The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

Both seek to dominate society and to use state power to do so. Both seek to eliminate the Other — for Islamic fanatics, that means non-Muslim religions and secularism; for secular fanatics, it means Christianity and virtually any public invoking of God. The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law. The Taliban wiped out public vestiges of Buddhism in Afghanistan; the ACLU and its allies seek to wipe out public vestiges of Christianity in America — as it did, for example, in Los Angeles County, when it successfully pressured the County Board of Supervisors to remove the tiny cross from the county seal. A city and county founded by Catholics — hence the name “The Angels” — was forced to stop commemorating its founders because they were religious.

This fanaticism has been on display most recently in the state of Rhode Island. This past Christmas, the governor, Lincoln Chafee, renamed the state Christmas tree a “holiday tree.” Though Christmas is a national holiday, for the secular fanatic, anything Christian — or, as we shall see, anything that relates to religion or God — must be banned from public life.

The latest expression of the secular equivalent of Islamism is the lawsuit brought against a Rhode Island high school, Cranston High School West, for allowing a banner, written by a seventh grader in 1963, to remain hanging on one of the school walls. An atheist student, along with the ACLU, brought the lawsuit and a judge ruled that it is unconstitutional for it to hang in a public school.

To appreciate how fanatical the student, the ACLU and the ruling are, you have to know the words on the banner. So here they are:

Our Heavenly Father

Grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others.

Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. Teach us the value of true friendship. Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.

Amen

The idea that this prayer violates the Constitution of the United States is as much a mockery of the Constitution as it is of common sense. Only a fanatic can welcome the removal of such a non-denominational, sweet, moral exhortation from a high school wall. America is indeed as endangered by the ACLU as the Muslim world is by Islamists.

In the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on Jan. 7, Congressman Ron Paul said: “I’m the only one up here … that understands true racism in this country is in the judicial system.”

He said this racism has to do with “enforcing the drug laws” and then added: “They (blacks) get the death penalty way disproportionately.”

Two groups immediately defended Paul — his supporters and commentators on the left. The former support anything Paul says, and the left supports anything that Paul says that portrays America as ugly (see, for example, the defense of Paul by left-wing USA Today columnist Dwayne Wickham, whose columns are regularly devoted to how much blacks suffer from American racism).

Just last month, Paul was asked by a representative of an organization (We Are Change) that holds the government responsible for 9/11, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Paul’s response: “Because I can’t handle the controversy. I have the IMF, the Federal Reserve to deal with, the IRS to deal with. Because I just have more — too many — things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.” The interview is readily available on YouTube.

Whatever the implication of his cryptic response, when Paul is confronted by the mainstream media, he denies that he believes the American government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. But what is undeniable is that Paul, like much of the left, holds America largely responsible for 9/11 because of its foreign policy. That includes its “occupying” of countries all over the world; the sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which Paul and the left claim killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; the injustices against Palestinians that America has supported (through its support of Israel); etc.

Paul mocks the idea that the primary reason for 9/11 was that people of great evil attacked a very good country — because this is what the evil do, just as they did on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese regime attacked Pearl Harbor.

It does seem that the Texas congressman’s description of the American justice system as racist is part of Paul’s generally dark view of America.

Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality — often within our own family — of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence.

Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack — make that mock — the former Pennsylvania senator.

In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness. But one just assumes that some things — not many, just some — are off limits to political pundits and activists.

Among these few things, one has to believe, is the death of a child.

But I was wrong.

In 1996, Karen Santorum gave birth to a premature baby boy who died two hours later. After spending the night in the hospital with their baby son between them, the grieving parents brought the lifeless infant home for a brief period because, Santorum explained, it was important to them for their other children to “know they had a brother.” The Santorums didn’t want Gabriel Michael Santorum to be an abstraction to his siblings.

First, Alan Colmes on Fox News: “Once (voters) get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his 2-hour-old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real …”

Colmes was then interrupted by Rich Lowry: “You are mocking him. They lost a child, Alan. That’s very serious and it’s not something you should be mocking on national TV.”

After a lifetime of studying the left, I have concluded that leftism is a form of moral poison. It causes otherwise decent and kind people who take it into their systems to say and/or do cruel and sometimes evil things.

While not specifically about the left, a major new scholarly book, “Pathological Altruism” (Oxford University Press), explores this phenomenon of people wanting to do good things yet ending up doing bad. It applies to The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has a deep altruistic urge to bring peace to the Middle East. But because he sees the world through the liberal/left prism, he says morally reprehensible things — statements that individuals associated with hate-filled, non-altruistic groups and ideologies would make.

