Category Posts by Others

Feb 28 2015

What Has Happened to America?


America has been morally disarmed. It cannot stand up to its Mortal enemy, Islam.

By Prof Paul Eidelberg

It cannot even halt the hatred of Jews and Israel rampant in American colleges and universities. Indeed, liberal education in America is primarily a form of self-degradation. This degradation is called “multiculturalism,” which is nothing more than a euphemism for Nihilism, the philosophy of the void that has conquered contemporary liberal education.

What is ironic about this development is that it coincides with the eruption of a doctrine diametrically opposed to multiculturalism, “Islamism” Islamism is unadulterated Islam on its historical and global warpath. Islam rejects the nation-state system, whose diverse ways of life is a manifestation of the plenitude of the Creator of heaven and earth. This diversity requires for its enjoyment and progress universal laws of morality, for the teaching of which God created a special people, “Israel.”

The teachings and behaviors of Israel and Islam are diametrically opposed. Muslim scriptures impose on their believers a duty to kill Jews.  The Quran exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain” for Allah (Sura 9:111).

Given this murderous hatred, that Jews should arm themselves against these Muslims, whether in malls or in synagogues, is plain common sense. However, carrying a deadly weapon requires a modicum of courage, since it suggests that you may have to use it against a wicked person. This poses a problem that involves more than death-dealing Muslims.

First of all, to think and act with dispatch against wicked people requires a firm belief in good and evil. Unfortunately, the belief in good and evil has been eroded in the present age by the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism, a dogma prevalent among Contemporary Liberals in contradistinction to Classical Liberals.

When a Classical Liberal said that men can be friends despite their differences, he was assuming that what these men have in common is more important to them than their differences. What has unobtrusively fostered this assumption was the long-established belief that man is created in the image of God.

This is why people with diverse religious doctrines in the West – say Catholics, Protestant, and Jews – could behave toward each other in a civil and tolerant manner and with mutual confidence. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.

Evangelical atheists, who are not models of toleration, have become political activists. Meanwhile, moral fatigue has diminished Americans, and just when militant Islam is erupting everywhere.  American self-confidence has evaporated. For an American to preach religious toleration would be laughable.

The contemporary Liberal doesn’t know how to handle this new state of affairs. He’s mired in moral paralysis, largely because he has been to college where he internalized a variety of noxious academic doctrines spewing moral relativism or moral equivalency. Higher education today is steeped in post-modernism, more precisely, in multiculturalism and the “fact-value” dichotomy of logical empiricism. The latter has influenced great physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, Their mastery of science has left them babes in a moral wilderness, as I have shown in my book “Rescuing America from Nihilism: A Judeo-Scientific Approach”.

Now let us cut to the chase. The Relativism spearheaded by liberals has eviscerated belief in the Universal Truths embodied in America’s primary foundational document, its Declaration of Independence. By so doing, Relativism has undermined American self-confidence and vitiated its foreign policy. 

The seed was planted a hundred years ago in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was influenced by Hegel’s doctrine of historical progress, which by definition rendered the immutable truths of the Declaration obsolete, along with the long-established idea of limited government. Aping Hegel, Wilson made the bureaucratic State the instrument of Progress. This obviously promoted the popularly elected President as the nation’s supreme leader. Wilson’s historical relativism and progressivism captured the White House, now run by his unlearned disciple Barack Obama.

Thus, nothing less than an intellectual-cum-political revolution can save America and what’s left of Western Civilization. Needed for the dual aspects of this revolution is an American president with a sober Judeo-Christian mind and a good understanding of how this combination of factors is needed to stop the Advance of Islam on the one hand, and to rejuvenate the West on the other.

Hence nothing short of a political as well as a pedagogical revolution are necessary, beginning with basic reform of the education, one that restores love of America and confidence in the justice and nobility its cause – such that this education may inspire our opinion makers and decision makers.

Feb 24 2015

Obama Must Be Removed from Office


By Paul Eidelberg

Again I urge the formation of a prestigious team of experts in Constitutional Law, American history, and Political Science to render President Barack Obama powerless.

Needed are Congressional investigations of his conduct as President, his abuses of executive power; possible misappropriation or allocation of funds’ actual abuses of the law such as unlawful release of Arab terrorists undermining respect for the rule of law; any acts of Obama that cast contempt on America’s foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution; also statements and acts of Obama that reflect his contempt for Christianity and the American Heritage.

