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A 12 Step Program for Recovering Liberals
By Burt Prelutsky
Friday, March 7, 2008

Most 12-step programs start out by requiring that people have to understand that they’re powerless over their addiction and that only by turning their lives over to a Power greater than themselves can they be restored to sanity. Far be it from me to suggest that I am that Power, but clearly someone has to step in and try to rescue these poor liberal souls. Even the most harebrained among them deserves that much.

First, though, they have to acknowledge that Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Dick Durbin, Charles Rangel, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, are not moderates, but, rather, leftists with a Socialist agenda. Furthermore, they must recognize that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, the three major networks, the news magazines and the New Yorker, are not objective in their reporting of political events, and neither are Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher, in their commentary. If these entities and individuals are not on the payroll of the DNC, they certainly should be. They certainly put in longer hours than Howard Dean.

Step #1: It is high time that every American be guaranteed the right to speak freely. It is not reserved solely for left-wing college students who wish to take advantage of the first amendment to shout down conservatives. At the same time, they must not construe the conservative’s right to dismiss them as arrogant idiots as censorship.

Step #2: Affirmative action argues that African Americans and Latinos are intellectually inferior and are unable to compete academically unless other students are handicapped because of their race. Interestingly enough, when blacks and Hispanic students are given these unfair advantages, it’s rarely at any cost to white students, whose rate of college admissions remains constant; instead, it’s nearly always another minority group, Asians, who pay the price. This is what left-wingers refer to as leveling the playing field.

Step #3: Liberals always claim to be in favor of higher taxes, agreeing with Bill Clinton that the government invariably spends money more wisely than those who actually earn it. However, such prominent proponents of higher taxes as George Soros, Ted Kennedy and Mr. and Mrs. John Kerry, protect their own otherwise taxable income through trusts and offshore accounts. Obviously, any American who believes higher taxes are a good thing can do the honorable thing by spurning all deductions and paying Uncle Sam everything up to 100% of his income.

Step #4: Even the most secular of liberals seems to believe that Jimmy Carter is a saint. The evidence for this seems to be that he has on occasion posed with a hammer in his hand at Habitant for Humanity building sites and is constantly walking around with a expression on his face that suggests he has just forgiven Pontius Pilate for betraying him. This is the same fellow, let us never forget, who called Yasser Arafat his good friend and who has accepted untold millions of dollars from Arab cut-throats, who ask nothing in return except that he go on insisting that there would be peace in the Middle East if only those darn Israelis would disappear from the face of the earth.

Step #5: Stop insisting that all wars are bad. It only makes you sound daft. Carrying signs that equate a U.S. president, any U.S. president, with Adolph Hitler is not only rude, but suggests you’re certifiably nuts. Every president has left office right on schedule. Aside from FDR, who just happened to get elected four times, not one of them has remained in office beyond eight years. On the other hand, Hitler ran Germany for 12 years and only death and the allied forces brought that to an end; Stalin ran the Soviet show for 31 years; while that hero of the left, Fidel Castro, held the reins, not to mention the whip, for about 50 years.

Step #6: Repeat after me, “Separation of church and state” exists nowhere in the Constitution. The first amendment does not require the removal of Christmas trees from the village green, the 10 Commandments from court house walls or “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. All it does is forbid Congress from establishing a state religion, such as the Church of England, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar and, most likely, a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Step #7: Stop using the word “big” as a pejorative. There is nothing intrinsically bad about big oil, big agriculture or big pharmaceuticals. Overall, they do a very good job of keeping our cars on the road, food on our tables and most of us over 50 alive and functioning. On the other hand, big government, which so many liberals simply adore, represents a usurpation of the allegedly inalienable rights of individuals. A quick perusal of the Constitution should convince you that beyond declaring war, forging treaties, overseeing patents, printing money, running the post office, collecting taxes and protecting our borders -- and a few other things that Washington doesn’t do at all well these days -- the federal government has very limited responsibilities.

Step #8: Acknowledge that the United Nations is, in the main, an aggregation of venal diplomats who live high off the hog in New York City while representing the most corrupt and vicious regimes in the history of the world. Only a fool or a diplomat would continue to suggest that this gang of well-dressed thugs possesses anything resembling moral authority.

Step #9: Do not keep insisting that at a time when nearly all the large scale evil in the world is being perpetrated by Muslims that racial profiling is anything but a sensible approach to airport security. During WWII, Swedish Americans were not suspected of performing espionage for the Axis powers and for a very good reason; namely, because they weren’t performing espionage for the Axis powers. These days, their Swedish American children and grandchildren are not suspected of trying to blow up airlines, but the smarmy bureaucrats insist on pretending that they’re every bit as likely to be up to mischief as a bunch of 25-year-old Osama bin Laden look-alikes from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Step #10: Stop trying to pretend that illegal aliens are the same as legal immigrants just so you can claim the moral high ground and accuse those of us who are opposed to open borders of being racists.

