Timeless Wisdom - Dennis and Bret Stephens: What If America Retreats?

Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.

And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com. Aside from the obvious, the intellectual ability, the writing ability, you have courage. And I always say that of all the good traits—kindness, loyalty, honesty—courage is the most rare. So that's a great joy to have this evening with you. [APPLAUSE] Let's do it like this, because, you know, it's a sort of interview and it's a sort of dialogue, but I want him to speak more than I do. I get my— I get 3 hours a day on national radio. I don't lack for opportunity. So why don't we learn a little about you first, okay? So where are you from, and how did you get from— what are the highlights from birth to this moment? Oh, we don't have 2 mics? We only have 1?

Well, I'm going to use this one because this one seems to be the only one that works reliably.

Do you hear me well?

Thank you. What are the highlights? Buenas tardes, Mexicanos. So I was born— how shall I put this? I mean, the name Stevens is a dead giveaway of my Jewishness because my paternal grandparents were so clever that they didn't simply go for, you know, that sort of not just slightly taking the name from Rosenberg to Rose. They went the whole distance. And I'm especially proud of my grandfather who went for the PhD in Stevens. Classy touch there. I like to joke that I was raised as minimally Jewish as you can be without actually being Unitarian. I was born in New York, as an infant moved to Mexico City. My father had been born in Mexico to expatriated American parents. My grandmother was a painter who was a friend of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. My grandfather was a businessman. On my maternal side, my mother was born in Milano under Nazi occupation in World War II and was a displaced person after the war and came to this country after waiting patiently for 5 years to get a visa to come here, and arrived in the United States with her mother, not her father, with her mother, with $7 between them. And that is the family, briefly, the family history. I was raised in Mexico City. One of the people, someone once asked me, what's a touchstone event in your life politically? And when I was a child, we, had this big Ford LTD station wagon, and every few months we would drive from Mexico City to McAllen, Texas, just to stock up on American goods that you couldn't find easily in Mexico before NAFTA. You know, drive for really 2 days to finally get to McAllen. For me, heaven on earth remains McAllen, Texas. And it's an important point because really, you know, the difference is just You just cross a river and you enter into a new world. I don't think Americans perhaps appreciate in quite— Americans who were raised here, born here and raised here, appreciate in quite the same way what it means to turn on a tap, put your glass of water under the tap, and drink it, and what a miracle that is, and how in America what is a miracle just a few miles south of here is mundane. And so it gives you an appreciation. To be an American raised abroad gives you an appreciation of the everyday in this country that you don't quite have, I think, if you grow up in, frankly, San Diego or Westchester or whatever. So even from an early age being raised in Mexico, I felt this sort of fierce sense of patriotism. I was very proud of the fact that I was an American, even though I spoke fluent Spanish, spoke Spanish. Most of the time. I went to a boarding school in New England, went to the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago is truly a great university because they care about what used to be known as a liberal education. A liberal education really begins with an understanding that Western civilization starts in Jerusalem and in Athens. And you have to understand something about Jerusalem and Athens to understand what we're talking about, what business we are what we're dealing with. And I think about that in terms of the, my views about, say, the Islamic world today. I mean, we treat the jihadists, the terrorists, as if they're just utter barbarians with nothing to say. And yet the reason why jihadism, why radical Islam is growing the way it is, is that they are staking, in their perverse way, fundamental philosophical claims. And we have no rebuttal because we don't even realize we're engaged in an ideological struggle against them. So we think that they're sort of these terrorists, and God forbid you should call them Islamic. And when we fail to do that, when we fail to appreciate the ideological and theological nature of the challenge, we're just failing to meet it. I mean, imagine if during the Cold War we had said, We had a policy saying, well, we don't want to denigrate communism, which is absolutely, perfectly OK point of view about the brotherhood of man. It just happens to be that some characters in the Kremlin have a perverted view of communism, and that's the problem that we have. We waged an ideological struggle in the Cold War. We waged an ideological struggle during the Second World War. How did that grounding at Chicago, or wherever you go, having a grounding in political philosophy philosophy is a great advantage in terms of political argument. I then started working for— shortly after college, I went to work for the Wall Street Journal. I worked for it in— I have a graduate degree from British school, but I went to work in New York, then I moved to Brussels. And when I was in Brussels, I started covering Israel quite intensively. And it happened by happenstance. It wasn't because I'm Jewish, and so I decided I'm going to cover Israel. It just sort of came about. And I realized when I was— I first went to Israel as a journalist in the summer of 2000, right after the Camp David talks had failed. And there was a period there before the Second Intifada began where Arafat was threatening to declare a state. And so my assignment from my editor was if he declares a state, What kind of state would it be? So I went out there and instead of spending my time talking with leftist Israelis and, you know, peace-loving Palestinians, I spent my time in Gaza, in Jenin, throughout the Palestinian area talking to Hamas, talking to Palestinian dissidents, talking to leaders of Fatah. And I came to the conclusion that something was being missed in the story. The story was not, in fact, about the moderates among the Israelis and the Palestinians trying to make peace with being threatened by extremists on both sides, the story was that the Palestinian entity was riven between the kleptocrats of Fatah and the fanatics of Hamas, and that this would explode. And so when the Second Intifada began, I started covering it very intensively. And just out of the blue one day, as it happens, not long after 9/11, I got a phone call. And the publisher, the guy who was then the publisher of the Jerusalem Post, asked me, I wanted a job as the editor of the newspaper. I said, well, I'm 27 years old and I've never managed— I mean, I can't even manage myself, much less other people, but why not? So I went to Israel shortly after that, and this was during the height of the Second Intifada. I know I'm taking more than my 5 minutes, but one other sort of touchstone event. In January of 2004, my wife and I were fussing over our 5-week-old baby we suddenly heard a boom, and we saw smoke rising from the street about 200 feet away. This was on— we lived on Tchaikovsky, that was on Azov, so just the next block over. I immediately realized what had happened, so I got on my shoes and walked out and saw a suicide bombing that had taken place just about 2 minutes before. We forget that the word carnage, carnality, the body, that means something. To witness a suicide bombing in which 11 people are instantaneously murdered and another 20 badly maimed is an event that stays with you for the rest of your life. And I don't think you can understand what terrorism is, who these jihadis are, until you have that kind of experience. I mean, on the one hand, I hope none of you ever have it, On the other hand, I don't think I'd see the world the way I do if I hadn't had it. And then I was in Israel for a few years, was invited to come back to the Journal, became the foreign affairs columnist, wrote a column. And last point I want to make, which is just because it amuses me, when I won the Pulitzer Prize, I called up my mother and I said, Mom, I won a Pulitzer Prize. And she said, oh, good. Well, that's nice, sweetie.

