg’s reaction wrong or un-Jewish? I don’t think so. What I suspect distinguishes Hassenberg from those who lament celebrating the death of the truly evil is that Hassenberg experienced true evil. Dennis Prager’s nationally syndicated radio talk show is heard in Los Angeles on KRLA (AM 870) 9 a.m. to noon. His latest project is the Internet-based Prager University (prageru.com).

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Arab League Redefines Chutzpah, by Dennis Prager

Many readers will recall one of the most famous headlines in modern American newspaper history -- the 1975 New York Daily News headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

Substitute "Arab League" for "Ford" and "America" for "City" and you've got the perfect headline: "Arab League to America: Drop Dead."

I always thought the best illustration of "chutzpah" was that of the boy who kills his parents and then pleads with the court for mercy, on the grounds that he is an orphan.
But given that that is only a hypothetical example, we now have a better illustration of chutzpah because this one is true.
Witnessing the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's large-scale killings of Libyan civilians, the Arab League begged us, the Europeans and the Security Council to militarily intervene on behalf of the Libyan people.
So, despite the fact that America is rather weary of fighting Muslim mass murderers, is militarily overstretched and has a devastating national debt, America said yes. We are the most decent country on Earth, and even a liberal-left Democrat in the White House feels the moral pull of America's legacy, values and unparalleled strength.
But no sooner have America and the Europeans intervened than the Arab League officially protests our intervention on the grounds that Libyan civilians -- 48 claimed, 0 confirmed at the time of the protest -- have been killed by the intervention requested by the Arab League.
What exactly did the Arab League, most of whose dictators have murdered thousands of their own people for political reasons, think would happen once the U.S. and the Europeans intervened militarily? Did they assume not one Libyan civilian would get killed? Has there been a military action in history in which no civilians died?
Amr Moussa, the outgoing secretary general of the Arab League, claimed in his statement that "What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians."
Perhaps Moussa did not read the Security Council resolution. It does not limit anti-Gadhafi military activity to "imposing a no-fly zone." The resolution authorizes U.N. member states "to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi (italics added)."
Perhaps President Obama should hold a press conference and make this announcement:
"Given the Arab League's protest, we are immediately ending our military involvement in Libya. Apparently, Mr. Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, assumed that military intervention is possible without the killing of a single civilian. He should have told us so. Under that condition, we would never have put our blood and treasure on the line. So now, we are out, and the blood of every Libyan killed and tortured by the Libyan dictator is now on the Arab League's hands. On behalf of the American people, I ask the Arab League, and especially Mr. Moussa, to never again appeal to us to save Arabs from their dictators. Shukran."
(The president likes using Arabic words when he addresses Arab audiences, so his using the Arabic word for "thank you," shukran, would add a nice flourish.)
What does this Arab League protest mean?
It clarifies once again that tribal values outweigh moral values in the Arab world, including among much of its educated elite such as Moussa. In many Arabs' eyes, it is better for an Arab tyrant to slaughter any number of Arabs, and to allow that tyrant to retain power, than for Westerners to kill a dozen Arabs in order save tens of thousands of them trying to topple that tyrant.
In much of the Arab world, saving Arab lives and spreading freedom pale in comparison to two other passions.
One of these is power -- especially despotic power -- as David Pryce-Jones shows in his brilliant book on the Arab world, "The Closed Circle." Strong and cruel Arab leaders -- from Gamal Abdul Nasser to Saddam Hussein to Hamas and Hezbollah -- have been adored by the famed "Arab street."
The other passion is hatred of Israel. That's the one thing that unites nearly all Arabs. They no more love Palestinians than they love Libyans or the tens of thousands of Syrian victims of the two Assad regimes in Damascus. They defend Palestinians because they are necessary for demonizing and ultimately delegitimizing Israel.
And Moussa is among the Israel haters. As The New York Times reported, "Hosni Mubarak removed him (Moussa) as foreign minister after a song called 'I Hate Israel and I Love Amr Moussa' became a pop hit in 2001." To hate Israel is to love Moussa.
It gets worse. Moussa is favored to win the Egyptian presidential election.
But look at the bright side -- thanks to Moussa and the Arab League, we now have a real-life illustration of chutzpah that outdoes the classic fictitious one.

The Other Tsunami By Dennis Prager

It is very difficult to hate babies.

It takes a special person.

As morally wrong as it is to murder innocent adults, mankind seems to have a built-in revulsion against killing babies. If a baby does not evoke any tenderness, if a baby is regarded as worthy of being deliberately hurt or murdered, we know that we have encountered a degree of evil that few humans -- even among murderers -- can relate to.

That is why what Palestinian terrorists did to a Jewish family on the West Bank this past weekend deserves far more attention than it received.

Normally, Palestinian atrocities get little attention -- certainly far less attention than Israeli apartment-building on the West Bank receives. But this particular atrocity got even less attention than usual because the world was focused on the terrible tsunami that hit Japan .

