‘SA government is sick,’ says Prager

“The only difference between Hamas and the Nazis is that the Nazis hid what they did – or tried to hide it, and Hamas doesn’t try to hide it, and yet Israel is accused of genocide. It’s a sick world, a sick United Nations. Your government in South Africa is sick,” said American talk-show host Dennis Prager, a guest speaker at the prestigious Zimbali Lodge for Pesach this year.

Prager was one of about 300 Pesach guests at Zimbali. The SA Jewish Report spoke to him shortly after his return to Los Angeles about the war on Hamas, political developments in the United States, and his experiences in South Africa.

“Israel has offered the Palestinians a state on five occasions, and it was rejected on five occasions,” Prager said. “Palestinians don’t want a state, they want no Israel. In the current war, if Israel stops fighting, it has lost. It would be the first war it has lost, and that would create a new generation of Israel haters. They would think, ‘We can defeat Israel; we just need to get the world to side with us.’ So Israel needs to fight on, just as America and Britain did in World War II, which ended when the Nazis and the Japanese surrendered. Israel should announce this every day.

“The Palestinians don’t want peace with Israel. They want peace without an Israel. That’s the problem. I don’t know why people are so naïve about this. Palestinians don’t deny it. The world lives in this make-believe universe of a two-state solution. Even most Israelis on the left don’t believe in the two-state solution. The alternative is for Israel to be extremely strong.”

Prager studied Russian and was sent to the Soviet Union in 1969 by Israel “to smuggle in Jewish items and smuggle out Jewish names”, with Jewish emigration banned. On his return, he began lecturing, becoming more well known. In Los Angeles, he started a radio show, and the programme became nationally syndicated by 1998. His show is broadcast on South Africa’s ChaiFM.

“There’s nothing like radio,” Prager said. “You interact with the callers, and I always take those who differ with me first. I believe the ear is deeper than the eye, and radio is just ear. Unlike television, where you rarely get more than five or 10 minutes to develop ideas, I had three hours a day.”

Commenting on the anti-Israel violence that has gripped American university campuses, Prager said, “I did my graduate work at Columbia. I thought Columbia was a moral wasteland in the 1970s, and it’s only deteriorated. The American university is a moral cesspool, and idiotic ideas dominate. I warned parents that sending their children to college was like playing Russian roulette with their values. The only thing different today to when I said it 40 years ago, is that today, there are five bullets in the chamber, not one.

“To say that your child goes to a prestigious university gives many American Jews meaning in life. So, many American Jews were OK with the left, which has come out as being Jew haters who favour the destruction of Israel. This should be the end of the Jewish love affair with the left. But unfortunately, nothing will end, at least among the non-Orthodox, who will continue to vote for the Democrats.”

Prager believes the foment on campuses might favour Donald Trump in the November elections, but this will be offset by female voters on the issue of abortion.

When asked what South African Jews could do with such a pro-Hamas government, Prager said, “If you cannot speak up, you should leave. You can’t live in a place where you can’t even verbally defend yourself. At least in America, our government isn’t wearing keffiyehs.”

Prager mentioned the video interview on his Prager U website of South African member of parliament Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, who denounced as a lie the comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa. “That video should be shown as widely as possible. The apartheid lie is equivalent to the medieval blood libels. Get as many black Christians in South Africa as possible to acknowledge that, and say it publicly. I’m not saying it will end the issue, but it will make a dent. People need to know they’re being lied to.”

He acknowledged that Palestinians in the West Bank are living under military rule. “I wish Israel could get the hell out of there. But I don’t live in a wish world. I live in a real world. If Israel leaves, then the barbarians take over. Look what happened when Israel left Gaza in 2005. It’s a genocidal police state.

“Douglas Murray, who isn’t Jewish and a magnificent defender of Israel, has often stated that ‘Gaza could have been the Singapore of the Middle East’, but they spent billions of dollars on tunnels and rockets to kill Israelis.

“There’s no genocide. There’s no apartheid,” Prager said. “Yes, if you’re under military rule, by definition, you don’t have the same rights. That’s correct. You don’t run your own airport. You don’t have your own army. You don’t have your own police. There are checkpoints; because if there are no checkpoints, people come in and blow up Israeli buses.

“If we spread the wisdom and values of the Torah, we’ll change the world,” he said. He has published commentary on the Torah, called The Rational Bible, aimed at non-Jews as well as Jews, and the secular as well as the religious. “I use only reason not faith to make the text clear,” Prager said.

Prager has been called a right-wing conservative. “I don’t really care,” he said, “I have no problem with the label. Conserving the best of the past is one of the most noble things any generation can do.

“I’ve spent my life saying what I believe is true, not trying to win friends,” Prager said. “You can’t do both.”