On Aug. 27, 1985, Dennis Prager debated Rabbi Meir Kahane on the Ray Briem show. “It was one of the ugliest debates of my life,” says Dennis in a 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 15. “He was insulting the whole night.”
Here are some highlights of the debate as transcribed by Dennis Prager and published in his Fall 1985 edition of Ultimate Issues:
Briem: “Why in Israel, that always has had such compassion for people, invited the Arabs to come and stay in Israel when it was formed…would you want to kick them?”
Kahane: “Because the people of Israel and especially the Sephardic Jews of Israel, the Jews who came from Arab countries, didn’t learn about Arabs in seminars on the West Coast. They lived with Arabs, they know what it means to have lived under Arabs, and they’d never again want to.
“The problem is that the Arabs who live inside Israel hate Israel. And they understand that the Arabs, if they could, would do the Jews what they do to themselves every day in Beirut. They don’t want that to happen. They’re not troubled by the niceties of Western democracy.”
“I don’t hate Arabs. I love Jews. And I intend to save the Jewish people, both from Arabs and from themselves.”
“If there is anyone…who thinks that there is one Arab in Israel who would rather live in a country which is defined legally as the Jewish state, he has greater contempt for the Arabs than I thought that even liberals could have.”
“There is a basic contradiction between Zionism and Western democracy. A Jewish state at the very minimum means a state with a majority of Jews, because only in that way can Jews solve their own destiny, be masters of their own fate. Western democracy postulates the basic axiom that it doesn’t matter who’s the majority. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or non-Jewish, whoever’s the majority is it. Therefore there is a basic contradiction, since most western Jews are basically schizophrenic, with one foot inside Judaism and the other half inside western culture, and they would like to believe that Judaism is Thomas Jefferson. It isn’t.”
Prager: “I’d like to defend Judaism from the smear campaign taht Meir Kahane has directed against it.”
“[Kahane] is [antisemitism’s] tragic echo, produced to a large extent by the Holocaust and by the Arab desire to destroy Israel. He is a classic product of Jews being hated for all these centuries, and he has incorporated a mirror image of the non-Jew in his psyche. He hates non-Jews as he feels non-Jews hate him. His answer to Arafat is to be the Jewish Arafat.”
“Ray, you asked him, and he dismissed it as a lunacy, what really differentiates Meir Kahane’s attitude to Arabs from Hitler’s to German Jews. He didn’t answer you, because the difference is minimal.”
“This is a Jewish fascist. It is a tragedy that he cites that he is rooted in Judaism when there isn’t anything normative in Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative or Reform — that supports him.”
“One could cry over the fact that there is some popularity to someone who has such views when the Torah instructs the Jew to love the stranger because the Jews themselves were strangers in Egypt and know how it feels to be one.”
Kahane: “The Torah and the Talmud say any appointment of authority in Israel shall only be Jewish. That’s not democracy. Maimonides states clearly that no non-Jew shall ever be appointed over a Jew, even as a clerk concerning the water carriers.”
“Judaism states clearly that the Jews, when they create a Jewish state, will not grant citizenship to a non-Jew.”
Prager: “Rabbi Kahane is by and large considered in the Jewish world an immoral aberration.”
Kahane: “Assuming the Arabs would become a majority, what would Dennis Prager say?”
Prager: “In theory, the Jewish state has a right to remain a Jewish state. Just as during WWII, England suspended certain democratic processes.”
Caller1: “Mr. Prager, do you believe that the Arabs, if they have a chance to destroy Israel, will do that?’
Prager: “Most Arabs would.”
Caller1: “Then from that standpoint alone you must admit that Mr. Kahane has a reason for doing that [throwing Arabs out] because the Arabs will unite and destroy Israel the first chance they get.”
Prager: “Yes, but one of the reasons that it is important to have a Jewish state is in order to preserve Judaism. But if Israel becomes like its Arab neighbors in moral outlook, then the only difference between a Kahaneized Israel and an Arafatized Jordan is the language they speak. So Israel’s reason for being, if it becomes a state as morally low as many of its neighbors, [is undermined]. Israel can continue to be a light unto the nations, as a democratic state in the midst of tyranny, and need not be compromised just because of its enemies.”
Kahane: “If all the Arabs tomorrow become saints, and I was now living in a state with 730,000 Arab saints who in 20 years will be two and a half or three million Arab saints, and in 30 years will be the majority of the country but saintly, I don’t want to live as a minority under any saints.”
Caller4: “I would rather see a strong Israel that everybody hates, rather than an Auschwitz that everyone loves.”
Prager: “I agree with you… Part of the giveaway on Rabbi Kahane’s moral understanding is as he said, ‘even if all the Arabs were saints.’ In other words, the issue is not morality, it is race. It is Arab blood that is detested, not Arab morality. In other words, no matter how decent they might be, he wants to kick them out. Morality is foreign to his understanding. it is a blood-based understanding.”
Kahane: “You know very well taht if any Arab came to me and said, I would like to become Jewish, and he converted according to the proper standards, of course, just as any other non-Jew, that he would be welcome, blood and all… My problem with the Arabs has nothing to do with their blood. It’s that they want Jewish blood.”
Prager: “You respect [Arabs] so much that you want to chase them out.”
Kahane: “Exactly.”
Dec. 13, 2001, Prager said that almost all of Kahane’s proposed laws for Israel (making it a crime for a Jew to sleep with a non-Jew, to swim in the ocean with a non-Jew, etc) came from Torah Law.
Wikipedia said: “Kahane’s legislative proposals focused on transferring the Arab population out from the Land of Israel, revoking Israeli citizenship from non-Jews, and banning Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations, based on the Code of Jewish Law compiled by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah.”
