Alexander Hamilton

...But Hamilton has never been one of our revered Founders...

...The Jordanians expelled all the Jews, destroyed all Jewish houses of worship, and renamed as "West Bank" the territories that had been Judea and Samaria since time immemorial...

...He was indeed an American, as the subtitlehas it, an immigrant who came "from nowhere" (in Brookhiser's phrase) and almost immediately entered public life, and whose passions kept him engaged in it one way or another until he drew his last breath...

...She was still married to another man when Alexander was born...

...Even more, it is Hamilton who did so much to create the kind of institutions through which others from likewise obscure backgrounds could, by dint of hard work, prosper as Americans...

...M en are born not only with rights, of course, but also with passions, though not everyone's are alike...

...That policy is to get as much land as possible carved out of Israel "by peaceful and diplomatic" means, so as to make Israel indefensible and softened up for the final assault...

...But Transjordan stayed in possession of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem...

...In Hamilton's case, they were licentiousness, ambition, and honor...

...in a merchant house at the age of nine...

...Indeed so: Hamilton in 1775 joined a drill company and in 1776 first fired on British soldiers...

...The nationhood of the "Palestinians" is a myth...

...The "Palestinians...

...70 August 1999 The American Spectator...

...The Arabs have learned that lesson well...

...There was the Palestinian Brigade of Jewish volunteers in the British World War II Army (at a time when the Palestinian Arabs were in Berlin hatching plans with Adolf Hitler for world conquest and how to kill all the Jews...

...The "West Bank...

...Aspects of his life are not easily raised with children, such as that while treasury secretary he was caught up in the nation's first political sex scandal...

...Nonetheless, writes Richard Brookhiser, Hamilton was "a great man" and "a great American...

...Even after the total rout of the Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War, in which the Jordanians were driven out of Judea/Samaria and of Jerusalem, they and the world continued to call this territory the "West Bank", a geographical and political concept that cannot be found on any except the most recent maps...

...And he does his best work in explicating Hamilton's understanding of rights...

...Moreover, slavery, as Brookhiser states Hamilton's view of it, "was the ultimate negation of contracts—the state in which a man lost the power to make his own arrangements...

...Hamilton married into the prominent Schuyler family, from upstate New York, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, had a total of eight children, the last born two years before his death...

...After the victorious Six-Day War, during which the Israeli army defeated the same cabal of Arabs that had invaded the country in 1948, Israel regained possession of Judea/Samaria, the Gaza Strip, which had been occupied by the Egyptians, and of the Golan Heights, a plateau the size of Queens, which, though originally part of Palestine, had been assigned to Syria by British-French agreement...

...Hamilton published in reply to the charge that he was in fact a corrupt officeholder on account of "improper pecuniary speculation" (and not just an adulterer) "remains the frankest admission of adultery by any major American politician...

...A form of licentiousness is lust, and Treasury Secretary Hamilton succumbed to it the very day that he met Maria Reynolds, who also was married...

...none of Hamilton's peers equaled him in his understanding of the executive power, and his arguments have force even now...

...The full story of his life is worth knowing—and also worth learning from...

...The "Occupied Territories...

...Brookhiser correctly observes that Hamilton was "as apt to think of the rights of government as of the rights of man...

...Yet for all his contributions for which we today owe him very high gratitude, Hamilton teaches the importance of private life, and indeed, to use the contemporary jargon, of family values...

...Narcissus was captivated by his reflection because that was all he had...

...In the cost to his own family lies the cautionary teaching of Hamilton's life...

...And so it was that in 1772, at age 15, he left on a ship, never to return...

...Hamilton used the pronoun "our" several times: "our countrymen," "our population," "our dawning splendor...

...Brookhiser captures Burr this way: We associate Narcissus with beauty and self-regard, but the key to his myth is that it is about surfaces...

...Other founders also had affairs, but Hamilton, as Brookhiser points out, was "the only founder to admit it any detail...

...What are some of these myths...

...for example, Burr was an adulterer in both theory and practice...

...And it was lengthy: None of the Founders wrote more than Hamilton, their "most energetic wordsmith...

...The last sovereign in Judea/Samaria and in Gaza was the British mandatory power — and before it was the Ottoman Empire...