Now the stupid people will know you're smart. That's precious. I have to say, God, did she know what she was talking about. I want to add a word on seeing the carnage. I was taken to the Hadassah a number of years ago, taken to Hadassah. Area where victims of terror— and there was a very handsome young man.

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Who was in some restaurant and, and there was a certain degree of brain damage. You could still speak to him. He spoke fluently, but you could tell he wasn't himself, even if you didn't know him before. And as a result of that, Whenever there has been a terror bombing anywhere in the world, or terror attack, I never— when I read from the newspaper that I'm reading some report from on my show, I never read what they write, "And 27 wounded." I always say, "And 27 maimed." Wounded is a sprained ankle. So it's a very powerful point that you made, and to see what you saw I didn't see, and I'm sure it stays with you. So since you're talking about Israel, a few questions, get your thoughts on them. See, there is a danger because we are so in sync that there are no fireworks probably between us. I mean, we may differ on whether, you know, Napoleon should have taken on the coalition of Austria-Hungary and Serbia or not. I think on what is happening in the world, we are overwhelmingly in sync, which is fine with me, by the way, since I spend my life arguing. It's fine. But I want to— so I want to pose to you a level deeper even than where we would obviously agree. Do you agree that this president, and I'm not going to focus only on this president, but I'm curious your take. Do you believe that he has a particular dislike of the Israeli prime minister? And if you— you know, it's not a rhetorical question. We think, most of you obviously from your response, think that way, but it's not necessarily the case. And if it is the case, Why do you think that is?

Well, this is what I find odd, that we all know, all of us know in this room, outside this room, that Obama can't stand Bibi. And, you know, political leaders, no less than any people in any kind of relationship, they're people you transact business with, with and what your feelings about them may be privately are held privately. Especially when you exist in an office that is surrounded by ceremony, it is easy to observe the ceremony and not advertise the fact that so-and-so gets on your nerves. What I find odd is that in a year when, say, last year or last couple of years, when the The President of the United States discovered that Xi Jinping, the government of China, was actively spying on the United States and stealing the intellectual property of some of our biggest defense contractors, some of our most important intellectual property. When Vladimir Putin not only invaded, seized Crimea, invaded Ukraine, but apparently lies about Russian involvement in Ukraine all the time. That the one guy we know that the president really can't stand is the prime minister of Israel. And it's strange. I mean, I don't quite get it why the administration thought, or someone in his administration if not the president himself, thought it was a good idea to call the prime minister a chicken something or other. Really? I mean, leaving aside the fact that Bibi was a highly decorated Israeli commando, and I don't remember that being part of the president's biography. So the question then is why that is. I wrote a column about this. I called it Obama's Curious Rage. It's strange that this is the way that he should— look, it's not my business to psychoanalyze the president. What I do think is that in foreign policy, people need to understand the value of friends. Machiavelli says somewhere in The Prince, he says, you know, the best prince is a prince who develops a reputation as a firm friend and a thorough foe. And this president has more or less done exactly the opposite. And I think that hurts us in a way that goes well beyond the relationship with Israel. When your friends don't trust you, they'll begin to freelance their foreign policy in ways that you might not like. And when your foes don't respect you, they will cross your lines with glee and abandon. And that is precisely the world I think we have entered in the last year. I started this book, Dennis, in 2012 when People thought that the world was a benign place. And so the kind of the argument that we were entering into a period of global disorder, I think would have seemed to some people a little far-fetched. We'd reset relations with Russia, remember? Al-Qaeda was on a path to defeat. ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Yemen were the JV of global terrorism. I mean, so to sort of go on one, it was supposed to be a benign environment, and I made the argument that that was not the case, precisely because when your foes do not think that they will be seriously opposed in aggression, they will aggress. That was the lesson of the 1930s. You know, in 1929, Japan signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war forever. A year later, they invaded Manchuria. And the League of Nations sent a commission and spent a year trying to discover whether Japan had invaded Manchuria. So not surprisingly, 4 years later, Italy invades Abyssinia, and then Germany takes Czechoslovakia, and you know the rest. Look at what's happening today. The red line is crossed flagrantly in Syria. We do nothing. 6 months later, we have the Ukraine crisis. We are negotiating with the Iranians, and I'm happy to get into this in more detail, and the Iranians clearly are not particularly concerned that they have to come to terms with the United States. They're negotiating like they're the ones who hold the whip hand because they sense that this president is desperate for a deal, and that's a worrisome place for America to be. It makes me frightened for the next few years.

