The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

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The FCD Site Editors

Middle East analyst Emanuel A. Winston discusses various sponsors and mentors who seem to have been behind Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to public prominence and who may have influenced his political orientation.

Among those mentioned are the anti-American author Khalid al-Mansour, the principle adviser of Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal; the notorious Columbia University Professor Edward Said, once a member of the PLO; and Syrian-born Tony Rezko, a Chicago politician who became executive director of the Muhammad Ali Foundation to spread Islam.

To the preceding one must add Obama’s mentor the Rev. “God-damn-America” Jeremiah Wright, whose church Obama attended for 20 years.

Winston rightly concludes that America is poised to elect a man to the presidency whose known mentors and sponsors put a lie to just about everything Obama has said on the campaign trail. (more…)

I never cease to be amazed and humbled by the number of pundits who, without any classified information, confidently prognosticate on global affairs, especially on the United States and Israel. So what is a political scientist like me to say when asked whether the U.S. or Israel is going to bomb Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weapons?

Almost any person who takes 9/11 seriously and has heard about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s boast of a world without America and Israel, should be able to see that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a mortal threat to Western civilization. It requires no political scientist to see that a nuclear Iran would control the vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and cow an already cowed Europe. This, he would see, would be enough to devastate the American economy and bring the last bastion of freedom and human dignity to a miserable end. As for Israel, one nuclear strike would doom it to oblivion. Exit Judaism as well as Christianity.

Hence, I am asked: “Will Israel or the United States launch a preemptive attack on Iran, the epicenter of Islamic imperialism—horror of horrors that makes the imperialism of Nazi Germany appear as a minor affair in world history?” (more…)

On December 22, 1939, the French newspaper l’Epoque reported that Germany’s agents of influence in France were engaged in a plot to convince Marshal Petain to accept the leadership of a government of national unity that included the most notorious French defeatists and quislings.

The plotters wanted the aged Marshall to play unwittingly the role analogous to that of General Sivory in Czechoslovakia, opening the door to a Hitler in a moment of despondency. (Czechoslovakia, recall, was the victim of Chamberlain’s policy of “territory for peace.”)

It so happens that Georges Mandel, French Minister of Interior and director of counter-espionage, was fully cognizant of Hitler’s ambitions and of how his accomplices in France were plotting the country’s downfall. On the eve of the French Government’s enforced evacuation from Paris, and just prior to its conquest by the Germans on June 14, 1940, Mandel leveled a blistering indictment against France’s political and military leadership as well as its intelligence services: “Worst of all, you didn’t understand the one phenomenon you had to understand in order to save your country. You didn’t understand Hitler. You didn’t understand that he was planning total war. You never stopped to consider that total war is—total. That it really includes everything. You didn’t see what was coming closer and closer. And we who did see were called hysterical.” (more…)

Sarah Palin displays what is most lacking in many people in high office: character. Character is far more fundamental and important than “experience,” because without good character, experience will not enable office-holders to deal with the tough issues confronting our country.

A person of character has moral integrity and courage, personal dignity and humility, a strong sense of justice and devotion to the common good, respect for human life and, above all, a love of God. All this I discern in Governor Sarah Palin’s character—a strong, dynamic, yet humble person.

The Jewish sages regard humbleness as the highest virtue. Indeed, the Torah says Moses was the humblest person on the face of the earth. Humbleness is the only adjective the Torah uses to describe Moses. Why? Because humbleness is a precondition for achieving the highest wisdom. No wonder Gentile as well as Jewish philosophers and statesmen esteem Moses as the greatest law-giver of mankind.

I’m not suggesting that Governor Palin or any living person possesses the wisdom of Moses. (more…)

Hong Kong, or rather the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), has a total area of 422 square miles on which reside some seven million people—roughly the same as Israel’s in the year 2000, when I first published this report.

Hong Kong has a 60-member legislature. The legislature represents 5 Geographical Constituencies and 28 Functional Constituencies. The 5 Geographical Constituencies are represented by 24 members. The 28 Functional Constituencies (e.g., Education, Finance, Medicine, Labor, etc.) are represented by 30 members. (Labor has three representatives). The remaining 6 members of the legislature are the Election Committee.

Over three million registered voters had the right to vote in the Geographical Constituencies. The list voting system is used in the election. A voter can only choose one of the lists printed on the ballot paper (comparable to Israel’s system of list voting).

In contrast, Preferential voting is employed in four Functional Constituencies. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, September 1, 2008.

Carl Boggs, in his book The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000), writes: “Politics has become the most denigrated and devalued of all enterprises, robbed of the visionary, ennobling, and transformative qualities that not so long ago were associated with the great popular movements of the 1960s …”

Politics has increasingly become a dirty word, a form of self-aggrandizement at the public’s expense. The 2008 Israeli Democracy Index indicates that only 5 percent of the public regards Israeli politicians as honest. Unsurprisingly, “Israel today displays clear signs of anti-politics … The prevalent sense in the public is that the political system is impervious to the citizen’s voice and needs.’’ 81 percent assess their ability to influence government decisions as small or nonexistent. How can it be otherwise when citizens are compelled to vote for a party slate instead of individual candidates? Since members of the Knesset are not individually elected by and accountable to the voters in constituency elections, they can ignore public opinion with impunity between elections. They never have to worry about being called to account by a rival candidate.