...What a shame that the world has accepted most of it...

...Hamilton trusted Burr not at all...

...Hamilton was nothing if not a hard worker all his life, and he believed that Americans should, more than anything else, work...

...Who would be the sovereign and who the rightful inhabitants...

...his ability to get schemes going, and his failure to follow them through...

...Josef Goebbels, the infamous propaganda minister of the Nazis, had it right...

...A habit of labor in the people," Hamilton said during the Revolutionary War, "is as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies, as it is conducive to the welfare of the state...

...All of Palestine, including what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, was, by the Balfour Declaration, destined to be the Jewish National Home...

...Unable so far to destroy Israel on the battlefield — though they are feverishly preparing for their next assault — the Arabs are now trying to overcome and destroy Israel by their acknowledged "policy of stages...

...Brookhiser fails to elaborate even briefly on Hamilton's Federalist numbers on the presidency, the distinctive creation of the American founding...

...This analysis was probably wrong, as Brookhiser points out...

...But his effectiveness was limited—and thus his weakness as a politician was revealed—by his inability to turn the inspirational phrase...

...Indeed, the pamphlet (a writer yet again...

...How then could the Israelis possibly be "occupiers" in their own territory...

...What's more, many of the "Palestinians", or their immediate ancestors, came to the area attracted by the prosperity created by the Jews, in what previously had been pretty much of a wasteland...

...Just tell people big lies often enough and they'll believe them...

...tently summarizing the treasury secretary's three great reports on credit, a national bank, and manufacturing...

...Again, this is a concept that did not exist until 1948, when six Arab armies invaded the Jewish state of Israel, on the very day of its creation...

...Undaunted by his cosmopolitan surroundings, Hamilton entered public life in 1774 by publishing pamphlets under a pseudonym in response to an article involving trade with Britain...

...He was like a new refrigerator—bright, cold, and empty...

...Why didn't Hamilton try to brazen it out, admitting nothing...

...It is a further mark against Hamilton, the father, that two years earlier he had advised his oldest son, zo-year-old Philip, not to kill the opponent who had challenged him...

...Brookhiser has at least a few paragraphs on Hamilton's case for judicial review, which anticipated John Marshall's statement of it in Marbury v. Madison (1803), yet he does not address how Hamilton might have understood issues of constitutional interpretation that divided the Supreme Court in its early years and remain contentious still today...

...Miraculously, the ragtag Jewish forces defeated the combined Arab might...

...Hamilton had wanted to be a better father than his own had been, and yet he died on account of a decision that made his own reputation a more important consideration than the welfare of his wife and children...

...The immigrant," writes Brookhiser, "had become a patriot...

...there was The Palestine Post...

...He served in the Continental Congress, and though his role at the convention in Philadelphia was not major, he was the one who launched The Federalist, the most important journalism ever published in the United States...

...That was "a world that held nothing for him," Brookhiser writes, while "contracts characterized that part of it which freed him...

...Hamilton believed that the rights of man were grounded in the nature of things, and it was on the basis of principles of natural justice that Hamilton condemned the breaking of a contract and the enslavement of a man...

...Hamilton also was active in New York state politics, seeking to constrain the unprincipled and ambitious Aaron Burr...

...But he remained dedicated to public matters, ghosting Washington's famous (though never delivered) Farewell Address, defending Jay's Treaty in newspaper articles he wrote under a pseudonym (as was his usual practice), and even serving as a major general in the Army in 1798-99...

...Hamilton left the Washington administration in 1795 and again distinguishedhimself as a lawyer...

...Because his honor was at stake...

...Until then, the Jews were the Palestinians...

...The concept of the "West Bank" is a myth...

...He taught himself law...

...But they are no distinct nationality at all...

...The Arabs who now call themselves "Palestinians" do so in order to persuade a misinformed world that they are a distinct nationality and that "Palestine" is their ancestral homeland...

...Brookhiser understands this point, for Alexander Hamilton: American is biography of the old-fashioned kind, unafraid to explore matters of character...

...This, too, is his legacy...

...He thought, quite accurately, that the man's character was despicable...

...This ad has been published and paid for by FLANIE Facts and Logic about the Middle East P.O...