So let me bounce off an idea and have you quickly or at length react. I have a theory as to why he dislikes Netanyahu. It's sort of Prager's Rule 837 of human nature, and in my view, it applies profoundly to the world's left and to the American left. But even notwithstanding that, this is my rule: those who don't fight evil hate those who do fight evil. It's a wonderful rule.

Look, I can't improve on that comment. It's profound. But let me say this. We used to have a liberalism in America that wasn't afraid or understood that that liberalism had to be defended. Franklin Roosevelt understood it in 1940. Harry Truman understood it in 1945. Jack Kennedy understood it in the early 1960s. That liberalism now finds itself being eclipsed by something that pretends to be liberalism, but I think is the opposite. I mean, I find it flabbergasting that really the principal fellow travelers of Iran today, the people who are objectively— that Iran seeks to cultivate are people who describe themselves as being on the left. This is a regime that hangs gay people people, stones women, abuses minorities. And you would think that the left would say, well, this is the regime that is most antithetical to our core values, right? I mean, it's all well and good to be for gay rights here in San Diego, by all means, by the way, by all means, please. But also be for gay rights in Palestine. And the people who are busy marching to free Palestine don't have a word to say about the treatment of gays, or the treatment of women, or the treatment of religious minorities, or the quality of governance, or anything of the kind when it comes to the Palestinians. So you now have the phenomenon, which by the way stretches back for some time, of a left that ends up fellow traveling with totalitarians. It happened during the Soviet period. Jean-François Revel, the great French philosopher, wrote a book in the mid-1970s called The Totalitarian Temptation. And by the way, it was quite interesting. He said something, he said, you know, people— I understand why people want to admire tyranny because they themselves want to be tyrants. But the deeper psychological mystery is why people admire tyranny because they want themselves to be tyrannized. They want to submit to tyranny. This is kind of an interesting puzzle, and it gets back to the question of philosophy that I was talking about earlier. Freedom is not simply an obvious good. The goodness of freedom needs to be articulated and understood, especially among people who would be perfectly happy to be unfree for whatever reasons, because they don't want to make choices, because they have— they're masochists of the soul. And you now find that kind of politics being expressed in a big way on the left. Why is it that a left which has really all manner of excuses for Vladimir Putin— well, you know, he considers Ukraine his historic homeland, right? I mean, how many times have you heard this? Well, don't you understand that for Vladimir Putin, the loss of Ukraine was devastating? Imagine them saying, well, don't you understand that for Benjamin Netanyahu, the West Bank is Judea and Samaria, and it's the historic homeland historical men of the Jews, so at least acknowledge that point. When was the last time someone on the left made that point? So there's incredible solicitude for tyrants, and none for fellow liberals, that is to say those of us engaged in the broad enterprise of defending a free world in the old-fashioned sense. None at all. And I find people on the left who will detest me as a conservative, far more viscerally than they ever would if they met a jihadi with a beard and his wife in burqa in tow. Oh, that's just an intriguing cultural difference. It's taking a woman in sheets. That's just their culture, right? That woman wants to be in sheets, right? But the view from the grill is just so much more interesting.

I will give you, because I've lived longer than you, I will give you a firsthand, so to speak, recollection on your point about, well, if we have this understanding of Russia and Crimea, we don't understand Israel and the West Bank.

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Soviet Union shot down the Korean airliner. Ronald Reagan said they were an evil empire. He was excoriated by every single liberal newspaper in the United States, which means every newspaper except yours. But really excoriated. You can't judge them, who are you to do that, etc. Don't we have our own flaws? The usual stuff. And I remember, I'm on radio so long, been on radio, so what I remember saying on the radio is— oh, they gave an excuse, forgive me. They gave an excuse for the Soviets, aside from lambasting President Reagan, they said, well, the Soviets are paranoid, and there was an airplane came over their airspace and they're paranoid. This was very common, many of you are nodding, you may remember this. And I remember saying on the radio, Soviet Union is 1/9th of the entire landmass of the Earth. So they're paranoid over a remote section of 1/9 of the world's surface, but how has anyone ever said maybe Israel is legitimately paranoid about the West Bank? So I so vividly recall exactly what you were saying. And I'll give you another illustration. To you and all of you about hating the wrong guy. Ami Horowitz is a young man, even younger than Bret Stephens, and he is another courageous guy. You should know him. Look him up on YouTube. And we're quite friendly, and some of— I give him some ideas, some are his certainly, but he has the courage to enact them. Listen to this one. It is on YouTube. YouTube. He went to— was it Berkeley? He went to UC Berkeley, and for 2 hours he waved the Islamic State flag. Just stood on steps waving the flag. One negative comment, and a number of positive, and mostly ignored. Then for 2 hours he waved the Israeli flag. He was bombarded with hate. That's really worth commenting on. You can see it on YouTube. Let's go then to Iran. This is very worrisome, and the president made these arguments last night in the State of the Union address that, uh, don't you understand, uh, we are on the brink of an agreement, and if you have these backup sanctions, then we will be alienated from our coalition partners in these negotiations, and Iran will then proceed very fast to develop nuclear weapons and so on. I know you have great responses, but I think people need to hear them.

