So I’m reading this complicated story in the Jewish Journal about UCLA, my alma mater: “Last week, 18 of 30 candidates for positions in UCLA’s student government signed a pledge to not take trips to Israel…”
Why do American Jews support so much immigration of Muslims? These people don’t like Jews. Millions of Jews believe Islam is set on world conquest via violence and would love to destroy the United States and Israel. They wonder — why does the US and Israel tolerate Muslims? Why is the practice of Islam legal in the United States and Israel?
Alan Roebuck wrote to Lawrence Auster in 2009:
I was just listening to Dennis Prager, and his subject was Sotomayor. As he is wont to do, he was making the distinction between opposing a minority because of his race, and opposing him because of his beliefs. And then it occurred to me that for most minorities, it makes no difference why you oppose them. If a white opposes them, it’s entirely equivalent, in their minds, to opposing them because they’re black/Hispanic/etc.
Thus, for example, it seems to me that when a black accuses a white of racism, the actual meaning, for the black person, of the word “racism” is usually: “Any opposition to me or to other blacks with whom I identify.” It appears to me that for most (American, at any rate) blacks, if a white opposes them for any reason, the white is automatically labeled “racist.”
Lawrence Auster replied:
I once gave a talk on immigration at the Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. In the question period, one of the students, a young black woman, challenged me on the racism of my position. I said to her: “If white and Asian immigrants were entering a black African country en masse and changing it into a white and Asian country, would you approve of that? She said forcefully and without hesitation, “I’d be against that.”
Our side must continually pose this type of question to the other side, to expose that their demand for white inclusion of nonwhites has nothing to do with any principle of justice, but is simply a racial tribal power move against whites. And if that’s what it is, then obviously whites have the same right to defend their territory that other races have.
“Russell W.” wrote to Lawrence Auster about Dennis Prager:
He also has a sometimes bizarre anti-biology approach to all ethical matters. For instance, he considers racism as the most grievous human sin throughout history, and so anything at all that even acknowledges race as a reality is offensive. He was (completely rightly, in my opinion) appalled at the “Baby Richard” episode during the 90s, where an adopted child who had lived with his new parents from near-infancy to around age four or five was removed and given back to the formerly absentee biological father. He described the danger in ascribing so much importance to blood (and again, this seems like a perfectly valid point), but he takes this view to the extreme and says blood is completely meaningless. For instance, he has said many times that if the hospital mistakenly gave him another person’s baby and he kept that child for a day, he would not want to bring it back to switch it for his biological child. Of course, for every sane and decent person there’s a threshold of time after which the emotional connection overrides biology, but one day?
Auster replied:
I was just talking with a Jewish friend the last couple of days who has the same absolute opposition to the slightest hint that “blood,” i.e., descent, matters in the definition of a people, particularly the Jewish people. He said this rejection of any racial or ethnic component is central to Judaism, since what makes a Jew is the covenant with God. To non-Jews, of course, this staunch Jewish rejection of ethnic tribalism seems risible, as Jews are the oldest and most famous tribal people on earth.
Lawrence Auster wrote in 2005 that folks like Dennis had already given away the game:
Our quasi-religious faith in America as the spreader of freedom around the world grows in proportion as our actual America loses its culture, its morality, its spiritual and historical cohesion, and its will to defend itself, not to mention its real liberties, which are not to be confused with its modern, liberationist liberties. We can’t defend the actual America anymore, because we fear that we’ve already given so much of it away that the attempt to bring it back would make us seem like extremists or cranks. So, needing something to believe in, but no longer having a real country to believe in, we turn what’s left of our country into a mission to achieve universal democracy, and we believe in that instead.
The more we empty our country of its historical meaning, the more hysterical becomes our embrace of Bush’s messianic rhetoric, which is not about America, but about the world.
Internet poster Stephen T. wrote about Prager to Lawrence Auster Nov. 24, 2006: “If his wife needed some chores done while he was out of town and told him she intended to go to a street corner and randomly hire a Mestizo Mexican day laborer in the country illegally to work around the house with her in his absence, he would feel completely relaxed and have no worry whatsoever about her safety. However, if she said she was going to hire an American man to do the same thing, Prager said he would greatly fear for her well-being.”
Auster replied: “That is one sick liberal. He has not even read in the papers of the endless series of rapes and murders of white Americans, not to mention lesser crimes, performed by Mexican and other Hispanic illegal aliens, including murders of their white employers?”