It must also be shown that he is undermining the morale of American servicemen and women who are fighting for America while he casts nothing but contempt for the America way of life and does nothing more uplifting than playing nine more holes of golf.

It never has entered his opaque mind that more and more soldiers are committing suicide not because of combat fatigue, so much as because many feel there is nothing worth fighting for when the President of the United States scorns the idea of American Exceptionalism along with America’s most famous foundational documents, as mentioned, the Declaration and the Constitution.

I didn’t have to serve in the U.S. Air Force to know that the most important element of nation’s military power is the morale of its soldiers and citizens. Obama is disemboweling this country. He not only scorns America, but identifies with her greatest enemy, Islam.

Obama represents a clear and present danger to our country’s survival. Hence, everything short of violence must be done to remove Obama from office. This calls for coordinated protests in Washington by patriotic groups from every state of the Union. It calls for flooding the media with Obama’s anti-American, pro-Islamic statements. Every citizen must see how he trivializes and makes a mockery of Islamic terrorism, and how his moral indifference to this terrorism endangers the lives of American, men, women, and children.

If this were not enough to call for Obama’s resignation, our anti-America president has alienated our European allies. He has nullified missile defense facilities in Poland and Czechoslovakia, two of a dozen nations only recently liberated from Russian tyranny. At the same time, he authorized annual grants of hundreds of millions dollars to the tyranny called the Palestinian Authority, a consortium of Muslim terrorists groups committed to Israel’s destruction. Israel! America’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. Israel! The nation U.S. generals proudly and gratefully call America’s largest aircraft carrier in the Middle East!

Meanwhile, our anything but self-effacing President of the United States retreats from American power and responsibility while a new Cold War  is brewing with Russia. With troops and tanks in the Crimea, Russia will have a land base to supply its Black Sea fleet, whose target is not only the Middle East. No, Russia is positioning itself to control Europe’s southern front along the Mediterranean – which Russian geo-politics has envisioned for more than a century.

Our clueless Obama is utterly oblivious of Russia’s imperial ambitions. While this Golf Player thinks the Cold War is over, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, a student of history, boasts that Russian military might has no match. Obviously, Obama is no match for Putin.

Feb 24 2015

America’s Pedagogical & Political Demise: A Roman Story


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

The demise of America is proceeding without any serious resistance. Evangelical atheism is rampant. America’s most cherished values are being undermined by the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism, which denies any and all moral truths. College students have succumbed to the mindless adage “I’m okay, you’re okay.”

This nihilism is occurring in the midst of a war Islam is swaging against us while our golf-playing President, Barack Hussein Obama, intones the words “We are not at war with Islam,” as if 9/11never happened, and as if former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never gleefully said “Death to America!”  Let’s sober up.

It’s well known that Muslims – never mind futile and misleading adjectives – are murdering and maiming Jews and Christians in several continents. To all but fools, this is a world war. The truth is that the “religion of peace” has been waging a punctuated war against the non-Muslims world since the advent of Mohammad in the seventh century.

If proof is wanted, the Center for the Study of Political Islam reported in its February 21, 2007 issue of FrontPageMagazine, that Muslims have slaughtered approximately 270 million people since Muhammad’s ascendancy.

And now there’s the Muslim Brotherhood and myriads of mosques in America and Europe, spewing hatred of Western Civilization. Their Imams have declared war against all “infidels” in the name of Islam’s deity, Allah.

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama has appointed to his Administration, including the Department of Homeland Security, several members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose hostility toward the United States and the West are no secret.

Why is this subversion occurring with the compliance of the American Congress, and without large-scale public protests? Is the United States suffering from a massive mental disorder, moral indifferentism, or just plain cowardice?

Have college youth been corrupted by the academic doctrine of moral and cultural relativism? Are they now incapable of distinguishing between good from evil? Has their will to uphold American versus Islamic values been eviscerated by this moral and cultural relativism?

Have Christians and Jews in this country been so demoralized as to think that it is politically incorrect to describe ISIS decapitations of non-Muslims as evil? Or has relativism led them to believe that calling ISIS evil is to express nothing more than a personal dislike, comparable to one’s dislike for a particular flavor of ice cream?

Perhaps their mentors believe, and have taught them to believe, that notions of good and evil are purely subjective, that since they are not susceptible to measurement or empirical verification, they have no objective validity. This academic relativism fosters Nihilism, a rejection of America’s cherished values. Indeed, a nihilist rejects all claims to objective truth, and should therefore be deemed a degenerate.