I had the great good fortune of being on an airplane when the president delivered his State of the Union, so I have ironclad excuse. I chose not to watch, but then I did read the transcript, and you may have seen, some of you, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago on this subject. Look, first of all, it bothers me when a president of any party is I think, really quite nakedly dishonest about what is being proposed. Because what is being proposed on a bipartisan basis by Democrat Robert Menendez and a Republican, moderate Republican Mark Kirk, are sanctions that would only take effect in the event that negotiations fail to come to an agreement by this, the third deadline. Okay, the deadline was supposed to be last June, then it was extended to November, now we're once again back to June. So the suggestion that these are sanctions that would immediately take effect is simply false and misleading, and I think it's a betrayal of fellow Democrats who have been pushing this kind of sanctions legislation. Sanctions legislation that, by the way, the president was very happy to take credit for when it made him look tough a couple years ago. Those sanctions that he used to boast about were first of all shoved down his throat. He was opposed to this, the administration was opposed to them. But then when they started to bite the Iranian economy, then the administration's line was, oh, our sanctions, which were not their sanctions, are working so great that they've brought the Iranians to the table. So now it's switched once again to the notion that somehow sanctions The very sanctions that made Iran negotiate and do what the administration said it wanted would now be toxic to any kind of negotiation. So I think it's— I don't want to say dishonest, but it's disingenuous. It gives the American people an impression of what is being proposed in Congress that is simply untrue. The second point is I fear that what this administration is trying to do is simply kick the Iranian and down the road to, let us say, January 22nd, 2017. And after that, it's some other person's problem, okay? Whether it's Hillary's problem or Jeb's problem or whoever, I don't know, I'm not taking sides. It's someone else's problem. I think that is terrible. I once heard, let me just put it this way, I once heard a former president the United States saying. He said, you know, I want to make sure as I leave office that I'm giving my successor good options. That's part of the high responsibility of being the president. And what this president is doing is giving his successor the worst options, dreadful options. Because at that point, by January 22nd, 2017, the next president is going to have a binary choice. Accept a fait accompli, which is that the Iranian nuclear program is too diversified, too sophisticated, too robust, too deeply buried for us to do anything meaningful about it, or having waited on events, conduct an even larger military operation, which by then will be the only option for genuinely destroying this nuclear program. I interviewed a senior Israeli politician not too long ago, and he said something interesting. He said, you have to understand that what the Iranians are trying to do is they don't want a bomb today. They want a bomb tomorrow. A bomb today means they're going to breach the IAEA, and it's going to— they're going to lose economic advantages. It has all kinds of problems. What they want is the machinery that you need to have in place so that when you effectively flip the switch, you can produce not one, but dozens of bombs. And that ought to worry us. You know, when you think about the way countries have had their nuclear breakouts, the American— the United States went very quickly. In 1945, we tested a bomb in New Mexico in June or July of 1945, dropped it in August. But the way more recent nuclear powers have done it is they have slowly built up their infrastructure under the noses of international inspectors. The Pakistanis did this, the Indians did this, the North Koreans did it, and then at a moment of their choosing, they tested not one but several bombs when it was too late for the rest of the world to stop it. And that's exactly the kind of thing the Iranians are doing now, and it's distressing to me to hear this administration be repeatedly disingenuous with Americans. I mean, Secretary Kerry keeps saying the Iranians have abided to the letter letter to their agreement with the JPA. And yet the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is a UN agency, is complaining in public reports that Iran is not giving the UN inspectors the access they demand into suspected Iranian weaponization sites. So the Iranians are perfectly happy to suspend that part of the nuclear program they've they've already perfected, which is the enrichment side of the program, but they are not suspending and they are covering and hiding that part of the nuclear program that they have yet to perfect, which is the weaponization side. And these are kind of complicated things, and we deserve statesmanship in this country that lays these points out honestly. And if this administration were more honest, it would go out and say, you know what, you know what, yes, we really wish Iran wouldn't get a nuclear weapon, nuclear bomb, but the truth is we're not prepared to go the distance to really stop it for X, Y, and Z reasons. Let's have that honest argument, all right? You can have an intellectually honest argument that says, okay, we can live with a nuclear Iran. We live with nuclear North Korea. We live with nuclear Pakistan, and we all feel great, so why not a nuclear Iran? Well, then why not a nuclear Islamic State? Sure. Eventually it'll come to that, by the way. But at least that's an honest argument. But what they're doing is they lack really the courage of their convictions, and they lack the courage of their rhetoric. They don't have the conviction, they don't have the courage to say our conviction is that we can live with a nuclear Iran, and they don't have the courage of the rhetoric to say we will indeed not allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. So it's this kind of dishonest mush of policy that we're kind of stuck in. I feel like I'm living in an era of intellectual mashed potatoes.

