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General News    H2'ed 1/20/21

US Government Gives Plaque of Lies to City of David Foundation in Palestine

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Plaque of religious and historic lies.
Plaque of religious and historic lies.
(Image by US State Department)
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Recently US Ambassador to Israel and Donald Trump's bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, along with the Chairman of the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, Paul Packer (both Friedman and Packer are practicing religious Jews), dedicated a plaque to the City of David Foundation. The City of David Foundation is an Israeli organization in illegally and cruelly occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem. It's purpose is to further entrench Jews into Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank, which forces Palestinians out of their homes and towns. It's all based on the ungodly and barbaric Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and completely ignores this sage advice from Albert Einstein: "Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us."

Not content to simply take actions that further Israel's expanding occupation of Palestinian land, the plaque contains language that is based on the blatant lies of the religious right and which attack the truth about the founding of the US and the beliefs of America's Founders. It promotes the lie that America was founded as a nation based on Judeo-Christian values and the Bible. Friedman said in his remarks at the dedication:

"I've often wondered, what monuments inspired our Founding Fathers. When the drafters of the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that our Creator had endowed each and every American with certain unalienable rights, what monuments inspired them? I suggest that those monuments are located right here, in the ancient City of Jerusalem. We have given this plaque to the City of David Foundation with the hope that it will prompt all who read it to think of the Judeo-Christian values upon which our country was founded and how those values were inspired by ancient Jerusalem and its inhabitants."

Friedman is either ignorant of American history, or he is purposely being deceptive. Of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston, Jefferson and Franklin were Deists (they believed in God based on applying their reason to the laws and designs in Nature and rejected all of the "revealed" religions), Adams held Deistic beliefs, such as not believing Jesus was divine, but officially was a Unitarian. It is believed that Sherman and Livingston were Christians. The Deist Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and it is believed he probably had some important input from fellow Deist Thomas Paine.

Regardless of the beliefs of the men who drafted the Declaration of Independence, the final result is that the Declaration, contrary to Friedman and Packer, is a Deistic document in that it only mentions God in Deistic terms, such as Nature's God, and never mentions the Bible, Judaism, Christianity, Moses, Jesus or anything else from the Hebrew or Christian bibles.

It's interesting that Friedman and Packer completely ignored the founding document of the American Republic, the US Constitution. The US Constitution does not mention God at all, not even in Deistic terms. If Friedman, Packer and the theocrats of the religious right were correct, that America's Founders based the US on Judeo-Christian values, they would have at least mentioned Judaism and Christianity in the Declaration of Independence and in the US Constitution. The fact is, they never mentioned them.

The plaque itself contains these lies:

"The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American Republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed."

What spiritual bedrock of values comes from Jerusalem? If you objectively read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, you'll see it promotes all kinds of religious genocide, such as is found in the entire chapter of Numbers 31. It promotes homophobia to the point of claiming God commanded the killing of gay men (Leviticus 20:13), that children who curse their parents are to be killed (Exodus 21:17), that witches shall be put to death (Exodus 22:18), etc., etc. ad nauseum.

Contrary to the theocrats of the religious right, nowhere in the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible, is a democratic form of government promoted. David, who the City of David Foundation is named after, was a king. Ancient Israel was frequently ruled by monarchs. Monarchy is exactly what the American Founders and revolutionaries were fighting AGAINST! Thomas Jefferson wrote about what he hoped the American Revolution would bring to the world. He wrote,

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. ... The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others."

Thomas Jefferson's friend and fellow Deist Thomas Paine had this to say about monarchy,

"Monarchy always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter."

I hope all free-thinking Americans contact their members of Congress (the phone number is found at the above right of this page) and demand that the plaque given to the City of David Foundation be taken back, to prevent the dangerous lies engraved on it, lies advanced by Friedman, Packer, the warmongering Hebrew Bible-based neoconservative movement and the religious right, from infecting the minds of more people, and to give a more true and accurate idea of America's Founders and the American Revolution.

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Bob Johnson is a paralegal and a freelance writer in Florida. He was raised Roman Catholic, but after reading Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, he became a Deist. In 1993 he founded the World Union of Deists and in 1996 he launched the first web (more...)
 
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