Since this is the pronounced tendency of contemporary (as opposed to classical) liberals, we may call them liberal leftists. As college graduates, these liberal leftists become America’s most influential opinion makers and decision makers. Many are anti-American, and would not be incorrect to call egoists. Indeed, since they incline to moral relativism, they may well be called degenerates.

Is there any presidential candidate that has the courage to expose these degenerates without being accused of McCarthyism?

I exposed this degeneracy in an a 1968 article published in the Congressional Record, showing how it was being propagated by the then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, as well as by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas – both arrant relativists. We have such people in today’s Supreme Court. They are also present in the State Department, as documented by former US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

The Relativist-in-Chief is in the White House! Unless patriotic Congressmen and the American people speak up and expose this relativism – this academic subversion of the United States – the demise of this Republic will replicate the pedagogical and political decline of Rome.◙

 

Feb 24 2015

Islamic Arrogance, Rage, and Savagery


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

President Barack Obama cannot associate the word “radical” or “extremism” with Islam. It makes him choke. Hence, he cannot admit that Islam is at war with the United States.  After all, Islam is a world religion associated with monotheism. How can it be at war with America? In the surreal world of Barak Obama, 9/11 never happened or was a “workplace accident,”

Since Islam is a religion of peace, the notion of Islamic extremism is a non-sequitur. And since Islam is a monotheistic religion sharing moral precepts found in Christianity and Judaism,  it cannot possibly be at war with mankind.

Admittedly, Catholic theologian George P. Weigel is skeptical about Islam’s lofty reputation. He contends that “To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three monotheisms” or Abrahamic faiths” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, he says “ought to be retired.”[1]

Like many secular scholars from a variety of nations, Weigel rejects the notion of “Muslim moderates.”  It thus appears absurd that Jews, famous for their rationality, should seek a genuine peace agreement by negotiations with their cultural and ideological opposites – Muslim Arabs whose mentality is fundamentally bellicose and arguably irrational. Indeed, the great intellectually liberated Islamic philologist and historian, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), has written that Arabs are a savage people, and that “savagery” describes their inherent character. But what is meant by “savage?”

According to that most erudite and marvelous Christian C. S. Lewis, “Savage beliefs are thought to be the spontaneous response of a human group to its environment, a response made principally by the imagination. They exemplify what some call pre-logical thinking. They are closely bound up with the communal life of the group.”

Consistent therewith, Moshe Dayan writes, “[The Arabs] live in a world which is not truth and they do this almost like a man who needs hashish … It often seems to me that all Arabs – and on all levels – act as though under the influence of drugs. Yet illusion is worse than a lie. You make a lie consciously and you dominate it, while the illusion will finally dominate you.”[2] This phenomenon is typical among savages.

It is futile to engage a savage in rational discourse, in which an idea is related to observation with a view of its affirmation or negation. The passion-driven and communal consciousness of a savage is impervious to reason.

This savage mentality is exemplified by the Taliban, whose religious police distributed placards in Afghanistan saying, “Throw reason to the dogs, it stinks of corruption.” (It would be futile to send one of these placards to President Obama, since he sacrificed s intellect long ago at the church of the Revered Jeremiah Wright.)

Obama can hardly be classified as a savage, but his contempt for truth – most clearly manifested in his saying America was founded by Muslims – which suggests he does not read serious books – exemplifies the deep-seated hatred of books manifested in the Muslim world.

Although savage beliefs may be dissipated by literacy, Muslims are famous for how few books they publish. Muslims account for 5% of the world’s population, yet produce only 1% of the world’s books. Muslims are also habituated to rote learning. This renders them more susceptible to the hackneyed remarks of demagogues. Obama displays little evidence of critical thinking.

In Modern Islam (1962), G. E. Von Grunebaum writes, “It is essential to realize that Muslim civilization … is. not vitally interested in analytical self-understanding, and it is even less interested in the structural study of other cultures, either as an end in itself or as a means of a clearer understanding of its own character and history.”

Bernard Lewis portrays Islam’s overweening arrogance and utter contempt for Western civilization in “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990). Contrary to Islam, the sages of Israel teach, “The Creator says of all who are proud, he and I cannot be together.” As stated in Proverbs 16:5, “The proud are despicable in the eyes of Hashem.”

