Medved on Israel's right to exist

If you have a liberal friend who you may feel is tottering to the other side, turn that person on to Michael Medved's talk radio show. Medved is a former liberal. In addition, he doesn's possess the baggage of someone like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, and the tone of Medved's show is not confrontational. Medved regularly accepts calls from those who oppose his views, and Medved doesn't berate those callers, but shoots them down in calm responses doused in common sense.

Medved has a good eye for stories, he was the first radio talker to interview fired DePaul professor Thomas Klocek on the air.

"Does Israel have a right to exist?," Medved asks in today's Townhall.com

For those who instinctively resist any comparison of Israel’s "right to exist" with that of the United States, the crucial difference must be one of longevity: America has now enjoyed 230 years of prosperous independence, while Israel has yet to reach its sixtieth birthday. Yet other nations (Slovakia? Turkmenistan? Namibia?) have come into being far more recently than Israel, without endless public challenges to their legitimacy. Montenegro, for instance, just joined the family of nations a few months ago—despite the fact that more that 45% of the citizens of the new country voted against its independence.

Here is another paragraph I like:

Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, shortly before the commencement of modern Jewish resettlement, and described it as "a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action." According to the careful population figures of the Ottoman Empire, in 1882 (at the very beginning of the modern, organized Jewish immigration back to the ancestral home), the total population of land between the Jordan and the Sea was less than 250,000 – in an area that today supports ten million people, Israelis and Palestinians.

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