On Friday night, Palestinian terrorists slipped into a Jewish settlement, entered a home and stabbed the father, the mother and three of their children to death: an 11-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a three-month-old baby.

In order to understand what those actions mean, a seemingly separate incident needs to be recalled: the prolonged sexual attack by up to 200 Egyptian men on Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, in Tahrir Square , Cairo a few weeks ago. It was reported that after stripping her naked and then molesting and beating her, the men kept shouting, "Jew, Jew!"

The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim and some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran ), "Jew" is not a person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.

Think of any conflict in the world -- Pakistan-India , China - Tibet , North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.

There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children -- often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) -- as it was to murder Jewish adults.

The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder, steal or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire of evils.

But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies, and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes toward children.

That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the Muslim world have done to the word "Jew." To them, the Jew is not just sub-human; the Jew -- and his or her children -- is sub-animal.

Palestinian and other Muslim spokesmen and their supporters on the left argue that this unique hatred is the fruit of Israeli policies, not decades of Nazi-like Jew-hatred saturating Islamic education, television, radio and the mosque. But for this to be true, unique hatred would have to be matched by unique evil on the Israelis' part.

Yet, among the injustices of the world, what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians would not even register on a moral Richter scale. The creation of Israel engendered about 750,000 Palestinian refugees (and an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) and the death of perhaps 10 thousand Palestinian Arabs. And all of that came about solely because Arab armies invaded Israel in order to destroy it at birth. Yet, when Pakistan was yanked from India and established as a Muslim state at the very same time Israel was established, that act engendered 12.5 million Muslim refugees and about a million dead Muslims (and similar numbers of Hindu refugees and deaths). Why then doesn't "Hindu" equal "Jew" in the Muslim lexicon of hate?

Here are some answers in brief:

First, many groups have been hated, but none have been hated as deeply as the Jews.

Second, Jew-hatred is often exterminationist, which is why Jew-hatred has little in common with ethnic bigotry, religious intolerance or even racism. Rarely, if ever, do any of them seek the extermination of the disliked or hated group.

Third, exterminationist Jew-haters are particularly dangerous people. Non-Jews who do not recognize Jew-hatred as the moral cancer it is are fools. Nazism was born in Jew-hatred and led to the death of more than 40 million non-Jews. Islamic terror started against Israeli Jews but has spread around the world. More fellow Muslims have now been murdered by Islamic terror than Jews have.

That is why the tsunami the world ignored this weekend -- the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim flood of Jew-hatred -- is the one that will prove far more dangerous to it than the Japanese one it understandably focused on.

Eight Reasons Not To Be Optimistic About Egypt by Dennis Prager

From the moment the Tahrir Square demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak began, optimism has dominated American reporting and commentary on what is being called the Egyptian revolution.

I fervently hope I am wrong, but I find it hard to share this dominant view, even as I identify with all those Egyptians and other Arabs who yearn for freedom.

I offer eight good reasons for my pessimism:

1. Countries almost never go straight from dictatorship to liberty.

For the past 250 years, the general rule of revolutions has been this: The more tyrannical the regime that is overthrown, the more tyrannical the regime that replaces it. Though post-Soviet Eastern European countries might seem to invalidate this rule, they do not. The reason Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria became more or less free countries almost immediately after overthrowing communist dictatorships is that all those dictatorships were imposed from abroad (the Soviet Union). When a country overthrows a homemade dictator, it rarely replaces him with a free society. The French Revolution replaced the French monarchy with revolutionary terror. The Russian Revolution replaced the autocratic Russian czar with totalitarian commissars.

2. When pro-American dictators are overthrown, far more repressive anti-American tyrants usually replace them.

In 1959, the pro-American Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown and replaced by an anti-American communist totalitarian state under Fidel Castro. Most Cubans had far more freedom under Batista than under Castro. In 1979, the pro-American Shah of Iran dictatorship was overthrown and replaced by a far less free, far more repressive, virulently anti-American Islamic tyranny.

3. Islamists have a near-monopoly on passion in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.

In politics, passion matters. That is why small impassioned groups can dominate a more passive majority of a country. And in Egypt, no group or cause has nearly the passion that the Islamists have.

4. Neither liberty nor tolerance has roots in the Arab world.

It is very hard, perhaps impossible, to plant the trees of liberty and tolerance in soil that has never grown them. And if these trees are planted, they are likely to take many years to grow.

5. People have been trained to depend on the state.

In addition to political obstacles, there are economic and psychological ones. Most Egyptians and other Arabs have known no economic life other than reliance on the state. In order to foster liberty, the state must shrink. But if the state shrinks, so do government subsidies for food and so do the number of state employees. Even assuming Egyptians' yearnings for liberty were more intense than their yearning for an Islamist state, in order to make a free country, Egyptians would have to wean themselves off of dependence on the state. That is almost unheard of -- see Madison, Wis., to see how difficult it is even in a prosperous, free, First World country.