Another poster replied:
Dennis Prager…has a deeply heartfelt, emotional investment in believing that, while Americans are turning their backs on “conservative values,” there is somewhere else on the face of this earth a superior “other” culture—a simple, pious, goodhearted folk, who will work as servants for his family for practically nothing and who embody the old-time values he reveres… When reminded of the rampant corruption, immorality, violence, and cruelty which these same Mexicans have created in abundance in their failed, backwards country of origin, Prager typically excuses it all as entirely the accidental quirks and flukes of a broken political system—having nothing to do with any sort of cultural or societal ills of Mexicans at large. I live in Los Angeles and I also know where Dennis Prager lives: it’s an outlying, heavily private security-guarded community nowhere NEAR any of these “other” people whose values he supposedly admires so much. His kids have all attended exclusive private schools (not the LAUSD, with its Mexican-style 60% dropout rate) and I doubt Mr Prager socializes with many of the working Americans he delights in seeing downgraded from middle-class status to the level of third world peasants.
Internet poster “Gary M.” wrote to Lawrence Auster in 2008:
Prager interviewed Michelle Malkin a number of years ago on his radio show about her book, Invasion. At one point, Malkin became so distressed by what she was hearing from him, that she stopped and asked, “Mr. Prager, do you even believe we should have a southern border?”
…Prager seldom, if ever, has anything but gushing praise for immigrants of the Mexican variety. He says he favors a border fence, but… he is one of these people who also supports a huge increase in legal immigration to go along with any reductions a fence might provide in illegal immigration.
Lawrence Auster wrote Nov. 24, 2006:
Prager supports mass immigration and is a passionate crusader against “racism” (he even labels as “racist” people who prefer to marry people of the same race). [Robert] Spencer for his part proposes a rather demanding questionnaire that prospective Muslim immigrants would have to answer to demonstrate that they are not believers in jihad, but beyond that he does not criticize America’s non-discriminatory immigration policies or call for the end of Muslim immigration or even its reduction. Prager and Spencer both believe that Muslims, with the exception of those nasty radical Muslims whom they want to screen out, can be assimilated into America. But then Prager and Spencer express shock and outrage that a Muslim American who has been elected to Congress intends to take his oath of office on the Koran. Well, what did they expect? Did they think that even a moderate Muslim would want to take his oath on the Jewish and Christian scriptures?
…Ellison’s election to Congress is part and parcel of the ongoing Islamization of American life that has been brought about mainly by Muslim immigration. Without that immigration, Islam would have remained a tiny insignificant element in America, and Ellison would not have been elected to Congress. Or, if he had been elected, it would have been seen as a freak occurrence, not conveying the threatening message that we are losing control over our culture and institutions. In any case, Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants will inevitably be elected to Congress and other offices in the future, and will inevitably want to take their oath on the Koran, and what will the right-liberals say then?
Prager’s and Spencer’s reaction exemplifies the incurable superficiality of right-liberalism. The right-liberals assume that all human beings are the same, and therefore that all non-Western peoples including Muslims (except for certified extremists) can be assimilated into America. The right-liberals then are surprised that these aliens believe in their own, non-Western religions. Their surprise proves that the right-liberals have never subjected their universalist belief system to the slightest critical examination. They have never asked themselves if it is really true that all people can assimilate into America. They have never said to themselves, Gosh, if we admit Muslims into America, won’t they want to make Islam a part of America? Somehow they assumed that no matter whom we admitted into America, America would remain the same—that Muslims would somehow stay in some private, insignificant sphere, doing their jobs, paying their taxes, raising their children, without actually becoming active members of our society and thus bringing their own desires, preferences, and belief systems into the public sphere where they would visibly affect and transform America.
By contrast, traditionalists recognize that Muslims are (and here comes the little fact that endlessly shocks the liberals) Muslims. That’s right, folks: Muslims are Muslims. The people with whom Muslims share a sacred bond of solidarity are their fellow Muslims (including jihadists and terrorists), not Jews and Christians. Their model of behavior is Muhammad, not Jesus. Their law is the sharia, not the Constitution. Their holy book is the Koran, not the Bible. From which it follows that if we don’t want elected officials in this country to be taking their oath of office on the Koran, we must do whatever is necessary to prevent the increase of the Muslim population. We must, at a minimum, not admit Muslim immigrants. We must, at a minimum, deport Muslim non-citizens. And to the extent that Islam is already here, as a result of immigration or conversion, we must restrict and delegitimize it, as a belief system that is totally incompatible with the laws and customs of our society and our character as a people.
