The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

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…)

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…)

A.  Democracy: Two Types

1. “Normative” or classical democracy: based on the idea of man’s creation in the holy image of God. This provides democracy’s basic principles, freedom and equality, with rational and moral constraints. (Freedom is not “living as you like,” and equality is not a leveling but and elevating principle. The holy nation is a “kingdom of noblemen.”)

2. “Normless” or contemporary democracy. No ethical standards. Freedom is living as you please, and equality leads to vulgarity via the equivalence of all lifestyles. (Moral equivalence: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Arafat is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.)

B.  Jewish values (derived from the Torah)

1. Emphasis on justice, kindness, modesty, creativity, reason, and due process of law. Deference to wisdom. Relating the present to the past without sacrificing creativity. (more…)

Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, August 4, 2008.

PART I.

A major cause of assimilation in Israel, as well as in the United States, is the simple fact that Israel’s system of government is devoid of any Jewish character; each branch of Israeli government conflicts with Jewish principles. Multiparty cabinet government is not only a political monstrosity; it violates the concept of a Unitary Executive affirmed in the Torah and the Talmud. (See Rashi’s commentary to Deut. 31:7, quoting Sanhedrin 8a.)

Equally flagrant, members of the Legislature, the Knesset, are subservient to their party leaders. Nothing Jewish about this. (See Exod. 18:21 and Deut. 1`:13.) To this add the multicultural, hence anti-Jewish agenda of Israel’s Supreme Court, whose rulings often violate the abiding beliefs and values of the Jewish people.

Israel’s non-Jewish and anti-Jewish system of governance therefore fosters assimilation and undermines Jewish identity—whatever that means. Under such governance, Israel’s ruling elites cannot relate their public statements and policies to the sacred sources of Judaism or to the teachings of Israel’s great rabbis and philosophers. Jewish history is eviscerated while Jews are humiliated every day by the crass and irrational behavior of their ruling elites. (more…)

A contrarian view by Moshe Brody.

“Ehud Olmert—The Perfect Role Model for the Israeli Left”

• * A thoroughly-incompetent failure
• * Willingly led our country into disaster
• * Caused national suffering, loss, destruction, and death
• * Completely useless and derelict in all duties
• * Corrupt, unprincipled and self-serving
• * Totally irresponsible and answerable to nobody
• * Manipulative and deceitful
• * Sadistically persecuted our nation’s patriots
• * Shamelessly betrays our nation and people
• * Sells our country out to foreign interests (more…)

Edted transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, July 14, 2008.

The classic definition of party was set forth by that great 18th century philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke: “Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours, the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.”

By definition, a party represents only a part of the whole. While its members present their party principle as conducive to the national interest or the common good, they inevitably criticize the principles of other parties as not conducive to the common good, but they don’t necessarily impugn the integrity of their adversaries. For Burke, respectable parties must consist of “honest men of principle.”

Parties exist because men have different interests and conflicting opinions concerning such ends of government as justice and security, liberty and equality, prosperity and public morality. And of course such differences thrive in democracies.

Democracy, however, stands on the principle of “one adult, one vote.” One adult, one vote is virtually equivalent to “one opinion, one vote,” which suggests that democracy conduces to moral relativism. This is what decent people in democracies have yet to see: that democracy, as understand in this era of secularism, provides no objective justification for decency! Enough to mention the pornography and perversions now legalized in virtually all democratic countries. (more…)

The socialists who founded modern Israel were committed not to a Jewish state so much as to a secular democratic state. The economic goals of socialism, however, require a concentration of political-economic power in government. Socialism therefore eventuates in state capitalism—the control of a nation’s wealth by political commissars.

However democratic Israel may be from a sociological perspective, it is ruled by rotating oligarchy that has truncated and emasculated the Jewish state.

The oligarchy is ensconced in the cabinet. There, cabinet ministers control various sectors of the economy, and do so less with a view to economic efficiency than with a view to enlarging their own personal or partisan power.

