Josh Hammer, senior editor at Newsweek magazine, host of The Josh Hammer Show, and author of Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, spoke to a July 18 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
America’s Christian founders, deeply rooted in Old Testament biblical texts, were inspired by the Hebrew Bible to become “who we are and frankly, what we are” as a country. From the verse in Leviticus, “Thou shalt proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof” on the Liberty Bell, to Abraham Lincoln’s stirring speeches that quoted the Hebrew Psalms, the Old Testament “resonated with Americans going back all the way to the nation’s origin.”
America’s Christian founders, deeply rooted in Old Testament biblical texts, were inspired by the Hebrew Bible to become “who we are and frankly, what we are” as a country.
The moral clarity that America’s founding fathers communicated through their writings has dimmed when considering the world’s “morally confused reaction” to the October 7 atrocities committed against the Jewish nation. Unless a “civilization that is adrift” recovers its sense of purpose of “what it is and what it can and ought to be,” it risks being subjugated by the caustic effects of wokeism, global neoliberalism, and Islamism.
“Israel is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to literally all of those subjugationist forces.” Consider the “homogenizing force” rooted in the ultimate aim of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, which is to eradicate the nation state itself. Globalists focus on the “particularist and nationalist Jewish state” because Israel is the “world’s first example” of a nation state. Thousands of years ago, King David united the Israelite tribes into a nation with “discernible borders defined in that particular case by no one less than God Himself.”
Everything Western civilization takes for granted is grounded in its origins “beginning with the giving of God’s word, with God’s original revelation to Moses and the Israelites there at Mount Sinai.”
Leviticus 19:18, commanding us to love our neighbor as ourselves, is the source of the “modern golden rule, one of the glues that hold civil societies together.” Genesis 1:27 describes how God created man in His own image, male and female.”
It is codified in the Declaration of Independence and inspired Thomas Jefferson to write in 1776, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
The founding fathers wrote their words in the milieu of the Judeo-Christian biblical heritage that bound the nation as one. The West is a combination of revelation and reason, but “reason unmoored from revelation can go off the rails really, really quickly.” “So, there is a role for reason, but only contextualized within a certain exogenous framework.”
Ultimately, “if America wants to be America, we have to recover a sense of who we are. Only that will make us great again.”
Israel is the battleground in a civilizational clash between the West and Islamist barbarism. If Western civilization would understand that “it really is the Bible that made the West great in the first place,” it would comprehend that supporting the Jewish people and Israel as “the original recipients of the word of God” is a “proxy in many ways for support for the United States, for the West.”
Millennial conservatives, many of whom are religious Christians, have a “natural affinity for Israel, the Jewish people, for the holy land, the holy sites.” However, as they came of age in the fallout of “America’s generally failed efforts in wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan,” they are deeply skeptical of U.S. involvement in foreign affairs.
Then there are the libertarians and far-left, as well as far-rightists like Tucker Carlson, all ideologically wedded to their criticism of Israel and its just war. Unfortunately, we do not live “in a day and age where the only thing that mattered was facts and logic and history and law.” The critics’ default position is to appeal to emotion and ignore the facts in arguing for “an America head-in-the-sand, like an ostrich style, ultra isolationist foreign policy.”
Ultimately, “if America wants to be America, we have to recover a sense of who we are. Only that will make us great again.”