Prager and Spencer seem to want the effects of such a policy—they want Ellison to be stopped from swearing on the Koran—without articulating the policy itself. That is, they don’t want to say that Islam, as a religion incompatible with our Constitution, must be deprived of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. In brief, they think they can have traditionalist, non-liberal results (namely the preservation of a recognizable and cohesive society based on a common culture), without embracing traditionalist, non-liberal principles.
Lawrence Auster wrote Dec. 5, 2006:
On one hand, like a conservative, he posits that America has a particular moral and religious culture. He says that the Judeo-Christian tradition is central to American life and must never be challenged. On the other hand, like a liberal, he insists on the totally non-discriminatory inclusion in this country of Muslims who obviously are going to challenge that culture. And when, as has inevitably happened, the Muslims do challenge it, Prager’s conservative side springs back into action and he denounces the Muslims for disrespecting the American tradition!
…He improvises his own Torah as he goes along. His position in this case, announced from on top of his personal Mount Sinai, is that all office holders in the U.S. regardless of their religious beliefs must take their oath on the Bible, because the Bible is the source of our values and our constitutional principles of liberty. Of course there is no U.S. law requiring this, but such is the Gospel according to St. Dennis, which transcends U.S. law. At the same time, St. Dennis insists on the mass immigration of people whose religion commands them to crush beneath their feet biblical religion and the people who follow it.
…Prager, quite rightly, wants America to be a particularist, “Judeo-Christian” society. Yet his liberal principles of equality and non-discrimination lead inevitably to the destruction of the religious and moral particularity that he prizes.
Obviously I agree with Prager that the Koran does not belong in American public life. But unlike Prager I am consistent on the point and say that Muslims themselves do not belong in America and that it is a fatal mistake to allow their immigration hither.
In a traditionalist America, Muslims would not be allowed to immigrate or be naturalized. The Koran would not be allowed any place in our public life. Also, in a traditionalist America with a restored federal Constitution, the individual states would have restored to them their right to have religious establishments if they chose, and to institute restrictions on citizenship, the franchise, and political office based on religious belief, as was true of many states up to the mid 19th century. Obviously, there would not be enough Muslims in such an America for a Muslim Congressman to be elected, but, if there were, he could not use the Koran to take his oath on, because it would be understood that the Koran has no place in the United States and in the several states…
This would not be a violation of the First Amendment, since Islam is not a religion as ordinarily understood. Islam is a tyrannical religio-political system aimed at the destruction of every non-Islamic government including our own. Therefore Islam should have no rights as a religion in this country.
In the 19th century, a series of federal statutes and court decisions banned both the Mormon practice of polygamy and the promotion of polygamy, on the basis that polygamy is antithetical to our civilization. Any religious rights that the “religiously based” practice of polygamy might have claimed were superseded by the larger fact that polygamy is incompatible with our very civilization. I think the same reasoning ought to be applied to Islam.
Now what I’ve laid out above is an ideal situation. What do we do in our actual situation? As I said, given our present, liberal institutions, I see no legal basis to stop Ellison from doing what he wants. If we want to stop him from doing what he wants, we must change our system in a fundamental manner, namely, by limiting the application of the liberal principles of freedom and equality to those groups and cultures and religions that are compatible with, or at least not dangerous to, our society. Tolerance and equality have their place, but they cannot be our ruling principles. No society can survive for long if non-discriminatory tolerance and equality are its ultimate guide. Look at Britain as it heads into the abyss. Therefore the liberal principles of tolerance and equality must be limited by the parameters of our actual culture and of our structural, non-liberal political principles, such as, for example, national sovereignty and constitutional limits on government. Things radically antithetical to our culture, our sovereignty, and our constitutional structure should not receive tolerance and equal treatment. Meaning that we would officially and formally strip Islam of its free exercise rights. At present we are obviously not living in a traditionalist society, but if we want to stop Muslims from bringing their religion into American public life, we must begin moving in that direction.
To sum up, there are two consistent and principled ways of approaching this problem.
There is the consistent liberal path, which says that all people must be admitted equally into America, have equal religious rights in America, and can take their oath on the Koran and even institute sharia law if they want.