Convinced of its possession of absolute truth, Islam cannot believe it is of any value to study cultures steeped in error. Hence it discourages among the faithful any incentive to understand other cultures from the latter’s own point of view. It is therefore ethnocentric folly that prompts Israeli and American officials to engage the Palestinian Authority in peace talks with the expectation of rational and reliable results, especially in view of the deeply ingrained cultural duplicity exemplified by the Islamic concept of taqiyya.

It never occurs to people like Secretary of State John Kerry, to say nothing of Israeli politicians, that in consorting with the Palestinians they are dealing with a savage culture, as was recognized by Ibn Khaldun and G. E. Von Grunebaum.◙

 

[1] George Weigel, Faith. Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Acton (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 17.

[2] Cited in Michael Brecher, The Foreign Policy System of Israel (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 354-355; Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (Jerusalem: Steimatzky, 1976), 332.

Feb 20 2015

Identifying and Purging America’s Enemy


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

“A War America Can’t Win” is the title of an article I wrote a few days after having gazed, horror struck, at the rubble of the World Trade Center. In that article I said you can’t defeat an enemy unless you first identify him. Although Professor Newt Gingrich echoed this remark the other day in Iowa, more than fifteen years have elapsed since 9/11 and America has yet to define its enemy – and the enemy, unsurprisingly, was not defined by Gingrich.

The reason is pathetically obvious, for the name of the enemy is nothing other than ISLAM – Islam without descriptive adjectives, be it “radical,” “militant,” “extremist,” “political,” “fundamentalist,” etc.

America is so far from identifying its enemy that the benighted American people, with no small help from their academic mentors, have twice made the most powerful apologist of this enemy, Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States!

Before explaining this inanity or insanity, I must explain that no government official in America dares say that Islam is the enemy if only because that would define the enemy as a world RELIGION – a no-no in the lexicon of liberal America.

If this was not enough to veil the truth about this intolerant and venomous religion, Islam not only has 1.6 billion votaries, but this enormous number of worshipers of the toxic Qur’an rules than 50 nations. These Muslim nations, moreover, are represented in the world’s capital of hatred and hypocrisy the United Nations General Assembly. In that mélange, America, a colossus, has a single vote vis-à-vis diminutive Djibouti, a nation whose population is less than that of Brooklyn, New York!

Towering in the UN with more than fifty members, totalitarian Islam is appeased by an ensemble of democracies.  These democracies ignore the demonstrable fact that Islam is not only the greatest enemy of democracy, but also of Western Civilization. That Western civilization represents the primacy of reason versus primacy force in human affairs, and that this civilization embraces – of once embraced – the moral values of the Greco-Christian and Judaic heritage, no longer hold sway in the “community” of nations.

Although imperialism is a basic tenet of Islam, whose reach is everywhere, no civilized nation so much as thinks of organizing an alliance against this non-localized scourge of mankind, whose fabricated monotheistic veneer overawes post-Christian Europe and the evangelical atheism of the United States.

America and Europe, emasculated by secularism, exist in a state of denial. They willfully ignore blatant reality, that the American-led West is involved a civilizational conflict with the Islamic-led East. This is a RELIGIOUS WAR more total than the religious wars of the sixteenth century. The present East-West conflict began with the Khomeini Revolution of 1979, arguably the most significant revolution in the last 2,000 years.

But let us not overlook the civilizational and therefore quasi-religious conflict known as the Second World War, in which 16 million Americans were conscripted to fight atheistic Nazi Germany in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Notice, however, that that war differs in a most crucial respect from today’s conflagration.

In the Second World War, the United States and its ally Great Britain harbored no doubt about the evil nature of their enemy, Nazi Germany. Today, however, the university-bred doctrine of moral and cultural relativism has obscured the old distinction between good and evil. Generation after generation of college students have been corrupted by relativism. They graduate college and become the leading opinion makers and policy makers of the West. Emasculated by relativism, they lack the moral confidence and stamina of the older, more American generation. Relativism has sapped their will, their readiness to designate Islam as EVIL despite Islam’s use of children as human bombs, a depravity beyond that of the Nazis!

