On his radio show Jan. 9, Dennis turned to his wife 20 minutes in to the movie and said, ‘If this does not get better in 15 minutes, we’re outta here."
"It is well worth seeing. It is the great theme of my life — blood does not matter, love does."
Dennis was distressed by this reaction to the Gaza incursion from the Vatican:
ROME — Tensions rose between the Vatican and Israel on Thursday after Israel condemned a high-ranking Vatican official for comparing the Gaza Strip to “a concentration camp.”
"Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Council for Justice and Peace, said in an interview published Wednesday in an online publication.
He defended his comments in the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica on Thursday. While noting that Hamas rockets into Israel were “certainly not sugared almonds,” he called the situation in Gaza “horrific” and said conditions there went “against human dignity.”
Israel on Thursday harshly condemned the cardinal’s use of World War Two imagery. “We are astounded that a spiritual dignitary would have such words, that are so far removed from truth and dignity,” said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
He added that it was “shocking to hear the vocabulary of Hamas propaganda coming from a member of the church.” But he denied that it would cause a diplomatic crisis. It “doesn’t change the nature of relations between Israel and the Holy See,” Mr. Palmor said.
Dennis: "If people representing doctrines I have deep hopes for, then we don’t have much hope. If a high-ranking official of the Vatican calls Gaza a concentration camp, and the worst he can say about Hamas is that they don’t send sugared almonds to Israel, it is depressing. When a religious person is a moral idiot, it is depressing. When a secular person is a moral idiot, it is unfortunate, but when a religious Jew or Christian is, what is left? If you had told me that somebody was the president of the Council for Justice and Peace, I would’ve assumed he was a moral idiot."
"Sarah Palin gives an interview and all you realize is what a terrific woman she is."
"What was done to Sarah Palin in the campaign was a demonstration of the power of the media make a very good person look foolish. There’s a class issue here. This rural Alaskan hockey-mom churchgoing white woman and that pushes all the buttons among the sophisticates of our media."
"Her beauty played against her. There was an element of — you can’t have beauty and brains to that extent. It may have played a role in some liberal women’s animus against her."
"I remember there was an article about me that appeared in 200 newspapers. Can you imagine what I would’ve had to do to correct that? Write letters to 200 newspapers?"
"People still believe that her last child isn’t her’s, because of a rumor that some nut started."
"I would want her for president in a nanosecond."
"I love the average Catholic."
"Was is there only a word for Islamo-phobic but there is no word for Christian-phobic? Is there no one on earth who has an irrational fear of Christians? Would you say that Saudi Arabia is Christian-phobic? Given that somebody who wears a cross is sent to prison. If somebody converts to Christianity, they are killed. If you have a church service, it is closed down and you are arrested. How comes there is no word for Christian-phobic? Because the Left sets the agenda. That’s how a whole generation can be changed in one generation. If you dominate at the high school, university level, at the level of newspapers and television and movies and MTV, that is the paradigm for life."
"The Left has deeper faith than any religious person I know. Every religious person I know has more doubt than leftists. That is why Los Angeles has embarked on a campaign to ban outdoor smoking."
Dennis Prager reads from the WSJ:
Belgians, like many Europeans, are entitled to extensive or even unlimited sick leave — and they tend to stretch the definition of the word. One study showed government employees in droves were calling in sick to pack before vacations and to sleep off holiday hangovers. Some government departments were averaging 35 days of paid sick leave per employee each year, more than twice the national rate and seven times the U.S. average.
…Europe has long suffered from sick-day disease, and many European governments are trying to fix the problem. The average European worker took off 11.3 days in 2005, compared with 4.5 days for the average American, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in Paris. The cost of those lost workdays to Europe’s economy is sometimes as much as 1.3% of gross domestic product annually, says OECD senior economist Christopher Prinz.
But changing Europe’s sick-day culture isn’t easy. Half of all Belgians on medical leave say they suffer from depression — the country has Western Europe’s highest suicide rate. "You can’t contradict the opinion of a psychiatrist," says Dr. Quoidbach. "It has to be obvious they’re cheating."
Regarding the Middle East, Dennis says: "I can’t think of an easier position to take than that you are both wrong. ‘Israel, you go back to your corner. Hamas, you go back to your corner. I love children.’ That’s the tough position. The tough position in the United States in the corridors of the media and intellectuals is to let Israel vanquish an evil foe. If Israel is not allowed to vanquish Hamas, we are all in trouble. Hamas has just reintroduced crucifixion as one form of capital punishment, especially for Christians."
On Prager’s Jan. 8 show: "I have to make two decisions every show — what do I talk about and what do I not talk about? I turn to a widely covered contest in Fort Lauderdale — largely Muslim and Leftist (Answer) — and a Muslim woman screamed, ‘Go back to the ovens. You need a big oven, that’s what you need.’
"The reference of course is to the crematoria of Nazi death camps. You should all be exterminated. Hurrah for the Holocaust! I’d say about 10% of the Muslim world does believe — about 100 million Muslims.
"Why haven’t I covered this? Because it is one woman. You will always get one person at a demonstration saying something outrageous."
"I try to always put my feet in the other side’s shoes. If the left-wing media took one right-wing kook — which they did about Obama, and nobody has a witness it was said by anybody, it was one report in the Washington Post — ‘kill him’ — I said at the time it was utterly irresponsible [to publish it]. If one person said it, so what?
"I have to use the same criteria for the other side. If the entire demonstration said, ‘Back to the ovens!’ and there were placards, then we’d have something…"
"I try to find the bright side in every situation. The bright side is that you have a radical Muslim woman acknowleding the Holocaust. This woman is taking issue with Amadinajad and a whole host of Muslim scholars on Arab television. It proves that even among the most anti-Semitic Muslims, they know the Holocaust took place."
"People in my radio world have asked me — how come others have covered this and you didn’t?"
"As a kid, I realized my biggest challenge in life would be to know what was right. One realization was — if everybody did what I wanted to do, what would happen? You universalize your behavior, would it matter?"
From PragerRadio.com: "Dennis talks to Steve Knopper, contributing editor for Rolling Stone Magazine. His new book is Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age."
