America and Islam - 1776 to the Present

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Here's a scene from Michael Oren's new history of America's involvement in the Middle East. It's called "Power, Faith, and Fantasy."

A Canadian clergyman tells a wartime American president there can be no permanent peace until the civilized nations atone for their 2000 years of persecution of the Jews by restoring them to their national home in Palestine.

The American president replies restoring the Jews to their national home in Palestine is a noble dream and one shared by many Americans.

I might have thought possibly FDR during World War II or possibly Woodrow Wilson during World War I. In fact, the words are those of Abraham Lincoln speaking during the Civil War.

Michael Oren, the Israeli American historian, joins us from New York. Welcome to the program.

Mr. MICHAEL OREN (Author): It's a pleasure to be here.

SIEGEL: Where did this American sympathy for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine come, at a time when the Jewish presence in America was much, much, much smaller than it is today?

Mr. OREN: Actually in 1776, the Jewish presence in American was .04 percent, but the people that founded this new America were Puritans who had arrogated the role as the New Israel and they looked up this new world as the New Canaan, literally. And that created a sense of kinship between them and the old Jews and the old promised land, which was then Palestine under the Ottoman Empire.