The key problem is this. No American official would dare suggest that that moral depravity is intellectually ignored or obscured by the academic doctrine of multicultural moral relativism. This doctrine, which has been permeated by higher education in the democratic world, has emasculated the West vis-à-vis Islam. Just ponder a few quotes from the mentors of students who will eventually become the opinion makers and policy maker of the West, indeed, who will be ensconced in the foreign office in Washington and London, there to espouse the doctrine of moral equivalence – say between Israel and the Palestinian – and thus make a mockery of “Western Civilization.”

  • “Whatever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil … For these words of good[and] evil … are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so …”[1]
  • “If I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money,’ I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money.’ In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it…. If I now generalize my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning, that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false.”[2]– Alfred Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic(1936, 1946) England’s leading exponent of logical positivism knighted by the Queen!
  • “Ethical axioms are not necessary truths because they are not truths of any kind.”[3]– Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy(1951) Founder of the Berlin Circle of logical positivism in the United States
  • “The phantoms[ideas] formed in the brain are … sublimates of their material [economic] life-process … Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of Consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.”[4]– Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The German Ideology.

These nihilistic doctrines, which have corrupted the minds of Americans and Europeans, have actually modulated the mentality of Barak Obama. The mind of this first “post-American” has been so corrupted that he can’t utter the words “Islamic terrorism”! Indeed, he can’t associate Islam with Islam’s most notorious moral imperative, ofJihad!

This incredible state of affairs, the consequence of a long-ongoing erosion Judeo-Christian morality, hence, of an inability to distinguish good from evil, was foreshadowed the day after 9/11 when President George W. Bush uttered the statement that Islam is a “religion of Peace”! This mindless remark, repeated countless times by other American politicians, and never publicly and effectively revealed as a mockery of 1,400 years of Islamic history, leads to the conclusion that, given the pernicious influence of moral relativism, America cannot win the war against its declared enemy. Therefore, since moral relativism permeates the mentality now manifested by the occupant of the White House, it follows that America cannot survive Islamic Imperialism as long as the Congress of the United States or the American people do nothing to relegate Barack Obama to the political culvert from which he arose.

 

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 32 (emphasis added).

[2] A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Penguin, 1936), 110-111. Ayer (1910–1989) was a major purveyor of the emotive theory of ethics.

[3] Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Oakland: University of California Press, 1951), 280.

[4] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 14 (emphasis added).

Feb 20 2015

“I’m Okay, You’re Okay”


By Paul Eidelberg

The Americans had other grievances, but it took the British tax on tea to start the American Revolution of 1776. We live in a different era.

Since the value of tea now makes the value of human life worthless, as it is among Muslims, President Obama assures us that America is not at war with Islam. No one should be surprised by his taking time off from his job as America’s commander-in-chief to play golf.

His doing so is less a commentary on him than on America and American education. We need to bear in mind, that sports have taken the place of religion in American life, just as the mall has taken the place of the church. And we should also remember that our Colleges and Universities foster an “I’m okay you’re okay” mentality, which makes Islam okay as well.

If this corrupts the minds of youth, it doesn’t begin on campus, even though that’s where cynicism is dignified by academics with Ph.D.s in psychology or anthropology, or maybe sociology or political science. These academics have learned that we are all okay. What some people call “terrorists” is really freedom fighters looking for a job. You don’t need four years of college to learn this.

Besides, Internet is a lot cheaper than college tuition, and you don’t have to bone up for a final exam. Also, if you’re fed up with the left-wing academics that comprise three out of four teachers in the social sciences, you can always turn on FOX News for a red, white, and blue snapshot of good ole America. Of course, FOX is not Obama’s favorite news outlet, whose reporters think we are at war with some entity that has no name. Nevertheless, you must not offend Muslims. As for  Jews, they are open season.

Obama is really cool.  ISIS and its beheadings have not deterred POTUS from deploring Islamophobia. He’s quite blasé about the centrifuges Iran has been accumulating, and Iran’s space launch vehicle inventory only makes him yawn.  Obama should feel free to play another nine holes of golf. The U.S. is not at war with Islam.

Feb 20 2015

Obama’s Denial and America’s Looming Disaster


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States, has emphatically declared, “We are not at war with Islam.” This is comparable to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt saying “We are not at war with Nazism,” whose Storm troopers were poised to overrun and terrorize all of Europe as well as North Africa.

In this war America raise 15 million solders to defeat any nation that flew the Swastika, Germany’s death’s head insignia, the equivalent of Islam’s scimitar.

