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Explaining Jews, Part I By Dennis Prager FrontPageMagazine.com | January 4, 2006 Years ago, on a flight to Louisville, KY, the woman seated next to me asked what brought me from Los Angeles to Louisville. "I will be giving a lecture," I responded. "To whom?" the personable middle-aged woman asked. "To the Jewish community," I responded. She then proceeded to engage me in a discussion about Jews, and it became apparent that she believed Jews wielded great influence in society. So I decided to ask her a question: "There are almost 300 million Americans. How many of them do you...

Persecution and martyrdom of Christians under 20th century totalitarianism - mainly of Russian Orthodox Christians under Bolshevism - is by far the greatest crime in all of recorded history. It is several times greater than the Holocaust in terms of innocent lives brutally destroyed. It has killed more Christians in a few decades than all other causes put together in all ages, with Islam a distant second as the cause of their death and suffering. And yet it still remains a largely unknown, often minimized, or scandalously glossed over crime. According to the respected and reliable OUP World Christian...

Orthodox and traditional Jews comprise a majority of Israel's Jewish population according to a Central Bureau of Statistics study published Sunday. According to the study, which was carried out from 2002 to 2004, 8% of Israeli Jews defined themselves as hareidi-religious, 9% as Orthodox and 39% as traditional – leaving secular Jews as a minority of 44%. The rate of those identifying as secular is much higher among native Israelis of European and North American origin (63%) than those from Asian origin (33%) or Sephardic and North African origin (25%). When the questions used terms of religiosity instead of denominational...

At some future date, an intrepid scientist will announce that he has made a discovery: there is a correlation between heroin and liberal outrage. Apparently, when a leftist goes off on a tirade against conservatives, religion, or Evil America, it triggers an opiate release in the brain that causes a blissed-out high. Thus, as the addict must hunt down smack, the liberal must have a constant supply of outrages to feed his jones. If none are available -- if, indeed, our modern age is criminally short of witch hunts, McCarthyism, religious intolerance and racism -- then one must be made...

1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand. 2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity. 3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists. 4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding. 5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's. 6. You...

If viewers happened to be tuned into CSPAN several weeks ago, they were in for quite a spectacle. CSPAN was re-airing a conference that took place in May of 2005 with the ominous title, “Examining the Real Agenda of the Far Religious Right.” Sponsored by the New York Open Center, the conference was anything but open-minded. Instead, participants launched into a litany of complaints against the so-called Christian Right that bordered on bigotry. I half expected it to end with a pitchfork armed mob breaking down the doors of a local church. Perusing the Open Center’s website, one will find...

God, Darwinism, Intelligent Design and Secular Humanists. My humble opinion: The Theory of Evolution is just that - A Theory. The Theory of Intelligent Design is just that - A Theory. Both theories have some facts that support them - and other facts that don't support them. It used to be that places of higher learning taught students to think for themselves based on scientific facts and evidence. But what "facts" support intelligent design? 1. Evolution doesn't explain anything on how it all began. As a theory, it is grossly incomplete. At least intelligent design has a theory on the...

About those "secular" menorahs    TERRY MATTINGLY When it comes to decorating tabernacles and temples, the God of Israel cares about the fine details. Consider these Exodus instructions: "Thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, shall be of the same. And six branches shall come out of the sides of it; three branches of the candlestick out of the one side, and three branches of the candlestick out of the other side." Counting the center candlestick, this created a...

The War Against The Light By GEORGE A. KENDALL    We elderly and semi-elderly people can still remember a time when nothing was less controversial than the words “Merry Christmas.” If you said them in July, of course, you might be regarded as more than a little eccentric, perhaps in need of professional help of some kind, but even then people would have been puzzled, not offended. In my childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, I used to go about town, at Christmastime, and wish everyone I saw a Merry Christmas, without having an anxiety attack over the possibility that...

Tehran, 16 Dec. (AKI) - The wife of Iranian journalist, Akbar Ganji, who is imprisoned in a Tehran jail has said that her husband has again received death threats in prison. "A representative of the chief prosecutor visited my husband in jail, and issued a new death threat saying that he will only leave the cell wearing a 'kaftan' [the traditional white blanket that is used to wrap those who die in Islamic countries]," said Massoumeh Shafii, the wife of the dissident journalist. She said she was told this by prison officials - who over the last four weeks have...