6. The American media have been hiding the bad guys.

You have not been getting the whole truth about Tahrir Square. To this day, the print edition of The New York Times has not reported the sexual assault on Lara Logan, the chief CBS TV foreign correspondent, by 200 Egyptian men in Tahrir Square yelling "Jew, Jew" while they assaulted her. CBS News itself did not report on the incident until others exposed it. Likewise, few mainstream news media have reported or shown the depictions of Mubarak as an Israeli agent or attacks on other Western news teams accused of being agents of Israel.

7. Getting closer to Iran

In one of its first actions after taking over control of the Egyptian government, the Egyptian army allowed two Iranian warships to sail through the Suez Canal for the first time since the Iranian revolution. If that is not a bad sign, nothing is.

8. Egypt is saturated with Jew and Israel hatred.

Finally, and arguably most significantly, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world have been swimming in a sea of Jew and Israel hatred for decades. Historically, anti-Semitism has been a perfect predictor of a society that will cause others problems and that will eventually self-destruct. The preoccupation with destroying Israel has been the single greatest obstacle to Arab countries joining the modern world. No Arab progress will be possible until the Arab world gives up its obsession with Israel's disappearance.

Against these eight powerful reasons, we read about individual Egyptians who are sick of dictatorship and yearn for freedom. Such wonderful people also lived in Cuba in 1959, and in Iran in 1979. They usually end up in prison.

I wish settlements were the issue, by Dennis Prager

According to every liberal editorial page in America (and virtually every editorial page abroad), according to President Obama, the United Nations and every other liberal institution, and according to Jews on the left, the major impediment to peace in the Middle East is Israel’s continuing construction of settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

You have to say at least one thing on behalf of those on the left: They are consistent. In conflicts between a decent society and an indecent society, you can almost always count on the left to blame the decent society. The U.S. was wrong in overthrowing the mass murderer Saddam Hussein. The U.S. was wrong in fighting North Vietnam’s Stalinist tyrant, Ho Chi Minh. The U.S. was wrong in backing the Nicaraguan opposition to the Communist Sandinistas. Israel was wrong in its war against the murderous, Israel-denying, Jew-hating, Islamist totalitarian Hamas. And Israel is wrong today in its conflict with the Palestinians.

Actually, you can say one more thing: The left regularly confuses wishful thinking with reality. You see, I, too, wish that Israeli settlement construction — usually no more than apartment construction within existing Jewish communities within or right outside of Jerusalem — were the obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But not being on the left, I am cursed with not assuming that what I would like to believe is reality.

If only these apartments were the problem. What a great day it would be for all of us who yearn to see the Jewish state accepted by its Palestinian and other Arab neighbors.

But, alas, this is make-believe. As Charles Krauthammer asked in a column he wrote a year ago, “Is the peace process moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren?”

Not quite. As Krauthammer noted, “Blaming Israel and picking a fight over ‘natural growth’ may curry favor with the Muslim ‘street.’ But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, one of Israel’s most right-wing politicians, lives in a settlement. He has said that, to achieve peace he and his family would abandon their home. And for real peace, if necessary, Israel would force religious and secular settlers to abandon their homes as well.

If the conflict isn’t due to settlement buildings, then, why is there no peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

For the same reason the Jewish state was invaded by six Arab armies when it was born.

For the same reason Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, declared his intention to destroy Israel and, in partnership with Syria and Jordan, tried to do so in May-June 1967.

For the same reason that, in September 1967, the Arab nations gathered in Khartoum, Sudan, and declared their “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.

For the same reason the Palestinians sent human bombs into Israeli schools, weddings, pizza parlors and buses to maim and murder as many Jews as possible.

For the same reason Yasser Arafat unleashed more terror on Israelis in 2001 right after he rejected the offer of a Palestinian state made by Israel’s left-wing Prime Minister Ehud Barak and by President Bill Clinton.

For the same reason Iran’s dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel’s annihilation.

For the same reason Egyptian, Palestinian, Syrian and other Arab and Muslim countries’ media regularly broadcast the most anti-Semitic propaganda since the Nazis.

And that reason is that most Palestinians and most other Muslims in the Middle East, and many Muslims elsewhere, do not believe that a Jewish state should be allowed to exist, period, in an area once dominated by Islam. That — not Israeli apartment-building — is the problem.

Postscript: I just released the latest video course in my Internet project known as Prager University: prageru.com. It is, like the other courses, five minutes long. With the aid of maps and other illustrations, it explains what I have written here: The Middle East issue revolves around Arab/Muslim rejection of a Jewish state. According to YouTube, it has been viewed by 300,000 visitors in its first two weeks. I note this, first, to inform readers of this column about the video; second, to note how hungry people are for a clear explanation of the real reason for the lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinians; and third, because I have been moved by how many Israelis have written to me to thank me for the video. With nearly all the world — including many Jews — blaming Israel, they had forgotten why they don’t deserve to be.

Dennis Prager of Prager University: The Middle East Problem