Step #11: Once and for all, stop forgiving murderers. Whether or not you’re in favor of capital punishment, only the victim of a crime has the right to grant forgiveness. And inasmuch as the killer has deprived his victim of that ability, don’t take it upon yourself. It doesn’t prove how compassionate you are, only that you’re as sanctimonious and as self-aggrandizing as, say, Jimmy Carter.

Step #12: Stop bashing the U.S. military and the Boy Scouts. The only reason you have the ability to shoot your mouth off is because men and women braver and better than you sacrificed life and limb for your right to do so. As for the Boy Scouts, they are absolutely right to keep homosexuals from taking youngsters on camping trips. While it’s true that many gays are perfectly fine people and that very few homosexuals are pedophiles, there’s no reason on earth to take unnecessary risks just so we can all prove how broadminded we are. For what it’s worth, as decent as most Catholic priests are, I wouldn’t let them take youngsters into the woods, either. It’s fine to be compassionate and understanding, but let the gays among us be understanding for a change and acknowledge that, every so often, commonsense should trump political correctness.

And, finally, making this a baker’s dozen, Step #13: Let us all agree that while being a woman, a black, a Jew, a Catholic, a Mormon or even a gay, for that matter, should in no way preclude anyone from being elected president of the United States, none of those things constitutes a very good reason to vote for someone.

W. Burt Prelutsky is an accomplished, well-rounded writer and author of "The Secret of Their Success: Interviews with Legends and Luminaries."

The Hidden Basis for Hostility to Israel
-and America
By Michael Medved

On Saturday in Jerusalem, I participated in a moving religious service to honor one of Israel’s most celebrated heroes from last summer’s war against the Hezbollah terrorists.
Lieutenant Eli Kahn, 23, led a unit of elite Paratrooper Commandos advancing against heavily defended Hezbollah positions in the Southern Lebanon town of Maroun al-Ras in the early days of the fighting. The Israelis, hoping to knock out Katyusha rockets that had already taken a bloody toll on civilian targets, drew unexpectedly intense fire from the enemy and sustained heavy casualties.
While tending to one of his wounded paratroopers, Lt. Kahn saw a terrorist run toward them and throw a grenade that landed at their feet. Rather than jumping out of the way and abandoning his comrade to certain death, Lt. Kahn immediately picked up the grenade and threw it directly back at the Hezbollah fighter --- killing the terrorist and turning the tide of battle. For his leadership and quick thinking, he received the Medal of Valor – Israel’s equivalent of America’s Medal of Honor. The young hero’s father, Howie Kahn, remembered that his boy played Little League before the family immigrated to Israel from the United States and suggested that his skills as a slick-fielding shortstop paid off with that one fateful and well-aimed toss on the field of battle.
Hearing the story of Eli Kahn, most Americans would feel gratified and inspired but the service I attended at the lieutenant’s Orthodox synagogue nonetheless serves to highlight the deeper, unspoken reasons that Israel provokes such visceral hostility from the international left.
The Middle East’s only democracy has recently enjoyed spectacular economic progress and unprecedented success in blocking and deterring terror attacks from its many Islamo-Nazi adversaries. Why, then, the increasingly shrill demands from politically correct activists throughout Western Europe and from college campuses in the United States for boycotts, UN condemnation, sanctions and diplomatic isolation aimed at punishing the Jewish state?
Why does the death of a few dozen Palestinians (mostly gunmen or racketeers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad) provoke more international indignation than the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Darfur, or the butchery of additional thousands by Muslim terrorists in Pakistan, Indonesia, India, Algeria, Yemen, the Philippines and even Thailand?
The common explanations for singling out Israel for international denunciation make no sense when placed in any reasonably well-informed historical context.
For instance, leftist critics like to suggest that Israel deserves the world’s hostility because of its long-term “occupation” of lands captured in defensive wars. But the Jewish state has already withdrawn from the overwhelming majority of the disputed territory it ever controlled, hoping to demonstrate its eagerness to trade land for peace—abandoning the vast area of the Sinai Peninsula in 1978, its South Lebanon “Security Zone” in 2000, and all the Gaza Strip in 2005. Moreover, in the remaining zone of “occupation” in the West Bank, the results of Israeli rule can hardly count as brutal: according to UN figures, by all measures of economic prosperity, public health, and standards of living before the Second Intifada broke out in the Fall of 2000, West Bankers did better than their fellow Arabs in neighboring countries like Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
The historical record makes clear that Arab fury against Jews in the Middle East bears no connection to any occupation policy or to the plight of refugees, since this murderous rage claimed countless victims long before Israel occupied a single square inch or territory and before a single Palestinian had fled his home.
A brief history of the early conflict (published by the indispensable Israel Pocket Library) offers a necessary reminder of Palestinian terrorism as long ago as 1929. In that year, the bitterly anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (who later traveled to Berlin and spent most of the war years at Hitler’s side) claimed that the largely unarmed and loosely organized Jewish community harbored secret “designs” on Muslim holy places, and launched bloody attacks on the Jews of Jerusalem. As the grim story unfolded, “The violence spread to other parts of the country. On Sabbath, August 24, the Arabs of Hebron fell upon the small, defenseless Jewish community in the town and slaughtered some 70 men and women. Old people and infants were butchered; the survivors, numbering several hundred, being evacuated to Jerusalem.
Attacks on Tel Aviv and the Jewish quarter in Haifa were repulsed, but on the fifth day of the riots an Arab mob killed 18 Jews and wounded many more before the Jews could take refuge in the police headquarters while the mob ransacked and burned the historic Jewish quarter. In Be’er Toviyah all the settlers held out in a cowshed while the mob plundered and destroyed the village. Huldah, too, was destroyed after the Jewish defenders held out for many hours against thousands of Arabs and were evacuated by a British army patrol.”
A mere eight years later, in 1937, unprovoked Palestinian violence broke out once again with even bloodier results: “415 Jews were killed by the terrorists in the period 1937-39, over half of them between July and October 1938.”
The most striking revelation in these all-but-forgotten chapters of Middle East history involves the brutal, determined, vicious nature of Palestinian terrorism before Israel occupied any territory whatever, or caused the departure of any refugees (the Palestinian population went up sharply – never declining for even a single year – as Jewish return to the ancient homeland intensified). As a matter of fact, the devastating riots of 1929 and 1937-39 (not to mention other deadly attacks in 1921, 1926 and 1936) occurred long before the state of Israel even existed—making clear that Palestinian violence against their Jewish neighbors arose from fanatical Jew-hatred, not any objection to the specific policies of a non-existent state.
Clearly, the same deep-seated anti-Semitic instincts help to explain some of the hostility to the Jewish state today, especially among purportedly enlightened Europeans.
There’s also the undeniable factor of worldwide anti-Americanism – Israel earns contempt as one of the closest, most reliable allies of the Superpower labeled by many leftists (including Michael Moore in his previous America-bashing film, “The Big One”) as “the real Evil Empire.” But other nations (like Britain, Canada and Australia, most obviously) align themselves equally closely with the United States and even more enthusiastically embrace America’s reviled culture, without provoking the animus that faces Israel in many corners of the globe.
One of the secrets of the world-wide suspicion and resentment toward the Jewish state involves the unmistakably prominent, even dominant, Israeli role for two institutions loathed by leftists everywhere: religion and the military.
While two-thirds of Israelis describe themselves as secular, the increasing popularity and influence of Orthodox religiosity remains an undeniable factor in Israeli society. Meanwhile, even the state’s famously agnostic and atheist founders made regular reference to Bible in urging their compatriots to return to Zion. The fact that Israel counts as the “Holy Land” to the world’s more than two billion Christians also provides a religious flavor and perspective to the nation’s existence that makes secular purists distinctly uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, the military continues to play a huge and necessary part in the life of the perpetually embattled nation. Some 75% of young people still do three full years of military service after their high school graduation, and continue with yearly reserve duty for 25 years after that. Even the leader of Israel’s leading party on the left (former Prime Minister Ehud Barak) is a one-time war hero and the most decorated soldier in the country’s history.
In other words, for trendy liberals who feel profound, instinctive distaste for the influence of armies and organized faith in human life, it’s only natural to feel somewhat uncomfortable with Israel.
The same attitudes, by the way, help to explain some of the fashionable anti-Americanism that’s taken hold among European and other international elites. Religion remains a vastly more potent force in the US than in any other Western nation, and our military remains far larger, more potent and more revered than the armies of other major nations. Those who love to denounce the impact of militarism and organized faith will inevitably find much to dislike about America – and about our close ally in the Middle East.
This US and Israeli devotion to both armed forces and religious institutions brings me back to the synagogue celebration I witnessed for Lt. Eli Kahn. Called to the Torah before a clapping, singing, admiring congregation, the young war hero chanted the weekly “Haftorah” (a passage from Isaiah) and received a good-natured pelting of candy tossed at him from all directions by his friends and neighbors. This treatment had little to do with his battlefield exploits of exactly one year earlier, but actually reflected his status as the community’s next bridegroom: in Jewish tradition, all young men receive similar honor on the Sabbath before their weddings. (Lt. Kahn stands under the wedding canopy with his bride tomorrow night, Thursday).
In Israeli eyes, there’s no contradiction between love of God and admiration of the military – between celebrating the beginning of a loving new family along with the courage and dedication of a battle-hardened soldier. Both religious and military institutions exist to promote life, not death; to facilitate peaceful communities and growing families, not bloodshed and martyrdom.
Americans and Israelis understand the connection between our soldiers and our survival, between faith in a compassionate God and the maintenance of military strength that allows decency and kindness to flourish. And of course, much of the rest of the world that believes that they’ve already moved on beyond such outmoded relics as organized religion and mighty armies, hates us for our decidedly different perspective.
Michael Medved is a film critic, best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host.