In his Dec. 13 column, yet another of his attacks on Israel and its supporters, Friedman wrote: “The standing ovation (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) got in Congress this year was … bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

If a non-Jew had written this, he would have been severely condemned for writing something outright anti-Semitic. The notion that Jews manipulate the levers of power in Western societies for their own nefarious ends is probably the most enduring of all the West’s Jew-hating myths. It was a staple of Nazi anti-Semitism and is the single most repeated charge of those in the Arab and larger Muslim worlds who seek to annihilate Israel, since its purpose is to convince people that non-Jews who support Israel have been paid off by Jews.

But Friedman, who is a Jew and a liberal, can get away with it — even though it is so morally repulsive that Jew-haters can now assert they are merely quoting a well-known Jew. Who’s going to call him on it? The New York Times?

To his credit, one congressman did condemn Friedman. Rep. Steven R. Rothman (D-N.J.) released this statement: “Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who support the Jewish State of Israel, in his New York Times opinion piece today, is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to Israel and her advocates in the U.S. Mr. Friedman is not only wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the U.S.-Israel relationship and its American supporters.

“I gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a standing ovation, not because of any nefarious lobby, but because it is in America’s vital national security interests to support the Jewish State of Israel, and it is right for Congress to give a warm welcome to the leader of such a dear and essential ally. Mr. Friedman owes us all an apology.”

The governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, announced last week that he would not allow any more executions in his state during his time in office.

Kitzhaber, a Democrat, gave five reasons for his decision. My response follows each one.

1. “I refuse to be part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer.”

This has become one of the most frequently offered reasons for objecting to capital punishment — that because the system is not equitable, no murderer should be put to death.

This is a reason that is devoid of reason. If a system is not equitable, you don’t end the system, you try to end what is not equitable. This is classic left-wing thinking — destroy what is good if it is imperfect. Documentary-maker Michael Moore was recently on CNN with Anderson Cooper and provided a perfect example of this way of thinking.

Moore: “2011 capitalism is an evil system set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many.”

Cooper: “So, what system do you want?”

Moore: “Well, there’s no system right now that exists. We’re going to create that system.”

The utopian streak that is an essential part of the left-wing mind is puerile and destructive: “If it isn’t perfect, eliminate it.”

2. “I do not believe that those executions (the two that the governor allowed) made us safer.”

We all acknowledge that two executions do not make us safer (though they do make it safer for prison guards and for other inmates). Who ever said two executions would make us safer? Overwhelmingly, the reason people give for supporting the death penalty is justice. It is indescribably unjust to allow everyone who deliberately takes a human life to keep his own.

But if you want to talk safety, then yes, we who support the death penalty are certain that, applied with any consistency, it is a deterrent. The late sociologist Ernest van den Haag had an interesting thought experiment. Suppose that murders committed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays carried a death sentence, while those committed on the other days were punishable by a prison sentence. On which days do you suppose more murders would be committed?

The notion that parking tickets deter illegal parking but that death does not deter murder is truly irrational.

It shows what happens when people put ideology over common sense.

Commentary Magazine asked 41 Americans to respond to this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” The responses, including my own, appear in the current issue of Commentary. As we were limited to 500 words, I offer my response here, in edited and longer form.

I am both optimistic and pessimistic regarding America’s future.

Here are my reasons for pessimism:

First, the unique American values system — what I call the American Trinity — is under assault. These three values are declared on every American coin: Liberty, “E Pluribus Unum” and “In God We Trust.”

The left has declared war on all three. And it is winning. It seeks to replace Liberty with egalitarianism, “E Pluribus Unum” with multiculturalism, and “In God We Trust” with a godless society. America is being transformed — candidate Barack Obama’s favorite word for what he sought to do to this country — into a Western European country, the left’s model of a great society.

Second, the primary purpose of high schools and colleges — and, increasingly, even elementary schools — has become turning students into leftists.

That’s one reason many of those who graduate from America’s schools know what the climate will be in 2080 but don’t know who Stalin was, let alone who Cain and Abel were. They are proficient at using condoms and at recycling but at little else. They have been taught nothing of American exceptionalism and would likely find the term incomprehensible, if not objectionable. And they would save their dog before a human they didn’t know because morality is a matter of feelings, and they feel more for their dog.

Third, the expansion of the state is producing a new American. This American believes in rights more than in obligations and thinks that the state should take care of him, his parents, his children and his neighbors.