Then there is the consistent traditionalist path, which says we have a certain Constitution, a certain form of government, a certain form of society, a certain understanding of individual rights, certain common moral beliefs, and a certain culture. We do not include and tolerate all things equally, but only those things that are compatible with our actual culture.
Dennis Prager is caught between these two positions, and does not understand the nature of the contradiction or even the fact that he is caught in it, because he takes for granted his liberal principles AND his conservative attachments and he simply assumes he can have both. In reality he cannot have both. If he wants to preserve America as a Judeo-Christian society, then he must restrict citizenship to people who are compatible with such a society. And if he wants to have a truly liberal society, then he must let everyone in and not complain when the newcomers start to make America over in their image.
No one on our side, including me, had thought about what Muslims actually do as part of their daily routine. Maybe we figured they prayed or whatever in private. But now we suddenly realize that in institutions throughout America they are doing their Islamic thing in shared public spaces, and expecting everyone else to adjust. These issues never came up when we began letting Muslims immigrate; we never asked ourselves what their customs are and do we want these customs in America. The other day I stepped through the actual steps of both the washing and the prayer, as described at a Muslim website. It’s quite a complex procedure, for example, each foot must be washed three times, whatever that means. The person must “clean” his ears with his index finger and “clean” behind the ears with his thumb. The person must sniff water into his nostrils and blow it out. To think of people doing this in workplace restrooms or college dorm restrooms several times a day is simply appalling. Yet, as I’ve said, we’ve never heard about this before. This is where the rubber meets the road in the assimilation question. No honest person can say that such customs are conformable with America and with any Western society. The Dennis Pragers and Norman Podhoretzes of the world, who want to us to wage war on “Islamofascists” abroad while we continue welcoming Muslims into America, cannot honestly maintain that Muslim foot baths belong in the shared public spaces of America.
So, now that we’re starting to get a glimpse of the existence and the scale of the problem, what do we do about it? If we are Dennis Prager, we insist that all religions are welcome in America, but that if the people we’ve let in actually practice their religion, that is terrible.
Auster proposed a final solution to the problem of Islam in America:
Since Muslims, admitted legally to the U.S., and acting within the law once they are here, have the divinely mandated aim of destroying our system, and can destroy our system, we must respond accordingly. It is not a matter of calling Muslims criminals or terrorists. It is a matter of determining that the religion of Islam is antithetical to our culture and civilization and therefore must, at the least, be severely restricted.
This can be accomplished in two ways. Congress could pass a law declaring that Islam is not a religion in the usual sense but a political movement inherently dangerous to our civilization, our laws, and our liberties. This would remove First Amendment protections from Islam and enable the government to pass further laws regulating, restricting, or even prohibiting Islam. Any such laws would, of course, face continual constitutional challenges.Which leads to the second and more radical approach. We could pass a Constitutional amendment declaring that, notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution and any laws of the United States, the religion of Islam cannot be practiced in the United States. By placing the prohibition of Islam in the Constitution, by saying that Islam is incompatible with our existence as a society, we would be making a fundamental statement about the kind of society America is, and that is precisely the kind of thing that belongs in the Constitution. After the Civil War, slavery was prohibited, not by statute or presidential proclamation, but by an amendment to the Constitution, indicating that slavery has no place in the United States. Up to that point, slavery had been legal in much of the U.S., and during the Civil War had been ended by presidential proclamation under wartime powers. Slavery was only truly extirpated from the U.S. by the Thirteenth Amendment, which superseded all previous laws and all Constitutional protections that had given slavery a place in this country. It is time to think about doing the same with regard to Islam.
With the Thirteenth Amendment as our model, the amendment could be written as follows:
Section 1. The religion taught by the Prophet Muhammad in the Koran and in the Islamic Traditions or Hadiths, and formalized in the Islamic schools of jurisprudence, also known as the Sharia Law, shall not be practiced within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. This article supersedes any contrary provision of this Constitution and of the laws of the United States, and of the constitutions and laws of the several states.
Section 3. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The constitutionality of any laws passed by Congress pursuant to this article shall not be subject to the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.
