The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

Did those of you who are old enough thrill to these words of President John F. Kennedy: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Alas, they are unknown or forgotten by Kennedy’s Democratic Party, now headed by Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House majority leader Nancy Pelosi, who, in the midst of our war in Iraq, have vilified America’s commander-in-chief. Does this treacherous attitude trouble Americans?

It troubles the present writer, a former officer in the United States Air Force. I am dismayed by the new and unpatriotic Democratic Party that has arisen in America. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when America’s new Democrats compare Barack Obama with John F. Kennedy—Obama, so anxious for the United States to turn tail and withdraw American forces from Iraq. This is the same Obama that regards Iran, a nation of 70 million people, as a mere “nuisance.”

(This play-actor does not know that Iran is well-positioned to annex Iraq. He does not know that the combination of Iran’s current production of 4.21 million barrels of oil a day with Iraq’s 6 mullion would enable Iran to out-produce Saudi Arabia. He does not know that a 50 percent cutback of this oil would utterly collapse America’s shaky economy for which his party is primarily responsible. Goodbye Oprah!) (more…)

Dear Friends:

Here is an admittedly desperate message.

Please try to make contact, directly or otherwise, with Professor Henry Kissinger and urge him to announce publicly his support of Senator John McCain for President of the United States.

Please do not respond by saying this is far-fetched. Of course, I could mention other notable Americans who know that Barack Obama is not qualified for the office he seeks—as has been said by black ministers who are spreading the truth about the junior senator from Illinois.

I simply ask you to make an effort to get this message to Dr. Kissinger. He certainly knows what is at stake in the November election.

Thank you.
Prof. Paul Eidelberg

If you are wondering why the deluge of information about Obama’s shady past has not eliminated him from the presidential race;

If you are wondering why Obama may become America’s next president despite voluminous evidence of his being a liar and a fraud;

Let me reveal the secret underlying this grotesque state of affairs.

We are living in a postmodern world where truth and falsity are no longer relevant. In Barack Obama postmodernism (moral relativism) unites with the modernism that began with Machiavelli, who deified the self—the self-creating self that dispensed with the verities of the Bible. (more…)

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, says, “Every [American] citizen interested in our survival as a free and safe country should read [Norman Podhoretz] World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, 2007, 2008.”

I fully agree, and would only add, please do so before the November election.—Paul Eidelberg

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey express the highest praise for Norman Podhoretz’s book World War IV: The Long Struggle Again Islamofascism (NY: Vintage: 2007, 2008).

Iran, a nation of 70 million people, is the epicenter of Islamofascism. Its government may deploy nuclear weapons in less than a year. Senator Barack Obama regards Iran as a mere “nuisance.” This is enough to indicate that an Obama presidency would be disastrous.

Obama is so infatuated with his oratorical skills that he thinks he can persuade Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. The junior senator of Illinois Obama ignores the fact that five years of American and European diplomacy and sanctions have only given Iran five more years to develop a nuclear arsenal. (more…)

Herbert Marcuse was the philosopher of the New Left, which surfaced in academia in the 1960s and has since permeated American higher education.

Marcuse’s philosophy is an amalgam of existentialism and Marxism with a dash of Freud. I limit myself to existentialism which more readily solves the mystery of Senator Barack Obama.

The most well-known existentialist in the 20^th century was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was a moral relativist who chose to become a Marxist—not because Marxism is true, but because he deemed Marxism a convenient suit for the “nothingness” of his soul—a tabula rasa inherently devoid of identity. Sartre is famous for his philosophical dictum “existence precedes essence.” This dictum raises the question of an individual’s authenticity. To be authentic, one must choose one’s essence, that is, one’s own identity, which may also be called one’s “narrative.”

Of course, the fact that Obama is biracial has intensified his quest for identity. But Obama has also been influenced by existentialism, which requires the individual to mold or create himself. He cannot be authentic by affirming and living according to the principles of his nation’s heritage.