Fourth, the melting pot of Americans has been replaced by a patchwork quilt of “Latinos,” “African-Americans” and other identity groups, all of whom, moreover, are taught to consider themselves victims of a sexist, racist, intolerant, Islamophobic and xenophobic society.

Fifth, half or more of the Jews and Christians who attend synagogue or church are more likely to be led by a priest, minister or rabbi who sermonizes not about their sins but about America’s.

Sixth, civilization’s single most important institution — marriage — is increasingly regarded as pointless and is being redefined for the first time in history to include members of the same sex. Why? Because the notions that marriage is sacred and that men and women are intrinsically different — a difference that carries unique significance — are depicted as patriarchal, anachronistic and sexist.

Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, a physics professor and history professor at Eastern Nazarene College, respectively. The authors take evangelicals to task for being anti-intellectual, anti-reason and anti-science. Their evidence:

— Evangelicals doubt man-made global warming,

— Evangelicals believe that gays can “pray away” their homosexuality.

— Evangelicals believe Earth is only thousands of years old and that men lived alongside dinosaurs.

— Evangelicals oppose same-sex marriage.

Given how often they are made, it’s worth analyzing these charges.

With regard to man-made global warming, the accusation that all skeptics are anti-science is despicable and, indeed, anti-science. The list of prominent scientists who dissent — including the scientist widely considered the dean of climate science in America, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — is so long that there are entire websites that feature their names and credentials: There’s a Wikipedia page titled “List of Scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming” and a website called PetitionProject.org.

The authors of the Times op-ed piece, like virtually all other left-wing intellectuals who comment on the subject, dismiss all skepticism regarding the Al Gore hypothesis that humanity is headed toward a worldwide apocalypse due to heat resulting from man-made carbon emissions. This is a reflection on these intellectuals’ politics, not on their commitment to science.

With regard to “praying away” homosexuality — if it is indeed the normative evangelical position that all gays, with the right faith, can cease being sexually attracted to the same sex — that position is wrong. But to the best of my knowledge, that is not the normative evangelical position; evangelicals believe that no more than they believe that prayer alone will end any undesired physical condition.

At the same time, the opposite position — the position of nearly all the liberal intellectual world — that everyone’s sexual orientation is fixed is a position also driven by ideology rather than by science. Society has a huge influence on how people act out their sexuality, including the gender of person with whom they choose to be sexual. Human sexuality — especially female — is far more elastic than the intellectual community admits. And the widespread liberal belief that, all things being equal, it makes no difference whether a child is raised by a mother and father or by two fathers or two mothers is hardly rational. On the issue of homosexuality, the intellectual left is just as driven by ideology as evangelicals.

With regard to those evangelicals — and for that matter, those ultra-orthodox Jews — who believe that Earth is less than 10,000 years old and that there either were no dinosaurs or that they lived alongside human beings, my reaction has always been: So what? I believe that Earth is many millions of years old, that “six days” is meant as six periods of time (the sun wasn’t even created until the third day, so how could there have been any days before then?) and that dinosaurs preexisted man by millions of years.

The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers — Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot — was what groups they chose for extermination.

For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other “non-Aryans” were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.

Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.

Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post-World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race. But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, or the hatred of others based on class.

The reason for this embrace is that class hatred is as fundamental to the left as the Trinity is to Christians, and the left dominates the media and education. This is dangerous because there is an ideological continuum from the democratic left to the Communist left. Making the rich into scapegoats for society’s ills unites the left.

The democratic left believes in democracy, and, before the 1970s, some of its adherents were fierce anti-Communists. But while the decent and the indecent left differ on democracy versus tyranny and on non-violence versus violence, the nicest leftists in the world agree with the indecent left about who the enemy is.

Being on the left means that you divide the world between rich and poor much more than you divide it between good and evil. For the leftist, the existence of rich and poor — inequality — is what constitutes evil. More than tyranny, inequality disturbs the left, including the non-Communist left. That is why so many on the left fell in love with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and, at other times, with every left-wing dictator.

This week, for the fourth consecutive year, I am conducting Jewish High Holiday services. Though not a rabbi, I spent 12 years studying in yeshivas and 35 years teaching and writing on Judaism. The following is a summary of the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) sermon that I gave this past Wednesday night.

The purpose of the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) is moral introspection: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person can I become? So, every year, Jews meditate on the issue of becoming a better person.

But how many of us do become better people the next year?

This question has bothered me for many years, and I have decided to finally address it. Why is it so hard to become a better person?

I have — unfortunately — come up with 13 reasons.