...They have swayed world opinion by myths and lies that have no basis in fact...

...The concept of "occupied territories" is an Arab propaganda myth...

...Honor, Brookhiser argues persuasively, also moved Hamilton to engage in the duel that ended his life, notwithstanding that intellectually he had repudiated the practice...

...Instead, Philip dueled and suffered a mortal wound...

...What a shame that the world has accepted most of it...

...There is also the bad odor attached to his decision to participate in the duel with Vice President Aaron Burr, which resulted in Hamilton's death at the age of 47...

...No one seriously disputes Hamilton's greatness in that role, nor in his contribution to the American founding as the principal author of The Federalist Papers, which expounded the meaning of the Constitution (of which he was a signer...

...He wrote to persuade—"he was his arguments," as Brookhiser nicely puts it...

...The Mixed Legacy of Alexander Hamilton Alexander Hamilton: American Richard Brookhiser Free Press / 240 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Terry Eastland I n 1789 Alexander Hamilton, at age 32, became the nation's first treasury secretary...

...Box 590359 ^ San Francisco, CA 94159 FLAME is a 501(c)(3) educational institution...

...Brookhiser does better in his treatment of Hamilton's economic views, compe68 August 1999 • The American Spectator Arabian Fables (I) How the Arabs soften up world opinion with fanciful myths...

...Yet seeing the matter as Hamilton did, he felt he could not back down from Burr's challenge, which arose from Hamilton's failure to explain certain critical statements he had made about the vice president...

...Hamilton, a union supporter, saw in the convergence of certain events the possibility that Burr, a man of such contemptible character, could wreck the union...

...But Alexander's employer and a minister saw his potential and arranged to send him to the mainland...

...his lack of principle—all flow from his character...

...They are the same as the Arabs of Syria, Jordan, and beyond...

...there was the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra (all Jews, of course...

...Brookhiser competently narrates Hamilton's tenure as treasury secretary, including the Newspaper War fought out by the Federalists and Republicans, and the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt...

...His mother was descended from Huguenots, his father was a Scot...

...The web of lies and myths that the Arab propaganda machine has created plays an important role in the unrelenting quest to destroy the State of Israel...

...A weakness of this biography is that it does not always do justice to the ideas Hamilton put forward...

...There is no more difference between the "Palestinians" and the other Arabs of those countries than there is between, say, the citizens of Minnesota and those of Wisconsin...

...Brookhiser is a fine literary analyst, showing the strengths and weaknesses of Hamilton's efforts...

...He could have told him not to duel, period...

...Narcissists must live through their interactions, because there is no one home...

...Brookhiser rightly emphasizes Hamilton's public writing...

...It first took the form of self-expression and polemic, and then of support for laws and policies...

...He did not want a stain on his public record and so was willing to admit his adultery in order to clear his name...

...The concept of "Palestinians" did not exist until about 1948...

...There was, of course, very little opportunity in the islands...

...Hamilton did so because he recognized that (to borrow from the Declaration of Independence) governments are instituted to secure these rights...

...Hamilton went to New York, where he lived the rest of his life, and studied at King's College...

...he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and from 1777 to 1781 was one of George Washington's closest aides...

...Burr's charm, attentiveness, and promiscuity...

...and so much more...

...The attempt, quite successful, was to persuade an uninformed world that these were ancestral parts of the Jordanian Arab Kingdom...

...Brookhiser reminds that Hamilton had seen slavery in the West Indies, where blacks outnumbered whites 12 to land even his mother, when down on her luck, had owned slaves...

...Dueling even then was widely condemned on moral and religious grounds, and Hamilton himself had said only months before he died that dueling was forbidden on grounds of natural justice...

...The web of lies and myths that the Arab propaganda machine has created plays an important role in the unrelenting quest to destroy the State of Israel...

...And in 18oi he founded the New York Evening Post, which is still around as the New York Post...

...And though his parents may eventually have married, Hamilton's father—"a bum," says Brookhiser—deserted the family when Alexander went to work as a clerk TERRY EASTLAND is publisher and president of The American Spectator...

...Hamilton was born and raised in the sugar islands of the West Indies...

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