Besides, in this postmodern era of multiculturalism, the heritage of each nation appears arbitrary, another “narrative.” For almost a century, America has been immersed in a partisan, “liberal-conservative” narrative. Obama transcends this narrative, or so he would have us believe. His views of government have much in common with Progressivism. (more…)

In an article dated October 14, 2008, Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri writes: “Prepare for a new America: That’s the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held at [Evian, France] … last week.” Jackson went on to say: “Obama is about change. And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it.”

Jackson has more or less confirmed the present writer’s assessment of Barak Obama or what I perceived in his campaign slogan of “Change.” But let me be more precise.

Senator Obama has nothing less in mind than regime change—a radical change in the political philosophy on which the American government is based, namely, the basic principles and values of the American Declaration of Independence.

This revolutionary document affirms that man is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. An Obama government would substitute a right to happiness for the pursuit of happiness. Such a government would thus be utterly paternalistic—a tyranny. (more…)

Identifying the enemy is a precondition of fighting and winning any war—and the United States and Israel are at war with the same enemy. Indeed, the strategic issue of the presidential election, the issue that most clearly divides Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, is precisely their different views of the enemy. It may even be said that Obama lacks any serious conception of the enemy!

Perhaps no one has understood the enemy of the United States better than Lee Harris. His book Civilization and Its Enemies is a classic, and unless its insights are internalized by the next President of the United States, Western civilization, now on the slippery slope, may perish.

Harris mentions two kinds of enemies. “First, the enemy is someone whom we have mistreated and oppressed. Second, the enemy is someone who demands to be recognized for his superiority.” The second describes Islam, which regards all “infidels” as sub-human.

If the enemy was simply an oppressed group fighting to have equal recognition of his status vis-à-vis other groups, his enmity could be eliminated or gradually abated by granting him the status he is seeking. (more…)

Edited Transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, September 22, 2008.

“Praiseworthy is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked, and stood not in the path of sinners, and sat not in the sessions of scorners.” Psalms 1:1

Israel’s ruling elites suffer from a pathology clearly manifested in the pages of Exodus describing the behavior of the Egyptian Pharaoh.

Despite one devastating plague after another, the Egyptian despot stubbornly refused to let the Jews go. After the seventh plague, God hardened his obstinate heart to enable him to endure further attacks. Since he was responsible for so much evil, he was deprived of the freedom to repent and desist from his obviously ruinous policy. Clearly, the Pharaoh was driven by egomania, but this egomania was reinforced by God. I call this egomania the Pharoic syndrome.

The Pharoic syndrome afflicts Israel’s political elites. During the past 15 years, six successive Israeli prime ministers—Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert—mindless of the enormity of evil, have tried to make peace with the PLO, an organization whose record of terrorism and murder dates back to its formation in 1964. These politicians were so morally obtuse that they regarded the PLO’s genocidal objective, proclaimed in its Charter, as negotiable. (more…)

On September 17, Kadima, the ruling party of Ehud Olmert’s coalition government, held an election to determine who would replace him as Israel’s Prime Minister. The election was won by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, portrayed in the media as “Mrs. Clean.” The previous day, Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, wrote: “Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni may not be a crook, but she is a fraud … just one fraudulent election away from becoming our next prime minister.” [View article.]

As we shall see, however, Livni is not the mother of all frauds—merely one of its many children.

Glick sees that “unlike all the other party primaries that have been held over the years, the Kadima primary is designed not as a preparatory step ahead of general elections to the Knesset. Rather, it is intended to replace general elections.”

Having won that primary, Livni will have 42 days to put together a ruling coalition. Failure to do so would mean a new general election in early 2009, a year and a half ahead of schedule. Olmert, who is a crook as well as a fraud, will remain as a caretaker leader until a new coalition is approved by the Knesset. (more…)

Two cheers for Nathan D. Wirtschafter, a member of the Likud, whose article in The Jerusalem Post (September 11, 2008), “Direct elections begin with the Likud primary” comes close to advocating some of the institutional reform proposals of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy and of the Yamin Israel Party.

Mr. Wirtschafter calls for “regional elections with single-member districts, a professional cabinet and a new judicial selection system … ”

To propose a professional cabinet is to propose, in effect, separation between the executive and legislative branches of government. The proposed cabinet would then no longer consist of the leaders of rival political parties (one of the root causes of Israel’s malaise). Mr. Wirtschafter could have clarified matters by simply and explicitly calling for a presidential system of government.