1. Most people don’t particularly want to be good.

The biggest obstacle to people becoming better is that you have to really want to be a good person in order to be a better person, and most people would rather be other things. People devote far more effort to being happy (not knowing that goodness leads to increased happiness), successful, smart, attractive and healthy, to cite the most prominent examples.

2. Confusion exists about what goodness is.

Goodness is about character — integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.

Not everyone agrees.

For thousands of years, more than a few religious individuals have regarded goodness as being more about sexual behavior and religious piety than about character and the decent treatment of others. And while sexual behavior and religious piety are important, they are not as important as simply acting decently toward other human beings. That is what God wants most (see Micah 6:8, for example) and what we should want most.

At the other end of the spectrum, to modern progressives, goodness is all too often about having the correct political positions, not about character development.

3. Goodness is not about intentions.

Very few people have bad intentions. Even many people who commit real evil — such as true-believing Nazis, Communists, and Islamists — have good intentions. But as an ancient Jewish dictum put it, “It is not the thought that counts but the action.” Good intentions alone produce good people about as often as good intentions alone produce good surgeons.

4. We don’t learn how to be good.

Even if you want to be a good person, where is the instruction manual? Where are the teachers, the coaches and the schools? People spend years studying how to be good at everything — from sports to medicine to plumbing — except how to be good people.

5. We think too highly of ourselves.

Self-esteem frequently runs counter to goodness. Raising children with self-esteem sounds great, but when unearned — which it usually is — it leads to bad results. In fact, it is people who do not have particularly high self-esteem, people who feel that they constantly have to prove their worth, who are more likely to act good. And it is violent criminals who have the highest self-esteem — ‘I am better than others and can therefore do whatever I want.’

6. We think we will be taken advantage of.

Many parents have told me that they fear raising their children to be “too” good, lest they be taken advantage of.

People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.

Yes, bad people take advantage of others. This is why it is so important that good people surround themselves with good people. They allow us to be good and they make us better.

7. There are few personal models.

It is very difficult to grow into a good person without good models — whether a parent, a sibling, a friend, a clergyman, or even good characters in literature and film.

That is why it is so important for all adults to try to be good models — not necessarily friends — to all young people.

About five years ago, I was invited by the Hoover Institution to lecture at Stanford University over the course of a week. Coincidentally, Israel’s Independence Day fell during that week, so I was invited to speak at the celebration held by pro-Israel students. In my talk, I noted that the crux of the problem in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was that most Palestinians wanted Israel to cease to exist.

After my talk, a woman walked over to me and introduced herself as a peace activist. She told me that she could not agree with me because Palestinians, in her view, were quite willing to accept Israel’s existence.

As it happened, about 50 feet behind the pro-Israel celebration was an anti-Israel demonstration led by Palestinian students. So I told the woman to go over and introduce herself to the Palestinian students as a peace activist — that way they would immediately trust her — and ask them if they were willing to acknowledge the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. I told her that I would bet her $5 that they would not answer in the affirmative.

She accepted the bet and walked over the Palestinian students.

After about 10 minutes, she returned.

“So,” I asked her, “who won the bet?”

“I don’t know,” she responded.

“I don’t understand,” I replied. “Didn’t they answer you?”

“They asked me, ‘What do you mean?’” she answered.

I told her she owed me $5 but that I wouldn’t collect.

Earlier this month in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, I interviewed Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority and the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I asked him the same question: Do the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state?

He was more direct than the Palestinians students at Stanford.

His long answer amounted to: “No.”

There is no Jewish people, he told me, so how could there be a Jewish country? The Palestinian position is that there is a religion called Judaism, but there is no such thing as a Jewish people. (Interestingly, the Jews are referred to belonging to a religion only once in the entire Hebrew Bible — in the Book of Esther, by the anti-Semite Haman.)

In other words, Palestinians — people in a national group that never existed by the name “Palestine” until well into the 20th century — deny the existence of the oldest continuous nation in the world, dating back over 3,000 years.

Now, that’s real chutzpah.

Last week, David Brooks of The New York Times wrote a column on an academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral vocabulary among most American young people. Below are some excerpts from Brooks’ summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. (It was led by “the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.”)

“Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing …

“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all …

“Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner …

“The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste …

“As one put it, ‘I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong …

“Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”

Ever since I attended college, I have been convinced that either “studies” confirm what common sense suggests or that they are mistaken. I realized this when I was presented with study after study showing that boys and girls were not inherently different from one another, and they acted differently only because of sexist upbringings.

This latest study cited by David Brooks confirms what conservatives have known for a generation: Moral standards have been replaced by feelings. Of course, those on the left believe this only when a writer at a major liberal newspaper cites an “eminent sociologist.”

