In honor of Abraham Lincoln, and in view of our perilous times, the Israel-America Renaissance Institute urges you to ponder deeply Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain
-- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
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Abraham Lincoln
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
The Israel-America Renaissance Institute
Revisionist historians aside—or those who do not understand the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln—the issue of the Civil War that erupted in America after the election of 1860 involved more than the issue of slavery. At stake, as Lincoln saw, was the soul of the American people.
The soul of the American people is inseparable from America’s primary foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln deemed the soul of the Constitution.
That lofty and quintessential document has been degraded by higher education in the United States during the past 100 years. It has been degraded by various academic doctrines:
Historicism, Crypto-Marxism, Psychological and Sociological Reductionism, Existentialism, and other doctrines that propagate moral and cultural relativism—doctrines that undermine belief in the universal and trans-historical truths expressed in the Declaration. Let us be more specific.
Lincoln regarded the first principle of the Declaration—“that all men are created equal”—as a “self-evident truth.” This was more than a political principle. It was more than a sociological principle. It was a theologically based principle.
Slavery in the United States contradicted Genesis 1:27, that “God created man in His image; in the likeness of God He created him.
” This verse of the Jewish Bible proclaimed the revolutionary idea of the human community. Ponder the commentary of philosopher Rabbi Yitzhak Breuer:
The idea of the human community is one of the most beautiful pearls in the treasure of Jewish doctrine; it is a basic truth of Judaism; it is that Jewish idea which first set out on its triumphal procession from the Jewish camp into the whole world; it is the first message of salvation which Israel brought to a society of states which knew only force and the misuse of power. “God created man in His image; in the likeness of God He created him.” Here we have the lapidary sentence from Holy Writ which proclaims through all ages the inalienable, godlike nobility of man as such.
Barack Obama’s first Inaugural Address made nonsense of that lapidary sentence of Holy Writ. Contrary to the tradition that mandates America as a Judeo-Christian nation, Obama said on January 20, 2009 that “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, of Jews and Hindus,” to which he added “non-believers.”
Now it happens that Islamic theology regards as blasphemous the idea that man is created in the image of God. This is not something Barack Obama would have learned from his mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Nor would he have learned this at Columbia or Harvard. Indeed, Obama’s reference to “non-believers” reveals that his mind is the product of the secular brainwashing that has long dominated higher education in the United States.
The countless academics that perform this brainwashing deliberately ignore the fact that the Declaration of Independence mentions the God of the Bible in three additional ways: as the “Creator,” as the “Supreme Judge,” and in terms of “Divine Providence.” This clearly indicates that God is the God of History as well as of Nature. Nor is this all.
Unbeknownst to virtually all commentators—including “Straussians,” the pivotal and most profound phrase of the Declaration—“the Laws of Nature and of Nature and of Nature’s God”—corresponds to two sets of laws which in turn are related to the two names of God mentioned in the Creation narrative of Genesis. I refer to Elokim (used in the first six days of creation), and the ineffable name of God, the Tetragrammaton (used on the seventh day, i.e., the Sabbath).
As I show in the (virtually completed) second edition of my book on the theological foundations of American Exceptionalism, the Declaration of Independence, understood from a Judaic perspective, transcends Classical and Modern political science! Indeed, only a Judaic understanding of the Declaration can prevent America’s demise—the inevitable outcome of Obama’s re-election, which will enable him to appoint three or four “post-American” Supreme Court Judges for whom America’s foundational documents are obsolete.
Now, as the present writer and others have observed, Mr. Obama is a cultural relativist; yet he exalts Islam. His exaltation of Islam cannot be the result of any belief, on his part, of any objective truth, given his relativism. Hence, his exalting Islam must be the result of arbitrary will, of opportunism, or of expediency. His exalting the Quran is no more truth-inspired than is Hitler exalting Mein Kampf.
Having scorned America’s foundational documents, Obama is a man without a country. This would be ironic if his American citizenship is fraudulent. Be that as it may, his re-election indicates that the people of the United States are on the way to becoming a people without a country. Can such a tragedy be avoided? That’s the purpose of my book on American Exceptionalism.
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