So you believe that the Secretary of State and the president, their primary aim is to kick the bucket Till they're no longer in office? Is that— did I get that? Take the can. Take the can, that's right. A Mexican is correcting my English. I tell you, too many immigrants, too many immigrants. That's right. So that's— what about— so if you awakened one of them at 3 AM and gave them truth serum and said, does it really worry you— do the following two things really worry you? That no matter what agreement you come to, Iran will make a weapon? B, Iran more than anything wants to destroy Israel. Do those things trouble you deeply? What do you what do you think their responses would be with the truth serum?

Well, let me talk to the subject of Israel because these are both large topics and I tend to give answers that are too long, so I'm just going to take B because it's the more interesting subject. They would say, of course we're worried, but please, come on, be realistic. Israel, according to foreign sources, that's a joke some people just won't get. Israel, according to foreign sources, has a robust nuclear arsenal of its own. Say what you will about the Iranians, they're not suicidal. They would understand very quickly that if they were to develop a bomb, they would never use it against Israel. Yes, Rafsanjani made that comment that one bomb would destroy Israel, whereas All the entire Israeli nuclear arsenal would only damage the Islamic world. So what they would say is, chillax, dude. Israel will be fine. And by the way, this is what sort of daily kind of arguments I have on Fareed Zakaria's show. Why should we— they may be fanatical, but they're not suicidal. My response is— First of all, the character of the Iranian regime is fundamentally different from the character of other regimes. Even North Korea, being the evil, horrid cult it is, socialism, communism is not a death cult, okay? That's the difference. There are no North Korean shaheed, all right? Okay? The Islamic bomb, by the way, is very different. And people say, well, you know, Pakistan has a bomb, and you think, oh, and that doesn't worry you? What happens— would you be worried if the Taliban were to seize the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan? Would that worry you? And they go, oh, well, I guess. Iran is structured around the death cult. Iran is a country that was capable of sending tens of thousands of young children through minefields during the Iran-Iraq War as a way of clearing mines. Okay, so a regime that is capable of doing something like that is capable of a lot. So we shouldn't just blindly assume that they would never do it. Second of all, imagine a scenario in which Iran is faced with the internal uprising that Syria— that Assad faced in— has been facing the last 3 years. People think, oh, well, Iran is not like other nations. What are you talking about? Only half of Iran is actually Persian. There are Kurds, Balochis, Azeris. It's an ethnically fractious country, every bit as much as Syria is. All right, so imagine there's a huge uprising in Iran, and this happens, say, 5 years into the future. And Iran has a nuclear arsenal. The regime has a nuclear arsenal. And they sense they might fall. Are they going to go, I'm sorry, we had We had this nuclear arsenal, but now we're going to fall. They will use it. I mean, they will have a— to borrow from another death cult— a Gotterdammerung moment. The Nazi killing machine became more fanatical when they knew they were going to lose, not less. So that ought to concern this administration as well. And there is a kind of facile quality to their arguments a total lack of imagination that I think serves us very ill. One of the important— I mean, I have a chapter in my book, I have to raise my book, which imagines the world in 2019, Hillary Clinton as president, and remember, I'm just imagining. This is not a John Lennon imagine, by the way. It's a bad imagine. And I mentioned how— By the way, my chapter begins by noting that plunging oil prices and a rising dollar leads to plunging oil prices, which leads to an economic crisis in Russia. So I wrote that a year ago. So far, it's been pretty well. So you have to have an imaginative sense of what the future might bring. People who predict well understand that the essence of prediction isn't to seek the exotic in the mundane. It's to find the mundane in the exotic. And that's how you make smarter predictions. So think about what an Iranian leadership would do with nuclear weapons under conditions of internal stress. And that ought to worry you a great deal. And all of this is totally leaving aside the fact that the moment Iran gets even close to a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia is going to get a bomb. You like that? Does that sound good? How about Turkey? How about Egypt? You really want a Middle East with 5 nuclear weapon powers, each of them at daggers drawn with one another? I don't think so. And some of you in this room remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was USA versus USSR. We came this close to nuclear annihilation. So imagine 5 of them, and all of them except for Israel are nutters.

The name of the book is American Retreat, and I will be happy to advertise it on his behalf. You should read it. It is worth reading. It is important. He is one of the important thinkers today, and it will be available outside, and I get no proceeds from it. I just want to give it a very serious plug. Lucy Dawidowicz wrote a book, and it was the first one, if I recall, to argue that Hitler was more interested in killing Jews, annihilating the Jews, than he was in winning World War II. It has now become commonplace among historians, Jew and non-Jew, that that's true. Is it fair to say that that is the case for the Iranian regime, that more than any other single thing They would like to exterminate Israel.

