22 Dec America’s 250th Birthday: Recultivating Great Minds in America
Longstanding wisdom observes: small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas.
America’s Founding Fathers wrote of ‘self-evident truths’ relating to the Creator. They made consequential statements about the inalienable rights of individual men (and women) endowed to them by the Creator. They boldly asserted belief in the virtue of limited government, guided by the consent of the governed…and they stipulated to the importance of ‘the governed’ being comprised of a moral and religious people.
These were great ideas discussed and put into writing in the foundational documents of the country by great minds. As America moves to celebrate her 250th birthday and plan for another 250 years (or more), there is a critical, maybe even existential need to recultivate great minds in America.
Case in point: the ‘hot potato’ of current American political discussion is the relationship between America and Israel. There are great ideas that form the foundation of that relationship. But far too much of today’s discussion is about people—about Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Mark Levin, Steve Bannon and others—but not about those great ideas. The result is a discussion that loses the forest for the trees.
Raymond Ibrahim is an example of a ‘great mind’ of 2025, ready and willing to take on the big ideas of America/Israel and Islam (which is an absolutely critical component of the America/Israel relationship discussion). If you can spare the 5+ minutes necessary to watch this commentary of Ibrahim’s, it will be worth your time.
For summary purposes here, Ibrahim is pointing out that the frenzied attacks on the actions of people (current pundits and political leaders) relating to recent events (the hobgoblin of average minds) are leading to an utterly false and ridiculous logical fallacy in the realm of great ideas: if Israel is so bad today, then by implication Islam must be good, or at least not as bad as current Islamic critics say.
Yet there are 13+ centuries of violent, murderous Islamic behavior toward Christians and Jews (and all other non-Muslims) that were in the historical record before the nation-state of Israel even existed. (A previous post on this Substack highlights the observations of John Quincy Adams regarding Islam and its founder—observations made over a hundred years before Israel existed as a nation-state.)
Muslims have been waging war to conquer the world and establish a global caliphate since the inception of Islam. They proceed with the killing of Jews whenever possible because that is what they have been taught to do since the inception of Islam. They do not ultimately want a ‘two-state’ solution anywhere on earth; they want one state: a global caliphate governed by Islamic sharia.
As to the nation-state of Israel and the Palestinians in 2025, this also longstanding wisdom is absolutely true, and serious, honest observers of the Middle East of any political persuasion would agree:
If the Palestinian people laid down their arms and the Israelis retained theirs, there would be peace in the region…but if the Israelis laid down their arms and the Palestinian people retained theirs, the Israels would be exterminated ‘from the river to the sea’, because that is what Islam has taught its adherents to do since the inception of Islam.
(In terms being popularized today, this teaching of Islam is not only an endorsement of true genocide; it is per se an application of the grotesque concept of ‘blood-guilt’—the idea that people living today deserve to die because of their identity at birth rather than because of choices they have made.)
To be oblivious of this history and this wisdom, or to treat them as irrelevant to evaluation of the post October 7 behavior of Hamas and Israel in Gaza, and in the process to obscure the entire subject into a battle between ‘Israel First’ Shapiro or ‘Tel Aviv Levin’ or ‘Tucker Qatarlson’ is to position monumental issues relating to the future of humanity into the control of small minds. This cannot end well.
Christianity and Islam present radically and irreconcilably different views of the nature of God and man, of morality, of the rights of women, of free speech, of the right of the individual to change religious belief (or to have no religious belief). These are the great ideas that must be front and center as the subject of America’s relationship with Israel is debated.
The critical, divinely inspired ideals of the Declaration of Independence could not possibly have emerged from an Islamic society.
Islamic sharia cannot be merged with those American ideals.
This cannot be repeated too often: Islam is incompatible with western civilization…which means Islam is incompatible with the American constitution.
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These great ideas of great consequence must be understood and discussed by great American minds if there is to be any long-lasting resolution of ‘the conflict in the Middle East’. Because the conflict obviously involves people and events—but resolving it must take into account the underlying big ideas.
The recultivation of great American minds to discuss all great ideas of today is in fact critical if there is to be another 250 years of American exceptionalism to celebrate.
Eric Georgatos