What is disconcerting about Brooks’ piece is that nowhere in what is an important column does he mention the reason for this disturbing trend — namely, secularism.

The intellectual class and the left still believe that secularism is an unalloyed blessing.

In attempting to understand 9/11, the first question asked by the world’s elites — as exemplified by leading media and academics — was, “What did America do to provoke such hatred?”

Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with “What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans?” or “What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?”

As long as people keep asking what America did to incite such hate, nothing will have been learned from 9/11.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred because of a law of human life that has been true since Cain killed Abel: The worst hate the best (and the second best and the third best and so on). Evil hates good.

The United States of America is a flawed society. As it comprises human beings, it must be flawed. But in terms of the goodness achieved inside its borders and spread elsewhere in the world, it has been the finest country that ever existed. If you were to measure the moral gulf between America and those who despise it, the divide would have to be calculated in light-years.

If the academic and opinion elites of the world had moral courage, they would have asked the most obvious question provoked by 9/11: Were the mass murderers who flew those airplanes into American buildings an aberration or a product of their culture?

As far as those elites are concerned, only the first explanation exists. The 19 monsters of 9/11 were, for all intents and purposes, freaks. They were exceptions, no more representative of the Arab or Islamic worlds than serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was of America. According to the elites, the hijackers happened to be Muslim — only in name, we have been constantly reassured — but were not produced by anything within Arab or Islamic society. Even to ask whether anything in those worlds produced the 9/11 terrorists — or Britain’s 7/7 terrorists, or Madrid’s March 2004 terrorists, or Palestinian terrorists, or the Taliban, or Hamas — is to be a bigot, or an “Islamophobe,” the ingenious post-9/11 label to describe anyone who merely asks such questions.

It can be said, therefore, that not only has the world learned nothing from 9/11; it has been prohibited from learning anything.

The Muslim regime of Iran violently represses its people and (along with the Muslims of Hamas and of Hezbollah) vows to exterminate the nation of Israel.

Muslim mobs murdered innocent people because of cartoons in Denmark. The Muslims of the Taliban throw acid in the faces of girls who attend school. Muslim mobs kill Christians and burn churches in Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere. And we are told that the mere mention of these facts is an act of bigotry.

Imagine a Jewish Congress member accusing the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) of wanting to see Jews gassed. How would any decent American — on the right or left — describe such a statement? Loathsome? Morally reprehensible? An obvious lie?

All three descriptions would be entirely accurate.

Next question: How much media exposure would that slander be given?

Would it make the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post? Would we read ferocious editorials from coast to coast? Would the story lead on TV newscasts?

Correct on all three, again.

Final question: Would said congressman be allowed to stay in office?

We all know the answer to that one, too.

So here’s a real question: If a black congressman charged that members of Congress who support the tea party “would love to see you and me (blacks) hanging from a tree,” what’s the difference between that libel and the made-up libel about the CBC wanting to see Jews gassed?

The answer, of course, is that there is no difference.

But because the left thinks in terms of race, gender and class rather than in traditional moral terms of right and wrong, and because the left dominates the media, only one of these two libels would be given the national attention and opprobrium they would both deserve.

Last week, Indiana Congressman Andre Carson told a CBC gathering in Florida that members of Congress who are members of the tea party want to see blacks “hanging from trees.” Because he is both a Democrat and a black congressman, the liberal news media, which means essentially all of our news media, has barely reported what is an almost uniquely vicious libel in American political history.

Given this uniqueness, it demands an explanation.

First, it is meant to create racial tension. Without racial tension — specifically, black Americans resenting white Americans, especially conservatives — the Democratic Party fears that it cannot survive as a national force. And it is right.

The day the majority of black Americans adopt the attitude that Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg has written of in “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” the Democratic Party will be rendered irrelevant. As a black American, Richberg considers himself a member of the most fortunate group of blacks living anywhere in the world.

No Democrat can win a presidential election without more than 90 percent of the black vote. And the only way to ensure that vote is to label whites in general and conservatives in particular as racists.

Next month, the UN-sponsored hate-Israel festival known as Durban III takes place. Under the heading “anti-racism,” the great bulk of the conference, like Durban I and Durban II, consists of condemning Israel for racism and equating it to an apartheid state.

Of the world’s many great lies, this is among the greatest.

How do we know it is a lie? Because when South Africa was an apartheid state, no one accused Israel of being one. Even the UN would have regarded the accusation as absurd.