In 2006, Dennis almost said that the West was at war with Islam. Lawrence Auster wrote:
He says Islam has always been an imperialistic religion, conquering other lands and peoples, and that this is based on the Koran. He then does the kind of thing that critics of Islam should do repeatedly. He establishes the actual connection between Islamic sacred writings (the Koran and the Hadith) and actual Muslim practice, by showing how Muhammad’s command of total war on humanity has been quoted and followed by respected Muslim leaders over the centuries:
The Prophet Muhammad in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”
Saladin (great 12th-century founder of the Ayyubid dynasty that included Ayyubid Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and much of present-day Saudi Arabia): “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.”
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (father of the Islamic revolution in Iran): “We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”
Osama bin Laden in November 2001: “I was ordered to fight the people until they say ‘there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.’”
But then having made this powerful and decisive point about Islam, Prager half-throws it away:
We pray that there arises a strong Muslim group that is guided by the Quranic verse, “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.”
But until such time, we had better understand that we are not merely fighting a war on terror, but a war against an ideology that wishes us to convert, be subject to Islamic law, or die.
Auster added: “Even if Muslims did not gain the whole world by bin Laden-type means (which Prager opposes) but by peaceable means, once they controlled the whole world, the whole world would be under the quasi-totalitarian regime of sharia.”
In September of 2007, after Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, James N. wrote to Lawrence Auster:
Prager said, “Iran has one of the worst records in the world in basic human rights,” as an intro to why we needed to “do something.”…
The question is, “Do the Iranian (or other) people have the right to practice Islam?”
All they are doing in Iran, in Egypt, in Indonesia, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, is practicing Islam. Does Dennis Prager believe we have the right to deny them that “basic human right”? Or does he believe that “basic human rights” RULES OUT the practice of Islam?
Lawrence Auster replied:
Exactly. This is the foreign policy analogue to his absurd anger over Keith Ellison’s swearing in on the Koran. He wants Muslims to come into America, then gets furious when they behave as Muslims. He inchoately expects them to assimilate, but hasn’t thought critically about what this would mean.
When he says Muslims must assimilate, what he really means (though he will never recognize this) is that they must give up Islam.
When he says Iranians must practice human rights, what he really means (though he will never recognize this) is that they must give up Islam.
If he recognized that his demands for Muslim assimilation and for Muslim practice of human rights would require that Muslims give up Islam, which short of mass apostasy is impossible, his non-discriminatory position, based on the assumption that all people are basically alike, would fall apart.
In an Aug. 2, 2012 column, Dennis asked, “Can Islam Be Reformed?” Lawrence Auster wrote:
And here’s how he gets to the bottom of the issue. He cites the opinions of a handful of “moderate” Muslims in the U.S. who argue for a reformed Islam, chiefly the supremely ridiculous Zuhdi Jasser, and on that basis Prager concludes that, yes, Islam can be reformed.
Auster wrote July 2, 2012: “Dennis Prager is a joke, a man helplessly caught in his own contradictions, such as believing that America must be open to every person and culture in the world (his liberal part), and believing that America must preserve its traditions (his conservative part).”
In a 2006 essay, Dennis wrote about the Hamas landslide: “That is one reason why the Bush doctrine — we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world — is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life — from the most personal to the most macro — by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality.”
Lawrence Auster replied:
It seemed strange to me because it simply assumes that the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy in the Muslim world is the opposite of thinking wishfully and denying reality…
The election proves the left wrong about the Palestinians. But how does the election prove that spreading democracy to Muslims is valid? Hasn’t the election proved that spreading democracy to Muslims leads to a Hamas government?Or is Prager suggesting that the real purpose of spreading democracy is to smoke out the Muslims and demonstrate once and for all how destructive they are, so that we won’t have to deal with them any more and can treat them as enemies and make war on them or seal them off or let them go to hell?
But of course that’s not the purpose enunciated by the leader of the spread-democracy movement, President Bush. He’s spreading democracy not because he wants to expose and discredit Muslims as incurable terrorists, but because he thinks that democracy will make the Muslims peaceful and friendly.
So the Hamas election is at least as much a reproof to Bush as it is to the left. But in the fanatically polarized mindset of today’s “conservatives,” every issue must be seen as showing the left wrong and Bush right. A shattering blow to the whole Bush Doctrine is interpreted as a vindication of Bush and a repudiation of the left.
In a 2014 essay, John Mearsheimer pointed out that the United States had few if any strategic interests in the Middle East. “Israel is now so confident of its military superiority over its Arab neighbors that it is actually reducing its conventional forces.”
