Opinion

Prager: How the Left Sees the World: Power, Race, and Class

By  PragerU
   DailyWire.com
Dennis Prager
PragerU

In the newest PragerU video, Dennis Prager addresses a question which, on the surface, he suggests, doesn’t make sense: “Why does the Left hate Israel?”

After all, “Israel is a liberal democracy,” extending “full rights to women, to gays, and to its many Arab citizens,” notes the popular radio host, author and PragerU founder. While, “like all countries, Israel is flawed,” when compared to most countries — not to mention its neighbors — “it is a civil rights paradise,” he says.

The reason, Prager explains, is that the Left “is not guided by a moral compass.” Instead, it is “guided by three other compasses,” which are “a power compass, a race compass, and a class compass.”

The “power compass” involves evaluating people and nations “on the basis of weak and strong,” with weakness meaning “you’re good,” and strength meaning “you’re bad.” By this logic, Israel and America are strong, and are therefore bad. The Palestinians, conversely, are regarded as weak, and are therefore good.

After pointing out that strength and weakness are irrelevant “when you are guided by a moral compass,” Prager discusses why “Israel was not a big issue for the left” 50 years ago, when they were “perceived as weak.” This perception changed “after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel achieved a stunning military victory.” As Israel became strong, Israel became “bad.” 

With such a metric, Prager contends, “no matter how much terror Palestinians engaged in — hijacking airplanes, murdering eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics, blowing up Israelis in pizza parlors and at weddings — the Left’s position never changed.” Because the Palestinians were seen as weak, and Israel was seen as strong, “Palestinians good. Israel bad.”

Prager says that this viewpoint is “one of the three ways the left judges the world,” and that it can be tested by understanding that the United States is seen as bad because it is strong, and Third World countries that oppose the United States are seen as good because they are weak.

Cuba, for example, “has been adored by the Left for decades,” despite the fact that “Cuba’s communist party has ruined Cuba, that Cubans have no civil rights, and Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the world.” The same calculus applied to North Vietnam in the 1960s, even though “America was trying to preserve the freedom of the South Vietnamese.”

Prager concludes his discussion of the “power compass” by stating that “the stronger Israel gets — as it effectively defends itself, as its economy grows, and its diplomatic position improves — the more the Left hates it.”

He then moves on to the second of the Left’s compasses: the “race compass,” saying that — in the same manner as weakness and strength are viewed as synonymous with good and evil — “the Left substitutes non-white and white for good and evil,” judging people not “by their actions, but by their race.” For this reason, Prager says, “the Left asserts that a black person cannot be racist, only a white person can be racist.” Because “Israelis are considered white and Palestinians are not white,” the Left has labeled Israel as evil, choosing to “essentially ignore Palestinian terror” and “loudly condemn Israel’s responses to terror.”

Finally, Prager discusses the Left’s third compass, the “class compass,” judging “people’s actions based on their economic class,” with rich people and nations viewed as bad, and poor people and nations viewed as good. 

“This began,” Prager posits, “with Karl Marx, who divided the world by economic class, not moral behavior. To Marx and to Marxism, good and evil is entirely class-based. Good is defined as workers; evil is employers.” Therefore, according to the “class compass,” the Left hate Israel and America because “they are both wealthy.”

Prager concludes the video by warning against the increased destruction of our “moral compass” in favor of the Left’s three other compasses: “As fewer and fewer people perceive the world in terms of good and evil — substituting a power, race, or class compass for a moral compass — you will inevitably get more evil, and more hatred of the good — beginning with Israel and America, and ending with Western Civilization.”

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