Israel has nothing in common with an apartheid state, but few people know enough about Israel — or about apartheid South Africa — to refute the slander. So let’s respond.

First, what is an apartheid state? And does Israel fit that definition?

From 1948 to 1994, South Africa, the country that came up with this term, had an official policy that declared blacks second-class citizens in every aspect of that nation’s life. Among many other prohibitions on the country’s blacks, they could not vote; could not hold political office; were forced to reside in certain locations; could not marry whites; and couldn’t even use the same public restrooms as whites.

Not one of those restrictions applies to Arabs living in Israel.

One and a half million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20 percent of that country’s population. They have the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. They can vote, and they do. They can serve in the Israeli parliament, and they do. They can own property and businesses and work in professions alongside other Israelis, and they do. They can be judges, and they are. Here’s one telling example: it was an Arab judge on Israel’s Supreme Court who sentenced the former president of Israel — a Jew — to jail on a rape charge.

Some other examples of Arabs in Israeli life: Reda Mansour was the youngest ambassador in Israel’s history, and is now Consul General at Israel’s Atlanta Consulate; Walid Badir is an international soccer star on Israel’s national team and captain of one of Tel Aviv’s major teams; Rana Raslan is a former Miss Israel; Ishmael Khaldi was until recently the deputy consul of Israel in San Francisco; Khaled Abu Toameh is a major journalist with the Jerusalem Post; Ghaleb Majadele was until recently a Minister in the Israeli Government. They are all Israeli Arabs. Not one is a Jew.

Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world.

No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel enjoy.

There is only one solution to the world’s problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth.

It is 3,000 years old.

And it is known as the Ten Commandments.

Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs to make a beautiful world. While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas in order to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.

If people and countries lived by the Ten Commandments, all the great moral problems would disappear.

Or, to put it another way, all the great evils involve the violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments.

Here is the case in brief for the Ten Commandments (using the Jewish enumeration, which differs slightly from the Protestant and Catholic):

1. I am the Lord your God.

There are moral atheists and there are immoral believers, but there is no chance for a good world based on atheism. Ultimately, a godless and religion-free society depends on people’s hearts to determine right from wrong, and that is a very weak foundation.

Plenty of people have died in history in the name of God. But many more have been killed, tortured, and deprived of liberty in the name of humanity and progress or some other post-Judeo-Christian value. Religion gave us an Inquisition and gives us suicide terrorists, but the death of God gave us Nazism and Communism, which, in one century alone, slaughtered more than a hundred million people. All the founders of the United States – yes, all – knew that a free society can survive only if its citizens believe themselves to be morally accountable to God.

2. Do not have other gods.

The worship of false gods leads to evil. When anything but the God of creation and morality is worshiped, moral chaos ensues.

No one is godless. Either people worship God, or they worship other gods — nature, intelligence, art, education, beauty, the environment, Mother Earth, power, fame, pleasure, the state, the fuhrer, the party, progress, humanity. The list is almost endless. And no matter how noble — and false gods are often noble — when they become ends in themselves, they lead to evil.

3. Do not take God’s name in vain.

People have misinterpreted this commandment. They think it prohibits saying something like, “Oh, my God, what a home run!” But the Hebrew literally means “do not carry” the name of the Lord in vain.

In other words, we are forbidden from doing evil in God’s name. Only when thus understood does the rest of the Commandment make sense — that God will not “cleanse,” or forgive — the person who does this.

Thus, the Islamist who slits an innocent’s throat while shouting “Allahu Akbar” is the perfect example of the individual who carries God’s name in vain and who cannot be forgiven. These people not only murder their victims, they murder God’s name. For that reason, they do more evil than the atheist who murders.

4. Keep the Sabbath day and make it holy.

Leaving the world one day a week and elevating it above the others is the greatest vehicle to family harmony and to harmony with friends.

One day a week without video games, without parents leaving to go to work or to do their own thing on the computer forces parents and children to spend time together and to actually talk.

It even encourages couples to make love. It also weakens the institution of slavery. If even your servants get a day off because God commands it, that means you do not have absolute control over them.

Can Islam be reformed?

The question is in no way meant to be provocative, let alone insulting. But the world, including vast numbers of Muslims, needs this question answered.

After having studied Arabic at college and lectured on comparative religion for decades, and having devoted years to writing my upcoming book comparing American values with leftist and Islamist values, I have become convinced of two things regarding Islam: It must be reformed, and it can be reformed.

Both suppositions are highly controversial. Few believing Muslims think that Islam needs to be reformed; the suggestion would strike most religious Muslims as absurd, if not insulting and ultimately blasphemous. And it would strike many non-Muslim critics of Islam as naive. As Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, put it in a quote known to all Western students of Islam, “Islam reformed is Islam no longer.”