A Lawrence Auster reader wrote in 2007:
Yesterday Prager interviewed Paul Collier, a British economist and author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The discussion was an ostensibly conservative take on the subject suggesting something beyond foreign aid was necessary to solve these nations’ problems. It turns out three of the poorest nations are Sierra Leon, Nigeria and Uganda. Prager then wondered what made Uganda so different from, say, Hungary or Chile. They listed a series of differences. Corrupt governments was first, but according to the expert Uganda has a relatively benign government as of late (though why it is prone to bad government, including once having a cannibal as head of state, was left unasked). After going through the usual economic list—natural resources, access to water, industrial production—Collier suggested that Uganda had “bad neighbors” whereas Hungary and Chile had good ones. At no point in the hour was the culture of these three nations mentioned as having anything to do with their relative economic states.
Now, Chile is the most European of Latin American nations except for Argentina. Since Pinochet left office in 1981 (in a voluntary plebiscite) Chile has enjoyed the fruits of the economic reforms he initiated. The majority of the Chilean ruling class is Basque in origin, along with large numbers of Italian and German descendants, and of course native peoples, a very stoic, solid type I might add. Whatever is responsible for Chile being Chile and Mexico being Mexico, much less Uganda, has nothing to with any of this. Mexico’s natural resources dwarf Chile’s by the way.
Hungary, too, was reduced to outside variables. The fact that this ancient nation was once a genuine power with Austria and takes a back seat to none in its classical music tradition and its intellectual heritage is irrelevant. But here is what gets me:
Prager, rightfully so, is very proud of Israel. Yet he denies everyone else what he readily assumes of Israel, namely, that its ethno-cultural makeup have something to do with its success and its very being. If five million non-Jews settled in Israel it would cease to be Israel, but somehow if five million Ugandans settled in Hungary it would still be Hungary? It has been said, correctly in my view, that if a Jewish state had been created in modern day Uganda it would be an economic success. Can one think of a state with 1) worse neighbors, or 2) scarcer natural resources than Israel? Given the economist’s criteria, there is no way to explain Israel’s position vis-a-vis Uganda except to ask about the culture, including the ethno-culture, of each.
This is something I have noticed among liberal Jews: a refusal to allow others to affirm what is celebrated in one’s own—distinctiveness.
Auster replied:
I have never talked with a self-identified Jew who assented to the idea that Jewishness has anything to do with ethnicity, meaning a peoplehood formed at least in large part of common descent. It is an absolute axiom with Jews that Jewishness does not involve ethnicity. Culture, religion, shared history and values, yes, but not ethnicity. That the most famous ethnic people in the world deny that the are an ethnic people is pretty funny, but there it is. It’s another of the consequences of the world’s 12-year experience with Adolph Hitler that the very people he sought to destroy as a people, now, as a result of that event, deny that they are a people—for the same reason that the whole Western world says that ethnic or racial discrimination is the worst evil.
Since Prager (I’m assuming) does not acknowledge a Jewish ethnicity, he is not attributing Israel’s success to ethnicity while ignoring the role of ethnicity in other peoples’ success or failure, and so there is no double standard.
However, you said that Prager and his guest not only ignored race/ethnicity, but ignored culture too. There you may have him in a double standard. My guess is that they stayed away from culture because, ahem, culture gets too close to ethnicity, in the sense of something that is passed on from generation to generation and therefore expressing the essence of a group. To suggest that the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans are dysfunctional, is too close to saying that sub-Saharan Africans themselves are dysfunctional [for a First World way of life].
Prager’s reaction to IQ and race mirrors that of Oxford economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, who had the following interaction on the Freakanomics blog:
Q. What do you think of Richard Lynn’s findings about race differences in intelligence and their relatedness to Africa’s continuing state of underdevelopment? In his work, Mr. Lynn compiled the results of numerous studies which appear to show fairly unambiguously that average I.Q.’s in sub-Saharan Africa are below 70. Studies furthermore show that this disadvantage is almost certainly inherited genetically. — Denis Bider
A. I don’t know this stuff and don’t want to. But I am just about prepared to believe that the average Chinese person is smarter than the average Englishman. Despite this, the average Englishman is more than 10 times richer than the average Chinese person — so intelligence is manifestly not closely related to the performance of an economy.
As journalist Steve Sailer commented: “In other words, ‘Please don’t Watson me! I’ll be however stupid I have to be in order to keep my nice job at Oxford.'”