IS GOD BAD FOR SOCIETY ? Europeans are much better off than Americans because of their lack of faith. That's the conclusion of a paper published in the Journal of Religion and Society. Once, secularists, atheists, agnostics and materialists argued that a society without faith could be as just and moral as one built on the absolute standards of a Judeo-Christian foundation. Today, as the secular world's war with God rages, they are going further – building a pseudo-scientific case that faithless societies are actually better off. Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a self-proclaimed "social scientist," writes:...

LONDON, September 27 (IranMania) - Iranian dissident student leader Ali Afshari has been sentenced to six years in jail for "attacking national security", a source close to him said. He was also sentenced to five years deprivation of civic rights, which bars him from holding any official post, such as teaching, as well as public speaking. Afshari can appeal both Revolutionary Court verdicts, according to AFP. The activist, a member of a pro-reform student movement known as the Office to Consolidate Unity, has spent three years behind bars since 2000 including one year in solitary confinement. In 2001, Afshari appeared...

While the pro hardline government media in Iran called the meeting between the Iranian and Canadian foreign ministers successful, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, said, after meeting with his Iranian counterpart that his country had prepared a new resolution to condemn human rights violations in Iran and would propose it to the United Nations General Assembly. The new resolution condemning Iran's human rights record followed by IAEA resolution last week, which paves the way for referring Iran's nuclear file to the UN Security Council, has already created new challenges for Iran's foreign policy makers. An Iran analyst believes that although...

The following statement was issued today by the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Ambeyi Ligabo: "I wish to express again my deepest concern regarding the situation of journalist and writer Akbar Ganji whom I met on 8 November 2003 at the Evin prison, while visiting the Islamic Republic of Iran in my official capacity as Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. On that occasion, relevant Iranian authorities...

Why Iran, asked friends and relatives. Why should a group of women journalists decide to go on a busman’s holiday to Iran of all places? “You will have to cover your heads and won't be allowed to talk to men,” exclaimed a colleague. Iranian embassy officials were equally curious. The usual reasons were trotted out — it is an unlikely destination for a holiday with the family, but it is of interest to journalists as an important country in India’s neighbourhood. The visas finally arrived, just as we were giving up hope, and were accompanied by elaborate instructions — heads...

Tehran, Iran, Aug. 22 – An Iranian student activist was sentenced to one year in prison for organising anti-government demonstrations, the head of a student organisation said on Monday. Amir-Hossein Balali, a former student activist in Amir-Kabir University of Technology, had also been accused of inciting public anger against the state during the years 1998-2001, Yashar Qajar said. He also faced charges of insulting Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Balali had previously been arrested in the summer 2001 and held in solitary confinement for one month on similar charges. According to Qajar, Balali has been active in setting up...

A woman dressed as a bishop leads an anti-religion demonstration in Cologne August 19, 2005. Pope Benedict arrived in his German homeland on Thursday on the first international trip of his pontificate, a visit to the World Youth Day attended by hundreds of thousands of young Catholics. After the jubilant reception he received from 400,000 young Catholics Benedict's agenda centred on the closed-door talks at the presidential villa in nearby Bonn and the religious meetings in Cologne. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski Demonstrators dressed as a priest and a nun kiss in front of a large model dinosaur during an anti-religion demonstration in...

APART FROM the horseracing tipster on the BBC’s Today programme, no one has a worse record for predictions than the sociologist of religion. The classical sociologists expected organised religion to wither on the vine. Religion might be the heart of a heartless world and the opiate of the people, but, once the people were liberated and prosperous, there would be no need for supernatural consolations. As societies modernised, and human life was organised in an increasingly rational manner, superstition (for which read religion) would disappear. In global terms, none predicted the pentecostal and charismatic surge within Christianity. None foresaw the...

Al Muhajiroun (Khavarej) is referred to a clandestine group of four who cooperated to assassinate four leaders at promptly the same time: Imam Ali who was a religious leader (the fourth Suni's Khalif and the first Shiite's Imam), Moavieh who was the leader of the land, Amro Aas who was a canning politician and a senior advisor to Moavieh, and - Of the four only one, namely Ibn Moljam, successfully carried out his assassination by wounding Imam Ali with a poisonous sword, during the Imam's pray. Imam Ali died of his wound on the third night, the 21st, of Ramadan....

Akbar Ganji is dying in a hospital in Tehran. He is not a prophet. He is not calling for a revolution. He is not doing George Bush a favor. He is a man who speaks his mind and is willing to die for it. But he must not die. We must do everything we can to force the authorities to let him go home. Ganji is not everyone's favorite dissident. He quotes Khomeini, he looks up to Ayatollah Montazeri, and his circle of friends and allies includes leading religious reformists such as Saeed Hajjarian and Abdolkarim Soroush. Because of his...