Let’s deal first with the question of whether Islam needs reforming.

The case for it is compelling. Here are a few reasons:

— Majority-Muslim and Islam-based countries are not, and have not been, free societies. According to the 2010 Freedom House “Freedom in the World” survey, of the world’s 47 Muslim-majority countries, only two are free, 18 are partly free, and 27 are not free. There is no honest explanation for this nearly total absence of liberty in Muslim countries that does not reflect in some way on Islam.

— Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians in places like medieval Spain was morally far superior to the treatment of non-Christians by European Christians during the same period. But in the modern period, nowhere that Islam has controlled has afforded non-Muslims anywhere near the equality that non-Christians have taken for granted in the Christian world.

— There was a burst of intellectual and scientific creativity in the Muslim world for a few hundred years, but then the opponents of reason came to dominate Islam, and with it came a loss of scientific and intellectual curiosity.

How could it have been otherwise? The dominant Muslim view was that the natural world had no laws. Everything that occurred did so solely because Allah willed it. If an arrow hit its target, it was not because of the archer’s ability or wind patterns or laws of physics; it was because Allah willed it.

According to a United Nations report written by Arab scholars, the Arab world’s lack of interest in the non-Arab and non-Muslim worlds is so great that in any given year comparatively tiny Greece translates more books into Greek than all the Arab countries combined translate into Arabic.

— Regarding women, one cannot name a culture or religion in which the status of women is as low as it is in many Muslim societies. Moreover, the status of women has actually declined in many Muslim societies in the present generation. For example, the veil is more common in Egypt today than it was a hundred years ago.

— In nearly every Muslim country in which non-Muslims live (usually Christians) — from Nigeria to Egypt to Iraq — they suffer persecution.

— A very small percentage of Muslims are terrorists. But nearly every international terrorist is Muslim. And according to every poll I have seen, at least 70 million of the world’s more than a billion Muslims support Islamist actions and theology.

— Every state that calls itself an Islamic Republic and rules according to Islamic law is a totalitarian state, and it is usually a bloodthirsty one.

Saudi Arabia is an example of the first; Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Iran and Islamist Sudan are examples of both.

Cartoon created by circumcision ban advocate.

The citizens of San Francisco will be voting on a proposition that seeks to ban circumcision in that city. Though I am strongly opposed to the proposition, if it passes, some good may come of it.

Let me explain. I am a passionate advocate of Jewish ritual known as the brit (often pronounced bris) — the ritual circumcision of 8-day-old Jewish boys. I am even an advocate of circumcision generally. I was recently in Africa — in Zimbabwe and Zambia — where I delivered mosquito nets and seeds to the poorest of Africa’s poor. I saw giant billboards there, as well as in neighboring Botswana, exhorting men to get circumcised. The World Health Organization estimates that male circumcision reduces the rate of heterosexually transmitted AIDS by about 60 percent.

As regards Jewish ritual circumcision, I can only say that I cried like a baby at the brit of my two sons. All I could think of was that, like generations of Jews who came before me, I had been given the gift of transmitting an unbroken chain of Judaism that dates back to Abraham, 3,600 years ago.

I find the arguments of those who campaign against the brit either specious or ludicrous. The notion that some terrible, lasting pain is inflicted on the baby is simply over the top. The average time the baby cries is probably well under the time it cries — and far less frantic — when tired or desiring milk. I fully understand the conflicted feelings of the mother, and I see no reason for her to be present when the actual cutting of the foreskin takes place.

Does the baby experience pain and discomfort afterward? Yes. But it is temporary, and the baby heals quickly.

The advantages wildly outweigh the momentary pain. The brit uniquely strengthens a Jew’s religious identification, and the ceremony instills in the family and the community a profound identification with the nearly four millennia of the Jews’ world-changing history.

As for the argument that the foreskin is important, I can only say that in my most self-pitying moments I cannot recall lamenting not having my foreskin. As I have told anti-circumcision activists on my radio show, you have to be pretty bored with life to be preoccupied with not having foreskin.

One might add that the same people who are profoundly upset over the removal of foreskin rarely have a problem with the removal of a living human fetus. San Francisco considers protecting the human fetus religious fanaticism, but it is seriously considering protecting a newborn’s foreskin.

So, then, given my profound support for circumcision, what good could possibly come from San Francisco passing a ban on it?

If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the left.