I mean, you know, I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Mexico. In Mexico, there was a kind of a low-grade antisemitism that was probably not so different from antisemitism in America, say, 50 years ago. You would hear comments like, effectively, like, you know, translated, it's like, he He Jewed me out of something. That kind of stuff that would irritate you. But it wasn't like from that comment would spring the thought, you know what, let's slaughter this Jew's entire family, including the children in their cribs. So there has always been that kind of sort of non-toxic antisemitism. We are now living in a world where The toxicity of Islamist antisemitism is at the same fever pitch that it was in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. And to see the frenzy of antisemitic hatred at work in Paris at the kosher grocery store, but just, you know, some of you may travel for business. Do me a favor, next time you're in Kuwait, switch through the channels, okay, even if you don't understand Arabic, you will probably find a kind of Elders of Zion program on your TV at say 8 o'clock at night when you land in Kuwait, Qatar, you know, these supposedly friendly, friendly, moderate Arab nations. This ought to worry us a great deal, and we ought to be worried also more immediately about the way in which anti-Zionism, or ferocious hatred of Israel, wherever you draw the exact line, is becoming a facilitator, to borrow an expression, a beard for antisemitism. Antisemitism, after all, is just a term that was invented by an antisemite in the 1870s to describe one aspect of Jew hatred, which is the racial aspect. Previously there was a religious aspect of Jew hatred. It wasn't about the Jews being some evil race. It was the charges of being Christ killers, etc., etc. So hatred of Jews morphs according to the times. And now it's convenient to be an anti-Zionist because it speaks to the tropes of left-wing thinking. Zionism is colonialism and all this all this stuff, but it's the same hatred. And it always devolves into the same language and the same obscene accusations of gratuitous Jewish lust for the blood of the Gentiles. In the Gaza War last summer, okay, the suggestion that somehow Israel had Israelis almost delightedly killed those 4 boys on the beach, right? Or that the ratio of 2,000 Palestinian Gazans dead to 70 showed some kind of excessive force by the Israelis was part of that libel. And it was repeated by people who, had they probably stopped to think about it in a serious way, would have hung their heads in a certain amount of shame. Because we've created a world, a kind of a penumbra of fury that informs the kind of the dark heart of it. When Manuel Valls, the prime minister of France, begins by declaiming against the evils of antisemitism, but he has to clear his throat by first saying, of course criticism of Israel is OK. Why does he have to— what does it tell you that that's the first thing he has to say? On 9/11, did France say, when Desmondes said, we're all Americans, did they preface that by saying, of course, criticism of Americans is OK, but today we're all Americans, right? No, they don't do that. So this comes out in pernicious ways. A senior administration official, Ben Rhodes, goes on TV and he's asked about the body count. And he says, well, Israelis could do a better job of minimizing casualties. And we've done it in Afghanistan. And you say, is marijuana legal at 1600? Really? Really? Afghanistan, you may have heard, Ben Rhodes, is a largely rural area, okay? When the United States went to war in Fallujah in urban combat, okay, we killed hundreds, hundreds of Iraqis after taking every effort. And by the way, I don't say this for one second to criticize what our incredibly courageous Marines did in Fallujah. Quite the contrary. That is the reality of urban combat. That's the reality that Israel encountered in Gaza. I mean, could the Deputy National Security Advisor have said, you know what, Israel has agreed to abide by 11 ceasefires in this war, and every single one of them was violated by Hamas. So I mean, I find myself enraged by that sort of cheap moral equivalence engaged at high levels of government. Which essentially suggests that Israel would— is just sort of, uh, thinks, well, you know, we could just kill a few more Palestinians. I don't think any country has conducted a war as scrupulously as Israel has. I don't remember— I had the honor of visiting the General Atomics plant this morning and seeing some Predator UAVs, which are— it's just one of the great experiences of my life, and I loved every Predator I saw, but I would paint them in shades of mauve. All right, but I don't remember America dropping leaflets in northwest provinces of Pakistan saying, oh, by the way, we may be firing Hellfire missiles at house number 42, so please please get out of the way. And of course we wouldn't. Why should we? They're terrorists. We want to kill them. They want to kill us. We want to kill them first, right? But then you have this administration official insisting that Israel abide by a code of conduct that we don't apply to ourselves. A great California philosopher, longshoreman Eric Hoffer, once said that Israel is the only country in the world that is expected to behave like a Christian nation. And I don't like that.

In that book Eric Hoffer wrote, I'm afraid that something very close to this: Israel's fate is ours. As Israel goes, so go we. And he was Brilliant. He was a longshoreman philosopher. It's very worth reading him. So let me talk to you about a Jewish issue for a moment. And it's, I'm sure, will make you feel similarly, but I want to hear how you express it. We're a strange people, the Jews. I think there are a lot of our fellow Jews who are not healthy There is no group that has as many people who actively work against its interests as Jews do. By the way, the second group is Americans. And I think there are commonalities, there are a tremendous number of commonalities there. You don't have many Uruguayans working against Uruguay. I, as you know, I debated in Oxford on Thanksgiving. I debated an expatriate Israeli. Abi Shlain, whose basic thesis is that Israel was a terrorist state, Israel is at fault, Hamas is the victim, Israel was the instigator. His PhD student said, she was the other debater on that side, said that Israel does to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews. This was said at Oxford, and this was voted as the correct position by the Oxford students at the Oxford Union. And so you have this Israeli saying this, and today I was called up by Haaretz. I was mentioning this to you, but I want you to know why, because I want— this is a very important little, if you will, anecdote. I am going to Israel at the end of this month, with a man named David Lane, who's a Christian, evangelical Christian, who has been taking evangelicals to Israel, and in fact, in November, took them along with Mike Huckabee to Auschwitz. He's so pro-Jewish and pro-Israel that he takes pastors to Auschwitz and to Israel. And I was on the latter part of that trip in London, and I will be going to Israel with them. So Haaretz calls me up today, their New York correspondent, "Why are you going?" Which is a strange question. Why am I going with evangelicals and with leading Republicans to Israel? Because I'm pro-Israel, which at Haaretz apparently is somewhat of a difficult position. To digest. And so, and I have 3 witnesses because it happened while we were driving down to San Diego, and it went on for over a half hour, and we just started arguing with each other. I think she called to interview me, but she was so angry that I would be with evangelicals and, you know, people who think that they have the right position. I said, but so does the New York Times editorial page. They think they have the right position too and everyone else is wrong. She said, no, not at all. The New York Times position is that everyone's view is valid. And this is the— all right, but I have 3 witnesses living in the car. They were dying. I needed vomit bags in the car. It wasn't an airplane. And so you have to understand, I had to defend my criticize myself for going to help Israel with Christians going to Israel at a time of great tension in Israel. How do you explain this portion of the Jewish people that is more preoccupied with evangelicals' views of salvation than existential threats to Israel?

