How Big An Idiot Is Dennis Prager?
In the LATimes' new Currents section, one of my least favorite blowhard primitives trots out, with much pretense at apology, an essay explaining why the Jews are "the chosen people." Here's an excerpt from Dennis Prager's self-serving stupidity:

But the greatest evidence for chosenness is the evil that has targeted Jews since the mid-20th century:

• Nazi Germany was more concerned with exterminating the Jews than with winning World War II. Whenever there was competition for resources between the war and the "final solution," Hitler chose the murder of Europe's Jews.

• Throughout its 70-year history, the Soviet Union persecuted its Jews and tried to extinguish Judaism. At the time of Stalin's death, he was planning a massive killing of Soviet Jews.

• The United Nations has spent more time discussing and condemning the Jewish state than any other country. That is why the U.N. General Assembly has passed an unparalleled 322 resolutions against Israel. Yet this state is smaller than every Central American country. Imagine if the amount of attention paid to Israel were paid to Belize — who would not think there was something extraordinary about that country?

• The Muslim world is obsessed with the Jews and with annihilating the one Jewish state, an obsession analogous to that of the Nazis.

In the words of Catholic scholar Father Edward Flannery, "the Jews carry the burden of God in history." Most Jews do not believe this (or almost any Jewish religious doctrine, for that matter). And many Jews dislike talk of chosenness because they fear it will increase anti-Semitism. They may be right.

But it doesn't alter the fact that the worldwide obsession with one of the smallest countries and smallest peoples on Earth, and the unique hatred of the Jews and the Jewish state by the world's most vicious ideologies, can be best explained only in transcendent terms. God, for whatever reason, chose the Jews.

Oh. Please.

I grew up Jewish (I'm now a godless, as any rational person would be), but how queer is "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah...we're chosen!"? Why not just put it in fourth grade terms: "We're really cool, and you suck!" and call it what it is -- religiously sanctioned immaturity?

Attention, Dennis Prager: It's 2005. Isn't it time we stopped using such irrational divisiveness as belief, without proof, in one particular god or another, to remain clannishly separate, and instead focus onn how related we all are as human beings and get global?

For starters, let's look to reason, rather than religious mumbo jumbo, for possible reasons for the Jews' persecution throughout the centuries: The Jews have, for thousands of years, been a dispersed people, consistently "strangers in a strange land"; ie, a convenient "out group" for scapegoating.

Hence, persecution of the Jews is actually right in line with how humans evolved to behave -- to favor the "in group" (the members of our band) and disfavor the "out group" -- to attack them and take the resources for the "in group," or, at the very least, disfavor them for mating and special treatment. (In the post-Pleistocene era, this might mean not being allowed to join certain "in group" country clubs.)

It's really basic stuff. Except for voluntarily brainwashed, irrational religious fanatics like Prager.