Obviously, San Francisco’s already existing bans on toys in Happy Meals, on soda in city-owned places and on plastic bags, and the city’s proposed ban on the sale of pets, even goldfish, have not moved many Jews (or non-Jews) to begin wondering whether left-wing governance is dangerous. But perhaps a ban on circumcision will.

While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society’s moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans — through myriad associations — took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state — vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents — Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today’s workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. But today’s workers don’t have enough money to sustain the scheme, and there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, and many American states, like California, are going broke.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and contrary to liberal thought since Karl Marx, work builds character.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality — another expression of narcissism.

And the rhetoric of liberalism — labeling each new entitlement a “right” — reinforces this sense of entitlement.

South Korea has joined with only two other countries in the world in dropping the name of the forthcoming film “Captain America” and using the subtitle, “The First Avenger.” The other two countries are Russia and Ukraine. According to the New York Times report, “Although that country (South Korea) is one of Hollywood’s top-performing territories, resentment about the continued presence of the United States military runs deep.”

For years now, I have intended to write a column about the most glaring case of international ingratitude of which I am aware. The “Captain America” story has finally pushed me over the edge.

For decades, there have been anti-U.S. demonstrations in South Korea. And each time I wonder the same thing: Do these people have any idea what the living hell known as North Korea is like? Do these people understand that the United States is the reason they are so free and prosperous, completely unlike their fellow North Koreans who had the horrible luck not to be liberated by America? Do these people know how many Americans died to enable them to be free?

Whenever I confront someone who claims that America’s wars abroad were fought for economic gain or to extend its alleged imperialist empire, I ask the person about the Korean War: What imperialist or economic reasons were there to fight in that country?

The answer I most often receive is, “Frankly I don’t know too much about the Korean War.” And it’s a good thing for the critics of America’s wars that they don’t know much about the Korean War. If they did, they would either experience cognitive dissonance or have to severely modify their position on America’s wars.

Just five years after a war-weary America celebrated the end of World War II, Americans were asked to fight the successor-evil to Nazism, communism, in Korea, a country most Americans could not identify on a map or did not know anything about. In an earlier version of what happened in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China backed a communist attempt to take over the southern half of the Korean peninsula — the northern half had been communist since the end of World War II — and install a Stalinist tyranny over the non-communist southern half.

Over 36,000 Americans died in America’s successful attempt to keep SouthKorea from becoming communist. And another 92,000 were wounded.

Anthony Weiner, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger — these are just the most recent examples of powerful men who have ruined their lives because of some inappropriate (or, in the case of Strauss-Kahn, allegedly much worse than inappropriate) sexual conduct.

Can you name a single woman politician caught in a similar sex scandal?

If not, why not?

The answer is so simple and so obvious that there should be no need to write a column on the subject. But, thanks to feminism and academia, the obvious has been declared untrue.

Take the article on this subject by New York Times Washington correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg. Titled “When It Comes to Scandal, Girls Won’t Be Boys,” Stolberg begins her answer to the question as to why powerful men, but not powerful women, are involved in sex scandals with this disclaimer: “It would be easy to file this under the category of ‘men behaving badly,’ to dismiss it as a testosterone-induced, hard-wired connection between sex and power (powerful men attract women) … .”

Of course, what Stolberg dismisses as the reason is precisely the reason. Power (and money and fame) seduces women in the same way women’s bodies and faces seduce men. And, unless men exert major efforts to control their sexual nature, they will use their power (or money or fame) to obtain sex with a variety of women.

There are only two things that stop powerful and famous men from sleeping with available women. The first is a strong value system (that is, a sense of obligation to their wives and/or their religion’s power over them). The second is an overwhelming fear of getting caught. In either case, these things must be coupled with powerful self-control.

Yes, Stolberg, men — the least powerful as much as the most powerful — are “hard-wired” to sleep with as many women as they can. The only difference between the governor of California and a male sanitation worker is that the former has far more opportunities.

But Stolberg, our well-educated New York Times correspondent, denies this basic reality about men’s natures. Feminism 101 teaches the opposite of reality — that men and women have similar, if not identical, sexual drives. And therefore she dismisses the truth of the matter at the outset of her article.

But if it isn’t male sexual nature, what is the New York Times reporter’s feminist explanation for why sexual scandal is virtually a monopoly of powerful men?

“There may be something else at work: Research points to a substantial gender gap in the way women and men approach running for office.

Women have different reasons for running, are more reluctant to do so and, because there are so few of them in politics, are acutely aware of the scrutiny they draw — all of which seems to lead to differences in the way they handle their jobs once elected.”