Look, this is not an easy question, but one point I would make is Jews were exiled from politics for 2,000 years. And so forgive us for being incompetent at it. And not only that, but In the sense that Jews in the diaspora, I think, developed a politics which too easily conflated the pure business of politics— and I mean that politics in the high sense, the security of the city— with ethics. Politics is related to ethics, and there are always ethical considerations in politics, as often political considerations and ethics. But they're not simply twinned. And so there has always been a view, I think, among the Jews that to be— they would rather be ethically pure and dead than ethically compromised and alive. There is too much fascination with Auschwitz. There is too much of a sense that Auschwitz as an expression of utter victimization is almost a high point in Jewish history. And I think about this in a more recent context. For a number of years after Israel withdrew from Gaza, withdrew its settlers from Gaza, lo and behold, peace did not instantaneously break out. The Israeli town of Sderot was under constant shelling. And Sderot became a kind of a place where tour guides would take, took Obama, they took visiting politicians, and they would say, well, look, you know, we're being shelled, right? Isn't this terrible? And then, you know, UJA Federation, you know, to its great credit, would purchase $13 million to buy a state-of-the-art gym behind 4 walls. Walls 4 feet thick of nuclear-grade concrete so kids could play basketball. See, look, we're being victimized. But Sderot was being treated as an advertisement for Israel. In fact, it was a disgrace for Israel. It was a disgrace that Israel could accept that a town, even on the border with Gaza, could be shelled without a decisive response. Response by a state that had the capacity to carry out that response. The purpose of the state of Israel isn't to showcase Jewish victimization, it's to end Jewish victimization. I see in a sense, I mean, look, the Jewish story is a very long one and is certainly by no means over. And I see Zionism early chapters of Zionism, because I believe Israel will be around for a very, very, very long time, in which we are trying to understand again what it means to be political creatures. I mean, imagine if the Promised Land had been, I don't know, the Canary Islands or Barbados or, you know, something like that. You know, the Jews had returned to their historic homelands in Barbados and sit there and fish and argue about whatever. But no, not only will we return to political life in the 20th century, but we will return to political life where political choices are acute, where the margin of error is very slender, where you cannot engage, as we do too routinely in the United States, in a kind of politics of vanity. Like to say, I'm for peace. Are you for peace, Dennis Prager? Are you for peace? No, I'm against peace. This is sort of the slogan era that's so common in American politics. And so ironically, Jews are thrust back into political life after 2,000 years of exile. And suddenly they discover that their political choices are not between the virtuous option of being pro-peace, pro-ecology, pro-rights of squirrels, et cetera, et cetera, all of which which I entirely think not. But political choices are actually in constant confrontation of the choice of evil. You know, Bibi Netanyahu wakes up in the morning and his menu doesn't say— and I see Governor Wilson nodding because he understands this— the menu is, Governor, you may choose virtuousness and righteousness and in the long course, you know, the good action, or you may choose to be vile, reptilian, stupid, demagogic, and an object of the fury of the New York Times editorial page. Who wants to be? I think I'll be demagogic, right? No, I mean, the choice is, well, if you invade Gaza, for example, to take a recent example, if you invade Gaza and seize the city, you will end Hamas, right? But you will lose 150 soldiers. So the price of bringing an end to this terror will be 150 grieving Israeli parents, or 300 grieving Israeli parents. That's your choice. Then it becomes more complicated. And I think Jews are struggling to understand that the ethics that serves a people in exile in one way or another is not the ethics of politics. I think Jews need an education starting with Aristotle's Politics, in the actual nature of political life. And that's why I keep coming back to this question of philosophy. I think we are philosophically undereducated as Jews and as Americans to understand what it is to be a creature in the political world and to face choices where you understand that morally it's not easy, but precisely because it's difficult, It means that making the hard choice makes you a better man. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt faced tough choices. And Harry Truman, by the way, when he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I admire them more for having those choices and making them, understanding that in doing the right thing, they had to nonetheless become participants in a great deal of suffering.

Now I'm going to ask you a question I am certain you haven't— that you have not been asked. I'm going to bounce a, a theory off you on it. This may be an area where we may differ, uh, and, and may not. It doesn't matter, obviously, but I'm just giving that as a little preface.

