Russell Wardlow blogs about the March 5 U.J. program:
Prager, though I respect him, is constantly frustrating on questions like these in that he seems to refuse following the implications of his beliefs to their logical conclusions. Berenbaum actually went farther in explicitly advocating separation between Israel and the Palestinians.
Prager’s rhetoric is still useful as a corrective to the vague and unreal suggestions about the peace process and moral equivalence that still litter the media landscape, but the fact that he doesn’t speak beyond the present means that he can’t offer any strategy or goal beyond an aggressive holding pattern modeled on the current situation, wherein Israel will presumably continue to kill Palestinians it considers threatening, but not do anything more ambitious or long-term.
The underlying assumption that makes this at all tenable is that the Palestinians will eventually change and become acceptable neighbors. This goes to the more basic problem that liberals like Prager have in discussing the wider problem of Islam: they are, for ideological reasons, unable to extrapolate a conclusion that Islam is inevitably (or nearly so) unreconcilable to the western world, no matter what the evidence says.
On this point, Prager likes to say, "I don’t judge religions, I judge practitioners," and he’s quite willing to say that a huge proportion of Muslims are actively dangerous or at least hostile to us. But he categorically will not say that the belief system of Islam itself is such, holding always to the assumption that anything can happen in the future and that Islam will be whatever Muslims want it to be.