One researcher notes that the rate at which the salary of Knesset Members (MKs) increases is three times that of the average Israeli. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, July 7, 2008.

For most people, the mere fact that Israel has periodic, multiparty elections convinces them that Israel is a democracy. This is naive. Democratic elections do not necessarily render the government of a country accountable to the governed, and without accountability, there is no genuine democracy. Nevertheless, although accountability is lacking in Israeli government, Israeli society is pretty democratic.

A better guide to understanding “democracy in Israel” is Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America. For Tocqueville, the decisive principle of America is not democratic elections or even the structure of government, but equality of conditions. Equality of conditions means that no citizen is bound by law to the station of his birth. Equality of conditions enables any citizen to rise on the socio-economic ladder. A person of humble origin may become a country’s leader. Hence, nepotism aside, there are no hereditary privileges or privileged class.

However, while a country may be democratic from a sociological perspective, it may be very undemocratic from a political perspective, as I have already indicated. (more…)

The present writer received the following report from Israel National News:

“Winograd Panel Member: Why is Olmert Still PM?”

Winograd Committee member Professor Yehezkel Dror wrote in the New York Jewish Forward that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would not still be in power “in any other parliamentary democracy.” The five-member Winograd panel was appointed by the Olmert government to conduct an inquiry into conduct of the Second Lebanon War.

“As found by the commission, the Prime Minister misdirected the war, showing a serious lack of strategic thinking,” Prof. Dror wrote in the left-leaning Forward. “The Defense Minister [Amir Peretz] was ignorant about defense issues. The Cabinet and its committees did not really know what they were deciding most of the time…. The chief of staff imposed a wrong doctrine. The army was not well prepared.

“As a member of the commission, I expected that the Cabinet would resign or be dismissed after the interim report appeared. Indeed, the chief of staff honorably resigned, and the minister of defense was made to leave. The prime minister, however, did not resign, nor was he forced to leave…. Having a highly qualified defense minister helps but cannot make up for the lack of a prime minister with a strategic mind, however good his political mind may be.” (more…)

The founder of political science and its greatest exemplar is Aristotle, who wrote treatises on some 150 regimes. Alas, only fragments remain of what he wrote about Athens.

What Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, knows compared to Aristotle can be put on a postage stamp. The same may be said of postmodern political scientists vis-à-vis Machiavelli. Yes, unknown to Darwin, we have descended from Swift’s Brobdingnagians to Lilliputians to Yahoos.

Here, then, is a general outline of Aristotle’s political science, which I have distilled primarily from Book IV of his Politics.

A. The Scope, Subject Matter and Methods of Political Science

1. Political science is predominantly a practical discipline intended primarily for statesmen. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, June 30, 2008.

It has been reported that concerned citizens in Beit El recently invited several leaders of the “political right” to a panel discussion on the proper course for the ‘national camp’ in the next Knesset elections. Only two politicians turned up: Knesset Member Effie Eitam, who is heading a new faction called Achi (”My Brother”) within the National Union party, and Moshe Feiglin, head of the Jewish Leadership faction within the Likud party, whose ambition is take over that party.

The two politicians offered different approaches as to the best strategy for the national camp. Eitam emphasized “political unity” among the so-called nationalist parties. Feiglin focused on the ultimate goal of installing what he calls a “faith-based, ideological leadership for the nation as a whole.”

Although the reported positions of these two religious politicians are not contradictory in theory, they are not harmonious in fact, since most members of the so-called national camp are not religious. What most unites the parties composing the national camp is opposition to territorial withdrawal. This is a 30-year old story that dates back to Camp David 1978. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, June 23, 2008.

Knesset Member Yitzhak Levy wants to raise the number of Knesset members from 120 to 150. As reported in The Jerusalem Post last week (June 18, 2008), Levy complains that “the workload placed on MKs had grown to such an extent that it was simply impossible to adequately study the issues upon which MKs were expected to vote in a plenum, as well as in committees in which they sit.”

