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Hi, I'm Sean acres, Dean of the helm school government. I'd like to welcome you to this class on American foreign policy toward the Middle East. And began at with the discussion that ties into something you learned very early in your program here at the helm school and the Liberty University School of Law's MAT program. It's, it's this that ideas shape policy, that ideas plus governmental action equal policy. So we have emphasized many times how important ideas and their origins are. When we begin to talk about the Middle East and US foreign policy toward the Middle East. There are two names that are very similar, that can show you this flow of ideas across literally centuries and how important those ideas have become. The name is Blackstone. Now you've already been exposed many times to the name William Blackstone, the English jurist. But there was another William Blackstone who came along about 60 years later, William Eugene Blackstone. I'd like to show you how the two of them play together to, to show how ideas shape policy and how the United States has been very closely linked to the Middle East intellectually and in policy for many, many years. The first William Blackstone, the one that you've studied, the English jurist, dedicated his life to developing a philosophy of law. He did that very closely on the Ten Commandments and inculcated his understanding of law and of policy and of the role of government with Judeo Christian ideas. Now when we use that term Judeo Christian, it's important to understand that we're making a direct reference back. That's right. The Middle East, because both Judaism and Christianity sprang out of the State of Israel. And we see that they came most of these ideas, the ideas that William Blackstone incorporated into the study and the practice of law came from the Judeo-Christian tradition and from the Bible, which means that it was a Jewish and a Jewish Christian understanding of the world that shaped the ideas that Blackstone put into his commentary on the laws of England. Then as you know, those made their way into American political philosophy by the founders finding great inspiration and great use of Blackstone's philosophy of law and philosophy of government in both drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and giving birth to this nation. So from that vantage point, you really can trace the intellectual birth of the United States back from the colonies to England and strictly to Jerusalem to Israel. Now, what's interesting about that is if you flash forward after the time that the founders took what Blackstone did to incorporate Judeo Christianity into the law. And you find an American legal system built on that basis. That that system and that society produced people like the second Blackstone, William Eugene Blackstone, who was known as the father of American Zionism. In fact, a Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis said that he was the father of Zionism because he began the push to restore the Jewish people to their historical homeland even before Theodore Herzl. Blackstone use the William Eugene Blackstone is the man who, who drew together American interests to say, you know what? The Jews are being persecuted around the globe and they need to have a homeland. It was William Eugene Blackstone, Theodore Herzl, and several others that began to gather this momentum of idea. This idea that people should be free and this idea that the Jewish people have a homeland in the Middle East known as Israel. It was that of force that came together that created the political will that allowed a President of the United States to come out and support declarations that brought this about. Now William Eugene Blackstone did not live. He died 13 years before the establishment of the State of Israel. But many people have recognized that it was his push to bring full circle to this ideology. This ideology that started in Jerusalem, came through Europe, gave birth to the United States. That then was turned by an American Zionist to build support for what became the rebirth of the State of Israel. And 940 aid.