It is true that Athens and Jerusalem created the West, referring to the moral and religious idea that were introduced by Greece and Israel.
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Of the two, Jerusalem’s factor was the more persistent. Aristotle and Plato are hardly read by Westerners today. Up until the last generation or two, nearly every member of the West, even the uneducated, was aware of the Bible. The Catholic Church, rather than Odysseus, Westernized Europe in the name of the Bible.
Were it not for the Jews and their Bible, there would be no Christianity– and so no Western society. The abolition of slavery was led by Bible-believing Christians. The Bible, no Aristotle, was their spiritual inspiration.
With regard to America, its Members, even the less religious people, were rooted in scriptural conscience. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, two of the least-religious people, created the Great Seal of the United States, which depicted the Jews leaving Egypt. A verse from the Torah ( the initial five books of the Bible ) is the only monument on the Liberty Bell, the symbol of American independence. The emblem of Yale University is in Hebrew, and it, too, is taken from the Torah. An empty Bible appears on the Princeton University mark. Individuals at Yale, Harvard, and various institutions were required to study Hebrew up until about 1800.
America was referred to as a” Second Israel” by some American Members. According to Eran Shalev, a Fulbright researcher who later became Haifa University’s professor of history:
The Old Testament was so pervasive in British culture that, for years after the start of the nineteenth century, it was regarded as “omnipresent… as the atmosphere that people breathed,” according to Perry Miller, a Harvard teacher who cofounded the area of American research.
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The next president of the United States, John Adams, summarizes the perspective of the American Founders toward Jews in these terms:
” I will insist the Hebrews have ( contributed ) more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist who believed in blinded perpetual death, I also think that fate had given the Jews the most important role in civilizing the world. In contrast to the Jews, the Greeks and their dynasty were nothing more than a balloon. They have given church to three-quarters of the world and have influenced the affairs of human more, and more pleasantly, than any other country, old or present”.
As Israel again made the West, now it is saving the West. This was well-stated in a row titled” Israel Defends Itself– and May Save Western Society a few weeks ago by Wall Street Journal journalist Gerard Baker:
How will we ever pay the debt Israel owes us? What the Jewish state has accomplished in the past year will go down as one of the most significant contributions to the protection of Western civilization over the past three-quarters of a century. Its accomplishments were made for its own defense, but no ironically and for the security of everyone involved.
” Israel has in 12 weeks done nothing less than redesign the harmony of global security, not just in the area, but in the wider world. It has eliminated countless terrorists whose decades-long fervor for a brutal autocratic philosophy have claimed but many lives in the area and around the world.
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It has, above all, served as an unforeseen but important reminder to our opponents that there are at least some people who are willing to follow and fight them, irrespective of the danger to our own lives and resources. The merely appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us– its minimum allies, especially in the U. S.– are’ bless you’ and ‘ how can we assist?’
Winston Churchill praised the Royal Air Force’s people after they had rejected Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, saying,” Not in the field of human fight has so much been owed by so many to so few.”
We may sound those words now as we observe in wonder what a nation with a people lower than New Jersey, a smaller economy than Washington state, and a smaller population than New Jersey has accomplished for all of us.
Baker is not the only one to realize that the West is at war with Israel. On the one-year celebration of the Oct. 7, 2023, murders, Brendan O’Neill, former director of the British liberal newspaper Spiked, wrote:
The West’s social failings in the wake of September 7th were utterly new. Perhaps my worst fears were overshadowed by them. They cast a terrible, unavoidable light on the retreat from cause and the abandonment of revolution, which many of us have been warning about for years. The insanity of the post-civilization time became public. The West is now at the center of a severe moral issue, which was obvious. Hamas ‘ pity on our schools and sidewalks is inextricably a product of the West’s own sense of meaninglessness, our inability to understand ourselves, and our treachery of our past.
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It is necessary to start a battle for humanity’s mind. On two sides. Only a full-throated defense of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation could halt the moral derangement of our time and the Jew hatred it has engendered on the physical front of Israel’s borders ( a ) and on the intellectual front here at home.
If you care about Western culture, you need to worry about old Israel and Israel now.