Mr. Levy also complains that, given the system of coalition cabinet government, some 30 MKs—one out of every four members—currently serves as either a minister or deputy minister, and that’s an additional assignment which distracts from their participation in the legislative function.

Levy’s proposal to increase the Knesset’s membership may be indicative of the incompetence of Israel’s legislative body. Let’s compare the Knesset with the American House of Representatives, beginning with the House. (more…)

The present writer congratulates those members of the Knesset that supported a bill whereby 60 MKs would be elected in regional districts, while 60 would be elected under the present system of Proportional Representation. This fulfills one provision of a draft constitution set forth in my book Jewish Statesmanship: Lest Israel Fall (2000)—which is not to say this book should be credited for the bill in question.

Although the bill was vetoed by the Shas Party, a member of Ehud Olmert’s coalition government, it should soon resurface as a private member’s bill. At stake is the empowerment of the Jewish people and even the preservation of Israel’s Jewish heritage.

It cannot be said too often that the law that makes Israel a single electoral district in which fixed party slates win Knesset seats via Proportional Representation has effectively disenfranchised the Jews of this country. This law has enabled members of the Knesset, especially those who become prime ministers or cabinet ministers, to violate the abiding beliefs and values of the Jewish people with impunity. A conspicuous culprit is Shas. (more…)

Part three of a series. View Part one. View Part two.

B. Neither God Nor the People Rule Israel

In Judaism there is no ruling class. In a truly Jewish community, who rules is based primarily on intellectual and moral character. Indeed, the most authentic form of Jewish leadership is that of the teacher, whose power is not political but intellectual and moral.

The fact that education in Israel is required of all members of the community precludes rigid class divisions. Conversely, Torah education is the great unifying force of the Jewish people, a people that honors scholars more than kings. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch points out, in a mature Jewish community the center of gravity lies not in any ruling class but in the body of the people. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, therefore, that the leaders of a Jewish community act consistently with the Torah when they make themselves superfluous!

See to it that the peasant behind the plough, the herdsman with his cattle, the weaver at his loom can be your judges and masters, the critics of your conduct and teaching; then at the same time will they be your pupils and friends, they will willingly and joyfully follow your teachings and regulations; they will understand and appreciate the spirit in which you speak and by which you are guided.^[1] (more…)

This is a must read.
Terrorists’ Crossing (Paperback) by Rich Carroll

The Jihad Candidate

Conspiracy theories make for interesting novels when the storyline is not so absurd that it can grasp our attention. ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and ‘Seven Days in May’ are examples of plausible chains of events that captures the reader’s imagination at best-seller level. ‘What if’ has always been the solid grist of fiction.

Get yourself something cool to drink, find a relaxing position, but before you continue, visualize the television photos of two jet airliners smashing into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and remind yourself this cowardly act of Muslim terror was planned for eight years.

How long did it take Islam and their oil money to find a candidate for President of the United States? (more…)

Part two of a series. View Part one.

A. Neither God Nor the People Rule Israel

If “theocracy” signifies a regime ruled by a church or by priests, Judaism is not theocratic. There is no church in Judaism, neither theologically, since there is no mediation between God and the individual Jew, nor institutionally, since there is no ecclesiastical hierarchy.

In Judaism no priesthood but only publicly tested scholarship can lay claim to any validity regarding the laws of the Torah. This means that the Torah belongs to every Jew, whether he is a Kohane, Levite, or Israelite. A word about this classification of Jews may be helpful.

Although the Kohanim, Levites, and Israelites comprise hereditary “classes,” they are not closed. The daughter of an Israelite or Levite may marry a Kohane and her children will be Kohanim, since “class” status is patrilineal. (more…)

Please read Col. David Crockett’s speech as well as the speech of one of his constituents.

Light-years removed from Israel’s undemocratic system of government.

Thanks to Dr. Eugene Narrett.

Courtesy of Project Freedom and US Representative Ron Paul of Texas.

Colonel David Crockett, US Representative from Tennessee, Delivering His Celebrated Speech to Congress on the State of Finances, State Officers, and State Affairs in General.