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So the question arises of why the Jews. It's not a plug for my book. That's the title. Why the Jews? In other words, number 1, is, in your view, is Israel the Jew among states as the European Jew was the Jew among Europeans? That's number 1. Number 2, if the answer is essentially yes, and And if I could predict your answer, I think it will be yes. It is yes. Okay. So then we get to the question why. Why in this world of staggering evil is there so much preoccupation with one of the more decent countries on Earth? A country the size of— smaller than El Salvador, the size of New Jersey. Why that preoccupation? and why the annihilationist desires and aims. I have my answer. My answer is ultimately there is no fully secular response that makes sense. It is one of the sources of my religiosity, ironically. Jew hatred, which I loathe, nevertheless is a source of my emunah, of my faith as a Jew. No, nothing but ultimately the divine role in Jewish history makes Jew hatred comprehensible. The preoccupation with the evil targeting the Jew, and now the Jewish state, is, as I said, I don't think secularly explainable. I don't think you call yourself a religious Jew. This I just don't know. It would be interesting what you call yourself in that way. How do you react to this explanation for the targeting of the Jewish state?

I don't call myself a religious Jew. Jew, I'm not. I'm a proud Jew. And that's simply to say that I insist that I stand up and be counted. And with a name like Stevens, I could have decided, you know, whatever, had the— yeah, my parents were sort of Jewish, but, you know, and I, you had to— I had to make a choice that this is where I stood. I had— so this is bad because I happen to deeply agree with you, which is to say that Antisemitism or Jew hatred ultimately, in any sort of secular explanation, sort of falls short. But let me nonetheless give you the secular explanation which I think comes closest. Why is it that America, almost uniquely in the world, is a country where there really is no deep antisemitism? I mean, I understand there are antisemites, right? In the United States, you have a level of Jewish flourishing that is unparalleled in human history. And I think it comes down to this. In life, you have a choice. I look at a guy like Bill Gates, I can have one of two reactions. I can think I admire him, or I envy him. And we— people respond in different ways. I happen to look at a guy like Bill Gates, or, you know, pick your, you know, pick your person. And in America, the admiration gene runs strong in us because we have, in part, an economic system where one man's gain is another man's gain, a woman's gain, right? One other guy getting rich only means that I can invest in this company and get rich along. I with him. To see a guy like, you know, come up essentially from nothing, like, and I think of Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp. Jewish kid from Ukraine comes over with his mom because they're fleeing antisemitism in Ukraine, lives on food stamps up in Mountain View, drops out of San Jose State, is sort of an indifferent employee at Yahoo, takes time off, has an idea, boom, Facebook, which wouldn't give him a job when he applied for it through the front door, decides, actually, this is an interesting little application, we're going to give you $19 billion in cash and stock. What do you feel about that? You're like, what am I saying? That darn guy, why did he get it? And why are his $19 billion sucking up what could be, some portion of which could be mine? So in America, we have an admiration-based society. And look, Jews, for a variety of reasons, happen to be a very successful cultural or ethnic group. There are many other very successful cultural or ethnic groups. Mormons are very, you know, just to take an example. There are many all over America. But Jews, you know, it's true, Jews wherever they have gone, they have risen. And, you know, history, the reasons for that are well known. And so only in America did Jews come to a place where that admiration of Jews or philosophy was so deeply entrenched, so much part of the DNA of our country, of our economic system, that people look at Jews and say, "A successful group. Let's be like them." I had an incredible experience a few years ago. I was giving a talk at a synagogue in Cleveland. It was kind of a typical synagogue crowd, like basically middle-aged or elderly Jewish couples. And then this one young Chinese woman who introduced herself, she was from Shanghai, she was getting her MBA at Case Western. And I said, what brings you here? And she said, oh, we Chinese people know Jews are smartest in the world. And I said, oh, come on, you know, that's ridiculous. That's just not true. I mean, there's smart people of all ethnicities, races, et cetera. And she looked at me very sternly and she said, no. Jews smartest in world. Nobel Prize in chemistry, 32%. Nobel Prize in physics, 42%. Nobel Prize in economics, 51%. I mean, I forgot the figures are very interesting, right? And what she was saying is she was saying, I come from an admiration culture, and I admire what you people have accomplished. And so what in the eyes of, I don't know, someone from another, from Europe, might be seen as somehow like, why are all these Jews winning Nobel Prizes. What's the secret? You know, what are they doing? What's the Zionist conspiracy that connects them to the Swedish Academy? Swedes and Zionists, you know, they look with admiration. And I think that that comes— I think so anyway, the point I'm making, which is taking too long to make, is that envy is a powerful force in the And Jews have been at the homicidal edge of the envy gene around the world. The Arab world looks at Jews and what do they see? They see these people who were nothing 40, 50 years ago actually made this country the land of milk and honey. They actually turned it green. They actually built cities and skyscrapers and nuclear missiles and navies and Merkava tanks and drones and you name it. And they did it out of nothing. And by the way, we Jews, I think, make a big mistake when we answer by saying, oh, but don't you know what terrific beneficiaries we are to the world? I mean, don't you know that Israel is now providing, I don't know, help in Haiti or whatever? I mean, we should do these things because they're the right things to do. But again, I get back to political philosophy. Aristotle instructs us in the Nicomachean Ethics, right? That no one hates a benefactor so much as his beneficiary. So if you want to be a benefactor, by all means be a benefactor, but gratitude, do not expect. Now having said all this in a secular explanation, it's deeper, and it would require something almost— it goes to something that I honestly believe, and I say this as a non-religious Jew. There is a— it is something I almost am tempted to say that is satanic in the world. And the persistence, the prevalence, the fact that just 60 years after the Holocaust we are looking at near pogroms in Paris ought to tell us something. This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles.