GAVEL GAMUT
By Jim Redwine
www.jamesmredwine.com
(Week of 18 August 2025)
FATHER KNOWS BEST
Back in the days when TV was black and white the show Father Knows Best starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt as father and mother Jim and Margaret Anderson dished up weekly lessons of morality and common sense. Father Jim could always be relied on to give thoughtful and caring analysis that mother Margaret would inculcate in their children. The show’s premise was based upon a family seeking and receiving sagacious advice from a respected father much as our nation had received from the Father of our country, George Washington.
Just as most of us have from time to time neglected our parents’ guidance to our chagrin, the United States has sometimes strayed from our Founders’ hard-earned wisdom to our mutual detriment. Our current fall from grace in the Middle East could use a stern parental lecture as set forth in Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796. Among his thoughtful and prescient cautions to us were his observations on dangers to our own country from unjust and unwise foreign entanglements:
“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations, cultivate peace and harmony with all. … give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.
“…. Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations (Iran?) and passionate attachments for ochers (Israel?) should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or its affection.”
Washington’s advice stands in sharp contrast to our long myopic view of the Zionists unjust actions towards the people who long inhabited the land that was created as Israel in 1948. America has always been the main supporter and enabler of what can no longer be denied as an effort by Zionists to eliminate Palestinians from their ancestral homes. And it is Zionism not Judaism that should be condemned.
Jewish people as all other peoples have the right to live in Israel or migrate to Israel if it is done according to international law and justice. There are countless Jewish people throughout the world, including in Israel, who believe the Zionists in Israel are both legally and morally wrong to prosecute a genocide against Palestinians. The trope of calling criticism of Zionist crimes antisemitism or of speaking or protesting against the Israeli government’s actions is just an attempt by Zionists to divert attention from their immoral actions.
As for America, we should consider the wisdom of our Founders and the special place America has held in the world since WWII. We should stand up and call out the “passionate attachment” we have allowed to subvert our basic principles. It is never too late to do the right thing.
Perhaps a simpler guide than Father Washington’s sage advice might be an old adage about self-reflections. If one person calls us an ass, we can laugh it off, but if almost everyone does so, then we better look in the mirror. Such is America’s denial of its immoral enablement of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We may not be dropping the bombs on innocent children, but we are providing them along with the existential political threat to use our military might to support Zionist atrocities.
We appear blind to the evil Zionists call self-defense. Starving civilians, destroying hospitals, murdering journalists and stealing land is genocide, not self-preservation or any type of legitimate response to any former attack. As for America, we should not take up arms against Israel, but we should cease aiding Israel to take military action beyond its borders. And its borders should be those established by the United Nations in 1948.
The United States and Great Britain were the main reason there is an Israel. We found reasons to create Israel in the great evil done to Jewish people by WWII Germany. But that evil was not done by Palestinians or Arabs or Iranians. Such sympathy was certainly understandable. However, to commit another great wrong out of sympathy just doubles the evil; it does not expiate it.
America should first cease our complicity in this modern-day holocaust then we should assert our world leadership to help re-build and realign Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Our decades long culpability in this tragedy and our unique status and stature demand that America stands for what we say we believe and what George Washington called for. Peace and stability are possible in the Middle East; however, it will not come from bombs but from the principles we hold dear.
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