In saying “We are not at war with Islam, Obama was not engaging in the cultivated prevarication of Islamic taqiyya. After all, did not President George W. Bush say as much the day after 9/11 when he described Islam as “a religion of peace,” as have academics such as John Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University?

Indeed, what else but denial could Obama utter since he publicly exalts the Qur’an as “holy”? How could America possibly be at war with Obama’s holy book without being at war with Obama?

True, former Muslims, having renounced Islam, have called Islam a religion of war. They echo Winston Churchill’s famous remark that the Qur’an is the “Mein Kampf” of war, which may compound the reason why President Obama returned a bust of Churchill to London. Churchill was also a colonialist who said this of Muslims:

Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.[i]

If Churchill were alive today, his warning of the 1930s regarding the imminent war with Nazi Germany would be magnified tenfold regarding Islam’s declared war against Western Civilization. Obama’s denial of this war not only intensifies and magnifies its scope, His denial disarms us and may lead to Islam’s conquest of the world, the goal of Muslim leaders from Mohammad to the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose hatred of the West is Islam’s spearhead, Iran.

Feb 20 2015

We Must Remove Obama from the White House ASAP


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Honest scholars know that Islam declared war on the United States long before 9/11.

Now, the most powerful apologist of Islam is Barack Obama.

Therefore, we need team of men and women, black and white, including Constitutional lawyers, historians, and political scientists attuned to international relations, to put their heads together and devise lawful political means to remove Obama from the White House even without impeachment.

Let’s enlist present and former members of Congress (like Allen West and Michele Bachmann) to help in this task.

If this requires marches on Washington by groups of patriotic Americans from the 50 states of the Union (all calling on Obama to resign), let’s get to it before the pernicious fool in the WH  WWdoes any more irreversible damage. We can’t afford to wait two years. And don’t worry about VP Joe Biden.

Feb 12 2015

Solving Basic Public Problems


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Habit, no less than reason, is what prompts people to blame the head of their government or its ruling party for failure to solve basic public problems.  I say “habit” because if you live in a long-established regime, you are not likely to blame its form of government for its inept foreign policies or its serious socio-economic and moral problems. It’s much easier to denounce the failings of your president or his party.  And more “practical” because it’s far more difficult to change established institutions than to elect a new president or replace the party in power with another.

Few people in a democracy discern or trouble themselves about the defects of their system of governance.  Fewer still see the relationship between faulty government policies and their country’s electoral laws.  Most people take their governing institutions and electoral laws for granted.

Nevertheless, many basic problems are the result of unrecognized flaws in a country’s law-making and policy-making institutions.  The attributes of institutions — the qualifications for voting and holding office, the mode of election, the size, tenure, and powers of the various branches — can either increase or decrease the probability of getting competent office-holders on the one hand, and facilitate salutary public policies on the other.

I have elsewhere shown that Israel’s Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches are poorly designed. They render it extremely difficult to pursue policies conducive to national solidarity, self-confidence, and security.  Although more and more people in Israel are learning this, basic institutional or constitutional change is very difficult, and for various reasons.

First, and as indicated, most people find it simpler to blame the failings of this or that politician or party for their country’s plight, rather than the design of their system of governance.  Second, political parties and various economic groups, having learned how to exploit and profit from the system, have a vested interests in preserving the institutional status quo.  Third, Israel’s precarious situation in the Middle East discourages others from venturing on basic institutional reform.  Fourth, there are many people who do not see that it is precisely the defects of Israel’s political and judicial institutions that are largely responsible for the country’s internal and external dangers.

For example, it’s easier to say that the government is inept, or that it ignores public opinion, than to see that the country’s parliamentary electoral laws may discourage high caliber individuals from seeking public office, while making it easier for low caliber politicians to remain in office and betray their voters..  Very few people in a democracy have the professional training to recognize that its electoral laws may be largely responsible for inferior leadership and even official corruption.  But electoral laws very much determine not only the extent to which a government is democratic and faithful to the electorate, but capable of advancing to public office men capable of dealing effectively with the country’s basic tensions and dangers.

Consider.  Democracy means the rule of the people, which translates into the rule of the majority. The rule of the majority means the opinion of the majority on this or that public issue.  Knowing this opinion, Legislators have an obligation to translate that opinion into public law, or, in the case of the Executive, to apply existing law in conformity with public opinion.  Although this is a simplified view of things, it corresponds to the idea of representative government.    Admittedly, public opinion on a particular issue is not necessarily correct or just.  But there are occasions when public opinion actually represents the basic principles of any decent or civilized society.  Here is an example.

