To get the taste of Obama’s disturbing UN speech out of my mouth, I read the address of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the same corrupt body. Damn, I wish we had a president who spoke like that. Read the whole thing and/or watch the video.
Netanyahu began by challenging the claim, supported by much of the UN, that Jews are recent interlopers in the region (it was never a nation) known as Palestine:
Three thousand years ago, King David reigned over the Jewish state in our eternal capital, Jerusalem. I say that to all those who proclaim that the Jewish state has no roots in our region and that it will soon disappear.
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The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years. Even after most of our people were exiled from it, Jews continued to live in the land of Israel throughout the ages. The masses of our people never gave up the dreamed of returning to our ancient homeland.
Here he might have added that Jews continued to live throughout the Middle East in large numbers (a third of the population of Baghdad) until they were driven out or murdered by the Arabs who embraced Islamofascism.
Defying the laws of history, we did just that. We ingathered the exiles, restored our independence and rebuilt our national life. The Jewish people have come home.
We will never be uprooted again.
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In Israel, we walk the same paths tread by our patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But we blaze new trails in science, technology, medicine, agriculture.
In Israel, the past and the future find common ground.
Unfortunately, that is not the case in many other countries. For today, a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval.
The forces of modernity seek a bright future in which the rights of all are protected, in which an ever-expanding digital library is available in the palm of every child, in which every life is sacred.
The forces of medievalism seek a world in which women and minorities are subjugated, in which knowledge is suppressed, in which not life but death is glorified.
These forces clash around the globe, but nowhere more starkly than in the Middle East.
Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the rights of all our citizens: men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians – all are equal before the law.
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Israel wants to see a Middle East of progress and peace. We want to see the three great religions that sprang forth from our region – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – coexist in peace and in mutual respect.
Yet the medieval forces of radical Islam, whom you just saw storming the American embassies throughout the Middle East, they oppose this.
They seek supremacy over all Muslims. They are bent on world conquest. They want to destroy Israel, Europe, America. They want to extinguish freedom. They want to end the modern world.
Militant Islam has many branches – from the rulers of Iran with their Revolutionary Guards to Al Qaeda terrorists to the radical cells lurking in every part of the globe.
But despite their differences, they are all rooted in the same bitter soil of intolerance. That intolerance is directed first at their fellow Muslims, and then to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, secular people, anyone who doesn’t submit to their unforgiving creed.
They want to drag humanity back to an age of unquestioning dogma and unrelenting conflict.
I am sure of one thing. Ultimately they will fail. Ultimately, light will penetrate the darkness.
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I think the relevant question is this: it’s not whether this fanaticism will be defeated. It’s how many lives will be lost before it’s defeated.
Outstanding. Reason, the Enlightenment, modernity: the leader who represents one of the most ancient civilizations in the world forcefully defends these values; the leader of the nation that was founded on those principles can’t bring himself to do so.
Oh, and by the way: US Ambassador Susan Rice skipped Netanyahu’s speech, thus treating him the same way she did Ahmadinejad. Moral equivalence?
Like I said: Read the whole thing and/or watch the video. Especially the latter, so you can see the marvelous visual aid he uses to illustrate Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons and where we must draw a red line.
