In his most recent column, Dennis Prager asks, “why isn’t the left out there leading pro-Israel demonstrations?” After all, Israel is fully democratic, has a highly developed feminist movement, holds annual gay pride parades, has an independent and liberal judiciary, an active and influential leftist press, and leftist (even Socialist) parties — in short, it embodies the very institutions and attitudes the left claims to celebrate. Whereas the Muslim Arab world (let’s face it) represents the exact opposite: the Palestinian Authority is run by a “self-aggrandizing, corrupt dictator-type that the left claims to hold in contempt,” women are second-class citizens, homosexuals are arrested or executed, the media is state controlled, etc.

So why, then, does the left support the Palestinians?

For Prager, “the answer is as important as it is contemptible”:

In general, the left does not care about women, independent judiciaries, minorities, democracy, gays or almost anything else for which it marches. That is why the left opposed America’s war in Afghanistan, which liberated women from being treated like animals.

Nearly all the causes the left speaks for are noble-sounding covers for its real agenda — the overthrowing of Western, especially Judeo-Christian and capitalist, values. Remember the chant at Stanford, ‘Hey, hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go’? That is what animates the left.

In psychoanalytic terms, it is antagonism to one’s father and his values. In a commencement speech he gave this year, the former president of Dartmouth College, James O. Freedman, a man of the left, said that the purpose of a college education is ‘to question your father’s values.’ Those of us not on the left believe that the purpose of a college education is to discover what is true and what is good.

America embodies all that the left dislikes. It is the most religious of the industrialized democracies (proudly and uniquely Judeo-Christian). It is also the most capitalist. And, what drives the left especially crazy is that with all this religion and capitalism, America is the most powerful force on earth — economically, militarily and culturally.

Israel is Little America. It, too, is religious (though a secular state like the United States, it is proudly Jewish). It, too, celebrates capitalism. There are no demonstrations in Israel against McDonald’s. On the contrary, even before McDonald’s opened there, Hebrew replicas like ‘McDavid’s’ were established.

And Israel, like America, celebrates its national identity, not the ‘world’ identity that the left affirms. The left loathes nationalism unless it is anti-Western, like Palestinian or Cuban. America does not jump to attention when world treaties are signed and Israel is the U.N.’s pariah, rendering America and Israel the left’s ‘axis of evil,’ far more reviled than Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

The question, ‘Why does the left support the Palestinians?’ is an extremely important one. At this time in history nothing so illustrates the left’s nihilism as does its support of the Palestinians against Israel.

…Which is all a roundabout way of saying that, with regard to the Palestinian situation, either you’ve pulled your head out of your ass by now or you haven’t. And it’s not just “leftists.” I’ll even broaden my analysis to include those chainsmoking paleocon sneermongers (you know who you are) drunk on conspiracy theories and high on cloak-n-dagger paranoia. Tumblers, the lot of ’em.