On May 31, 1994, eight months after the signing of the Israel-PLO Accords, the following question was posed to Hebrew-speaking Israelis in a Gallop poll:  “There are those who claim that senior PLO officials, such as Arafat and others who are suspected of murdering Israelis, should not be put on trial, because such an action would probably damage the peace process.  There are others who claim that everyone is equal before the law, and therefore suspected PLO officials should be investigated and put on trial.  Which claim do you support?”

Almost 66% of the population, including 59% of Labor voters, held that senior PLO officials should be put on trial even though it might damage the peace process! From this data one may conclude that the Rabin or Labor-led government of 1994 did not faithfully represent the public’s attitude toward the policy of “territory for peace” – which perhaps may also be said of every succeeding Israeli government!  Even if many Israelis are resigned to that policy, it does not accord with their deepest and abiding convictions.  They are simply following their “leaders,” having no leader with wisdom and courage enough to offer a viable alternative.  So much should be obvious.

But it should also be obvious that if Israel’s political institutions and electoral laws were designed in such a way as to render Israeli politicians more dependent on public opinion, the September 13, 1993 Israel-PLO Agreement would never have taken place, indeed, would have been implemented even partially! The same may be said of the 2004 Evacuation Law, which Ariel Sharon virtually imposed on the Knesset despite the fact that the policy embodied in that law—“unilateral disengagement”— was rejected by an overwhelming majority of the public in the 2003 election.

If MKs were dependent not on their party leaders but on the voters for their continuance in office, Oslo would not have occurred and Israel would not be in its present mess.  But as we see, Israel’s political elites can ignore public opinion with impunity, which places in question the widespread belief that Israel is a genuine democracy – however democratic it may appear in comparison with its Arab neighbors. Imagine Netanyahu boasting of this comparison when he addresses the Congress of the United States!

In any event, to transform Israel into genuine democracy will require fundamental changes in Israel’s institutions and electoral laws. Merely to replace one Prime Minister with another will not solve Israel’s basic problems.

Feb 6 2015

The End of the Heroic


By Paul Eidelberg

If you are puzzled by “homegrown” Islamic terrorism in America, if you are wondering why many youth join “radical” or “extremist” Islamic organizations, you may want to consider, among the various causes of such phenomena, certain hitherto unexamined facts about American “culture.”

One such fact is the lack of any clearly defined culture in this country. Most clearly lacking is what was once deemed admirable and worthy of praise and imitation: the heroic.

The concept of the heroic was once propagated by Hollywood Westerns, personified, for instance, by Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” Such heroic personalities have been replaced by urban misfits, portrayed, for example, by physically unimpressive types like Dustin Hoffman.  But this touches only the surface of the anti-heroic.

Probing more deeply, the heroic, which portrays man as larger that than life, has been buried by the ordinary. Shakespeare is dead, replaced by the meaninglessness Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.

The ordinary has become the preoccupation of the cinema. It has been endowed with philosophical trappings, such as the college-bred doctrine of moral relativism, a doctrine that denies black-and-white distinctions, such as “good” and “evil.” The old Hollywood ending in which good triumphs over evil is now ancient history. For Americans, history began with the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima, hardly an act requiring personal courage.

To make things even clearer, ponder Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” whose central character is rightly named “Willy Loman.” The salesman has nothing of his own, and this exactly defines the anti-heroic.

Indeed, the anti-heroic has conquered the American mind and is vividly exemplified in Barack Obama’s servile apology for American greatness. Moreover, Obama’s retreat from America’s pivotal role in the Middle East may be compared to Miller’s Death of a Salesman translated from the stage in Broadway to the stage and death of American foreign policy!

We see this demise in America’s anti-war movement and corresponding anti-war movies. We are witnessing the senility of contemporary America. This senility goes against the grain of youth. It clashes with youth’s full-blooded imagination and dreams of greatness. Small wonder that some young Americans have joined a Muslim terrorist group that exalts self-sacrifice in the seemingly heroic cause of Islam.

Contrast the moral relativism and milquetoast nihilism of American colleges and universities. Barack Obama ingested the moral anemia of academia. Hence his phlegmatic description of ISIS terrorism as “bankruptcy” and his less than heroic forays on the golf course while the world is going to hell. But now you may begin to understand why some American youth want more than Willy Lomans