A group of respected former world leaders and academic figures came together in Paris earlier this month to establish the Friends of Israel initiative to combat what they called the “delegitimation of the State of Israel.”
The group was led by former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and included Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former First Minister of Northern Ireland David Trimble, former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, Italian philosopher Marcelo Pear, British historian Andrew Roberts and former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton.
In a press release prior to the Paris event, the group expressed its outrage over the “unprecedented delegitimation campaign against Israel, driven by the enemies of the Jewish state and perversely assumed by numerous international authorities.”
The Friends of Israel initiative differs from and compliments other pro-Israel movements because it “is promoted by people who are not Jewish and whose motivations are based on the deep conviction that Israel is part of the Western world. In fact, today Israel is a fundamental actor for the future of the West.”
Aznar, Trimble, Bolton and the rest said that while they view the Israeli-Arab peace process as important, they believe disproportionate attention is being focused on it, while Islamic terror and a nuclear Iran are far greater threats to world peace and stability.
At the inaugural event in the French capital, the group stressed that it is not wrong to disagree with Israel, but that such disagreements over policy should never “be used as an excuse to question Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy or its national rights.”
They concluded by declaring that “there is no West without Israel.”
News of the initiative’s launch was severely muted as it took place less than a day after Israel’s raid on the Free Gaza “humanitarian aid” flotilla that was trying to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
David Trimble has since been named as one of two foreign observers on Israel’s panel of inquiry into the flotilla raid.
Sarah Palin about “Cap and Tax” – Denver, May 23, 2010
TED and LAURA
Dennis Prager Q & A At University of Denver
Pls view and review this clip of Prager
I don’t like him but here at least I believe he was elegant, not only in his presentation but also his understanding of the problem and his unique ability to transmit that message clearly.
This clip should be seen by every American and most Israelis.
THE WEST???
German flags in Haifa
Arabs in Akko and Haifa have developed a strange habit of placing foreign flags, mostly German, on their roofs and balconies. It is not easy to comprehend the Arab mind, but,
this seems like a challenge to Israeli sovereignty.
The Yom Kippur syndrome
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
Love/hate?
Meaningless Cliche.
What’s so great or worthwhile about the so called west?
Beyond Bigotry
Clifford May, Scripps Howard News Service · Monday, Jun. 14, 2010
I srael is at war, and if Israel were to be defeated, much of the world would not shed wet tears. What would happen after such a defeat? No one can seriously doubt that Hamas has genocidal intentions.
Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas’s Deputy Minister of Religion, recently asserted that Jews “want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria — a microbe unparalleled in the world.” Jarbu then offered this prayer: “May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience.”
Jarbu is restating what Hamas’s Iranian sponsors have been saying for years. Kayhan, the newspaper that speaks for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be excised from “the Islamic Middle East.” The goal, Kayhan added, must be Israel’s “total annihilation from the political geography of the region.”
Let’s stipulate that not all those who support the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” would welcome a second Holocaust. But let’s acknowledge, too, that those who do not endorse genocide feel it unnecessary to distance themselves from those who do.
The American journalist Helen Thomas was videotaped last week saying that Israelis should return to “Germany and Poland.” What was shocking here was not Thomas’s anti-Semitism (long well known) but that she was echoing, with just a tad more subtlety, the message radioed last week from the flotilla’s Turkish flagship to the Israelis: “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz.” There also was this pro-terrorism message: “We’re helping Arabs go against the U.S., don’t forget 9/11.”
Despite such evidence, most media have been reporting that those aboard the flotilla were on a “humanitarian mission,” attempting to deliver needed aid. Few have mentioned that Palestinians already are the largest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world. Israel itself delivers as much as 15,000 tons of aid to Gazans every week. More comes from the U.S. and Europe via the United Nations, which has a massive relief operation in Gaza — to which the Turks have contributed but a pittance, as my colleague Claudia Rosett has pointed out.
A Washington Post reporter in Gaza last week noted that “grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.” Read more