Home

Six Lessons From The Assassination

By DENNIS PRAGER

The lessons of the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin apply to far more than Israel, Jews and the Middle East.

Lesson No. 1: The Greatest Threats Are Internal

There is almost no group or country today for whom the greatest threats do not come from within. This is true for Israel and Jews, for the United States, for Arab countries and Muslims and for minorities such as blacks in America.

Crime and a general moral dissolution threaten America far more than any external threat. The zealots of the far right and the de-Judaizing elements of the far left threaten Israel far more than do the Palestinians (though still not as much as an Iranian atom bomb or Iraqui biological weapons). The anti-democratic elements of radical Islam threaten Muslims far more than do Israel or the Christian West. And drugs, moral breakdown and the disappearance of fathers threaten black Americans far more than do any whites.

Leaders should therefore be judged by their willingness to tell their people that their greatest threats are internal. Except in time of war, leaders who focus on external threats are usually demagogues, people more in love with power than with truth. Yitzchak Rabin and Anwar Sadat were leaders -- they fought external enemies when they had to, but afterward they told their countrymen that external enemies were no longer necessarily their enemies. For this they were murdered. In Israel and Egypt, the forces focusing on external enemies (Arabs, Jews respectively) are primarily on the right; in America, these forces are primarily on the left (holding, for example, that "white society" is minorities' greatest threat).