Unfortunately, his party leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, in an interview with the Russian Chanel-7, rejected district elections as well as a presidential system of government—and on the most frivolous grounds. As if he never heard of the U.S. House of Representatives and its 435 districts but only two political parties, Netanyahu said that district elections in Israeli would produce sixty political parties! (more…)

Three months from now, American citizens will be voting for the next President of the United States. They will be faced by the choice of voting for Senator John McCain or for Senator Barack Obama. This may well be the most momentous decision of their lives, for in the next few years Iran, if not prevented, will have nuclear weapons. With such weapons and the range of its current launching systems, Iran will dominate not only the Middle East and its enormous oil reserves, but also pacifist Europe on which the economy and therefore the way of life and even the survival of the United States ultimately depend.

So what should be going through the minds of Americans before they vote for Senator McCain or for Senator Obama?

To begin with, let us consider how one of America’s Founding fathers, James Wilson, thought about the general subject of voting.

James Wilson of Pennsylvania was one of six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. His contribution to the deliberations of the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 was second only to that of James Madison. He was also the principal draftsman of Pennsylvania’s own constitution of 1790. (more…)

Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, was exiled from his native city of Sinope and moved to Athens, where he is said to have walked through the streets carrying a lantern in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man, but unable to find one. I wonder if he would find any in Israel’s Knesset?

According to The 2008 Israeli Democracy Index, 95 percent of the public in Israel deem members of the Knesset dishonest. If this assessment of the Knesset is correct, one may wonder why the remaining 5 percent stay in that den of iniquity.

If 95 percent of the Knesset’s 120 members are not honest, that leaves only six honest MKs! Let’s help Diogenes find an honest MK.

The Olmert coalition government is rightly deemed the most corrupt government in Israel’s history. That puts to shame 29 MKs from Kadima; 19 from Labor-Meimad; 12 from Shas; 7 from (the original) Gil Pensioners—a total of 67 MKs to which we may add another 5 from Meretz-Yachad, which said it will serve as a “safety net” for the Kadima government. We thus have 72 unsavory Knesset members. Pray, continue, says Diogenes. (more…)

Citing Jack Cashill, “The Mansourian Candidate,” 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 these one must add Bill Ayers, founder and theoretician of the Weatherman Underground terrorist organization (1969-1976), now a professor. Then there is the racist and revolutionary ideology/theology of Obama’s most publicized mentor the Rev. “God-damn-America” Jeremiah Wright. Obama attended Wright’s church for twenty years. This is the same Wright who unabashedly expressed his admiration for the Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan, a purveyor of Islam.

And so, as Winston rightly concludes, 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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

All of us are disgusted with the Kadima government headed by that “tired-of-being-courageous” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

We shudder at the prospect of his most prominent successors:  (1)  Kadima’s scatter-brained, pro-Palestinian-state Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and  (2)  Kadima’s Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, who, as IDF Chief of Staff, supervised the disastrous withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and who, as Minister of Defense, supervised the equally disastrous withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

Knowing, moreover, that Kadima is a haven for political hacks devoid of any ideology, we want new elections.

We know that Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, who alone can be counted upon to relegate Kadima to the political wilderness, is now favored to become Israel’s next prime minister. His record, however, is not admirable: he signed the Wye Memorandum; he voted for “unilateral disengagement” as a minister in the Sharon government; and his spin about “reciprocity” in dealing with the Palestinian (terrorist) Authority suggests readiness to withdraw further from Judea and Samaria. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, August 11, 2008.

Part I: Obama

1.  Senator Barack Obama uttered the dumbest statement of the century: “My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.”

2.  Obama recently said in Berlin that he speaks not only as an American citizen, but as a “citizen of the world.” Is Obama in truth a patriotic American? After all, he refrained from putting his hand on his heart when the Pledge of Allegiance was recited in public.

3.  In Dreams of My Father he wrote: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.” This suggests that Obama is an anti-Caucasian “citizen of the world.” (more…)