The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

Article III, Section 3 of the American Constitution includes, in its definition of treason against the United States, “adhering to their Enemies” and “giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Israel’s Penal Law on treason is more complex: it defines treason in terms of four kinds of acts:

1. the category of acts which “impair the sovereignty” of the State of Israel—section 97(a);

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Who and what are the ID People? No, they’re not libidinous disciples of Sigmund Freud. Truth to tell, some are prime ministers. Some are foreign ministers. Others are party leaders. More than a few are academics and journalists. They are legion. And whatever their differences or diverse nationalities, they all have one thing in common: they are Intellectually Dishonest.

What does their dishonesty consist in? Simply this: They know you can’t make peace with people committed to your destruction. They know you can’t make peace with people who do not recognize the sanctity of human life. They know you can’t make peace with people conditioned by a culture of hatred—a hatred so deep as to induce these people to use their own children as human bombs. (more…)

If any one person can be named the father of modern racism it’s Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882). Gobineau was a respected French writer, a Catholic who served as a diplomat in the Near East. Although he admired German culture, he despised chauvinism and regarded the notion of the “fatherland” as a “beastly idea.”

Writing in 1870, he referred worryingly to the newly achieved unity of Germany. With chilling prescience he warned: “It is from above that inspiration and direction are fated to descend to people; and when … in spheres of authority there no longer is any belief … no striving for the good and for the better, one may state with all the certainty of a mathematical proposition that power will fall to the first corporal who, in passing will seize it.” The corporal, of course, was Adolph Hitler. (more…)

Some 80 years ago, George Orwell wrote: “The illiteracy of politicians is a special feature of our age—as G.M. Trevelyan put it, ‘In the seventeenth century Members of Parliament quoted the Bible, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classics, in the twentieth century nothing’—and its corollary [Orwell added] is the political impotence of writers.”

This is a rather sad commentary on higher education in the democratic world. Neither the Bible nor the classics play a significant role in what passes for “liberal education.” More “relevant” are “ethnic” studies, “feminist” studies, “gay” studies, and the like. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, January 15, 2006.

Part I

One of the most paradoxical and most important statements in Lee Harris’ book Civilization and Its Enemies, is this: “Only those who have mastered ruthlessness can defend their society from the ruthlessness of others.” But how can Western civilization be ruthless without discarding the humane values on which this civilization is based? Does this mean that the values we associate with liberal democracy are obsolete, and if so, what will take their place?

One of these values is tolerance. Tolerance, however, can degenerate into moral indifference or neutrality. (more…)

It has been reported that more people are converting to Islam than to any other religious creed. Of the various reasons which may explain this reported phenomenon, one is this: there are periods in human history when an “untrue” belief is more fervently held than a “true” one.

Recall how fervently Communism was held by intellectuals who had rejected, along with capitalism, lukewarm Christianity and milquetoast Judaism. (more…)

Israel was accused of using disproportional force last year in response to Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in the Second Lebanese War. It may therefore be of interest to consider the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. The following is extracted from Wikipedia:

… During the evening of February 13, 796 Avro Lancasters and 9 De Havilland Mosquitoes … dropped 1,478 tons of high explosive and 1,182 tons of incendiary bombs by the early hours of February 14….

[A few hours later,] … 529 Lancasters dropped more than 1,800 tons of bombs…. (more…)

Dear Friends:

I plan to be in the USA for about a month after Passover, during which time I will be available for lectures.

Please contact me if interested.

Thank you.
Prof. Paul Eidelberg

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Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, January 8, 2007.

This essay takes its title and basic ideas from Lee Harris’ book, Civilization and Its Enemies (Free Press 2004). Harris has been dubbed the philosopher of 9/11. As I read it, Civilization and Its Enemies is one the most important books published since the end of World War II, and unless we heed its warnings, we may lose World War III.

Harris reminds us that civilized people forget how much work it took not to kill one’s neighbors, “simply because this work was all done by our ancestors so that it could be willed to us as an heirloom.” Civilized people forget “that there has ever been a category of human experience called the enemy…. The enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason and not ours. He does not hate us for our faults any more than for our virtues. He sees a different world from ours, and in the world he sees, we are the enemy.”

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was only superficially motivated by Islamic hatred of American wealth and power. (more…)

There is a fundamental conflict between the sovereign state and the Torah. This should be obvious to any rabbi—certainly any Orthodox rabbi.

Probing deeper, rabbis should be the first to realize that any Knesset Member or any judge who holds that the law of the State is the highest law is uttering, in principle, a fascist doctrine. The principle has actually been enunciated by the Knesset: “No act of legislation shall diminish the rights of the State, or impose upon it any obligation, unless explicitly stated.” (Law and Administration Ordinance, 1948, Section 42, Explanatory Note.) The sovereignty of the State is clear, and this is the basic reason why the State, in utter disregard of the Torah, expelled 10,000 Jews from Gush Katif and northern Samaria. (more…)

England, the home of parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, civility and poetry, all but gone, succumbing to Islam via multiculturalism. Shakespeare, Blackstone, Milton, Newton, and Matthew Arnold: “The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, full … But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar …”

Wake up America! Your tolerance, your liberalism, your exaltation of pluralism and humanism are obsolete. To win the war against the most ruthless of enemies, you will have to be ruthless yourself. Unlike you, the enemy does not believe in the sanctity of human life: he uses women and children as human bombs to kill you. And with each leniency and retreat on your part, his so-called moderate co-religionists will join him. (more…)

Revised transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, Jan. 1, 2007.

In this report I want to warn people about various constitutions and institutional reforms which, whatever their merit, will nonetheless perpetuate the divisive and anti-Jewish aspects of Israel’s existing system of governance.

As a preliminary to my analysis, let’s consider the position of Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute who worked in Iraq while it was deliberating on a constitution. One of his major concerns was the electoral system. Given Iraq’s ethnic divisions, it was all-too-easy to recommend election of representatives by party slates. Rubin wisely opposed this pernicious electoral system—the very system that has fragmented Israel since 1948 and has produced a government rated in international reports as one of the most corrupt in the developed world. (more…)

The founders of modernity, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx, prepared the foundations for the secular democratic state. In the name of philosophy and science, they undermined the authority of the Bible and removed religion from the domain of truth. Modernity, however, has spawned post-modernism, where truth has given way to moral and cultural relativism, the reigning doctrine of the secular democratic state now in process of decay.

Secular democracy was the goal of the Zionists who established the State of Israel. Their Zionism was based on the territorial nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe. (more…)