To speak of the end of politics, however, is to imply the demise of democracy. The causal connection between politics and democracy can be formulated as follows. Politics is about the controversial, and only healthy democracies provide a platform for rational discussion about controversial issues. This requires at least two contestants for public office facing each other before the voters and debating basic issues. (more…)

Democracy literally means the rule of the people, which translates into the rule of the majority. Show me a nation in which the people, or a majority of the people, rule.

Consider the world’s leading democracy, the United States. There are about 200,000 million eligible voters in the United States, but as few as 35 percent vote in midterm elections, and little more than a majority vote in presidential elections—and even this is misleading.

A mere 15 percent of Americans polled by the PEW Research Center in July 1999 said they were paying very close attention to the Gore-Bush campaign, and the percentage was lower for those under 30 years of age.

The truth is that few Americans display any serious interest in politics. Carl Boggs reports that a 1997 UCLA poll of 252,000 freshmen at 464 colleges and universities around the country indicated that only 26.7 percent of the respondents said that it was important to keep up with public affairs. (more…)

Since Barack Obama is the first Black presidential candidate in American history, it was essential to make him personally familiar to the American people. This could not be done by speaking of his legislative accomplishments, of which none is worth mentioning. Nor could such familiarity be achieved by speaking of Obama’s experience in world affairs, of which he is less than an amateur.

Obama, whose mentor for many years was “God-damn-America” Jeremiah Wright, had to be given a media image—crafted in a certain way, one that would make Americans feel he was one of them. He had to appear not only as a red-white-and–blue American, but someone like your neighbor, even a friend, someone you often had over for dinner, someone you have known for many years—a family man with family values (contrary to the permissiveness of his Democratic Party).

His wife’s speech at the Democratic National Convention made this transparently clear. She was, oh, so personal, so charmingly intimate. Barack is like you and me. We are all the same despite our differences. We all want change. We all want to make life better for our children. That’s what America is all about—a nation of hopes and dreams.

And so Michelle, like her husband, played on the emotions. She made you feel good, compassionate, perhaps even tearful—at one with everyone. (more…)

The goal of the Torah is to eliminate all forms of idolatry on the one hand, and to promote the universal recognition of ethical monotheism on the other.

According to Judaism, idolatry is the beginning and cause of every evil, be it the slaughtering of children, as in worship of Moloch, or the slaughtering of “infidels” in the worship of Allah.

The First Commandment of the Torah logically entails the Second, the elimination of all forms of idolatry. Idolatry is the worship of any created thing, including the products of the human intellect, be it a philosophic or scientific theory, a political or religious ideology, or a particular form of government.

Let us equate idolatry with “reification,” which may be defined as the postulation of any physical or mental existent, process, or law as autonomous or self-sustaining. Reification thus applies to any philosophic or scientific monism, dualism, or pluralism that attempts to explain the totality or any part of existence in terms of one or more independent or self-subsisting entities. The Torah thus rejects the exaltation of any humanly constructed system of governance. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, first delivered on June 26, 2004 and updated August 24, 2008.

Back in June 2004, more than a year before the government expelled 10,000 Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria, I reported that the Right, the so-called national camp, has failed to galvanize the people against the Left. The Right, representing at least 75% of the people, has allowed the Left to undermine Israel’s territorial integrity and thereby undermine the heritage of the Jewish people. This was done in the name of democracy.

I pointed out that analysis of Israel’s legislative, executive, and judicial institutions reveals that Israel is not an authentic democracy, despite its periodic, multiparty elections, Political theorist Henry Mayo correctly states that “A political system is democratic to the extent that decisions-makers are under effective popular control.”

But decisions-makers in Israel are not and cannot be under effective popular control so long as members of the Knesset are not individually elected by and accountable to the voters in regional elections. The Right—politicians, professors, and journalists—have not told the people the truth about Israel’s oligarchic system of governance. (more…)

Barack Obama has chosen Zbigniew Brzezinski to advise him on Middle East policy. This bodes ill, and not only for Israel.

Back in 1985, I wrote an article on Brzezinski for The Intercollegiate Review. Before citing some of the more relevant passages of that article, it should be borne in mind that Brzezinski, a political scientist, served as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. One does not have to read Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to know that Carter is an anti-Semite. Brzezinski has earned the same reputation.

Not only has Brzezinski publicly defended the anti-Semitic canard that the relationship between America and Israel is the result of Jewish pressure, but he also signed a letter demanding dialogue with Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction. It behooves us to understand the mentality of Obama’s Middle East adviser—and more deeply than our so-called experts.

Long before he became Mr. Carter’s national security adviser, Brzezinski rejected what he and most political scientists term the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet political systems. (more…)

Oriana Fallaci (RIP)

Day after day, American politicians and diplomats insult our intelligence. They would have us believe that we can make peace with Islam—a political religion whose devotees have slaughtered some 270 million people since the days of Muhammad.

These American politicians and diplomats see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil about a religion whose most admired leader today is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Muslim who proclaims his vision—a world without America and Israel, a world without Christianity and Judaism.

While he spits in their faces, these American politicians and diplomats are anxious to engage in negotiations with this Hitler of Tehran. They want to dissuade him from developing nuclear weapons, the key to his controlling the oil resources of the Middle East, to cowing decadent Europe, hence, to collapsing the American economy and thereby fulfilling his vision of a world without America.

As I ponder the character of these American politicians and officials, I behold the waning if not the death of reason. This prompts me to speak of a woman who wrote about this subject, a woman, alas, no longer with us, Oriana Fallaci. (more…)

Feel free to use this in response to The New York Times vicious attack on Brigitte Gabriel as a “radical Islamophobe.”

Brigitte Gabriel, Because They Hate (St. Martins Press, 2006)

Those who admired the courage and wisdom of Oriana Fallaci will be enchanted by Brigitte Gabriel, who risks her life by exposing the hateful nature of Islam.

Brigitte Gabriel, who now lives and works as a writer in the United States, is a Lebanese-born Maronite Christian. As a child and as a teenager, she lived through the trauma of Lebanon’s civil war and the PLO’s brutal occupation of southern region from which the Palestinians launched terrorist attacks on Israel.

Like all Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, she had been immersed in a constant steam of Jew-hatred and anti-Israel propaganda. Then, in 1982, Brigitte Gabriel underwent a psychological metamorphosis as a result of Israel’s expulsion of the PLO from her country. What happened was this: (more…)

Year after year I send this kind of message out.
Now, with catastrophe approaching ever nearer, I urge all forthright Jewish organizations to to reiterate these words:

Without God Israel is lost.

For 60 years, Israeli prime ministers have banished God from the domain of statecraft, and with the compliance of the religious parties. May there not be a connection between the absence of God in Israeli statecraft and the absence of wisdom, courage, and Jewish national pride in Israel’s government?

How is it that Israel, despite its awesome military power, appeases and retreats before a gang of terrorists, be it Hamas or Fatah? Can it be because Israel’s ruling elites are godless in contrast to Israel’s enemies, who never fail to invoke the name of Allah?

Juxtapose these Arabs and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (or his predecessors Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak). (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, 18 August 2008.

Fools aside, everyone knows that Israel is at war with the Palestinian Authority. Whatever the machinations of Fatah-leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas-leader Ismail Haniyah, both villains are committed to Israel’s annihilation.

That many of Israel’s own Arab citizens have long been participating in this war against the Jews has been ignored by various Israeli governments, Left and Right—if I may use these obsolete terms. Arabs freely traverse the roads assaulting Jewish vehicles; they brazenly fly the flag of PLO; and the Olmert-Livni-Mofaz government blinks.

Sderot has been depopulated, Iranian weapons flow into Gaza and are smuggled thence to Judea and Samaria. Soon every city in Israel may become another Sderot, and the Olmert-Livni-Mofaz government blinks.

This cockamamie government is just a collection of political liars and crooks—Likud turncoats and other hacks paid by the overtaxed citizens of Israel. (more…)

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton recently raised the question of a possible Israeli attack on Iran. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Bolton urged the US to aid Israel before, during, and after such an attack—if it should take place.

This may mean that Bolton does not believe a US attack on Iran is in the cards. Indeed, pundits report that Washington is opposed to an Israeli preemptive strike because it would “destabilize” the region. And what would a nuclear armed-Iran do to the region—especially now that Vladimir Putin (allied with Iran) is restoring the Cold War, largely by means of Russia’s oil and gas resources on which Europe is dependent?

What does all this mean for Israel? The continuance of a Kadima-led government can only spell further disaster—and not only because Kadima is committed to territorial retreat from Judea and Samaria. That very commitment signifies that the leaders of that ersatz party do not have the guts to deal with the Iranian threat. (more…)

“Humanity,” said Alexander Hamilton, “does not require us to sacrifice our own security and welfare to the convenience, or advantage of others. Self-preservation is the first principle of our nature. When our lives and properties are at stake, it would be foolish and unnatural to refrain from such measures as might preserve them, because it would be detrimental to others.”

It has rightly been said that Hamilton was always adverse to relying on other countries to do for Americans what he believed they ought to do for themselves.

Hamilton was 21 when revolution was simmering in America. Some of his contemporaries argued that the Americans could rely on Britain for relief of their grievances. Hamilton responded: “Tell me not of the British Commons, Lords, [and] ministerial tools … I scorn to let my life depend upon the pleasure of any of them.”

Georgia, invaded by Russia, can expect no aid from its ally, the United States. The same applies to Israel, threatened by a nuclear Iran. (more…)

Violations of the Interim Agreement
Reported by the Netanyahu Government

A. The Interim Agreement

1. According to the September 28, 1995 Interim Agreement (”Oslo 2″), the Palestinian Authority (PA) may deploy at this stage up to 24,000 Policemen in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (Annex I, Article IV (3)).

2. The accord also requires the PA to submit a list of all potential police recruits to Israel for approval (Annex I, Article IV(4)). (more…)

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