I probably sent out 20,000 emails in the past two weeks urging people to fight back against Helen Thomas’s remarks about Jews and Israel as well as Yahoo’s declaring a Palestinian state on their weather page by offering the weather in Jerusalem, Palestine. In addition to those who wrote back “take me off your friggen hate list,” I also received such optimistic notes as “You’re talking to the walls, they’ll never fire Thomas and Yahoo! will not take it down.” Well, it turns out that our collective voice resonated. Though we can’t win every battle, we must fight every battle. Just as in the Jewish State when Israel vacates an area it gets filled with Islamic extremists, so too in the PR campaign we cannot forsake any stepping stone or we will find things closing in on us with no retreat and no ability to fight back. Whoever attacks Israel whether militarily or verbally, must be met with consequence. Once burned, twice shy.
This week, however, I’m not standing on Israel’s defense, but rather putting our best foot forward.
I’d like to know why no one has written a thank you note to Jews or the Jewish State? Though they make up .02 percent of the world population, Jews have won almost 25 percent of all Nobel Prizes and have made great contributions to mankind. How can you not appreciate them when they produced the likes of Sigmund Freud, who gave every human the ability to legitimately blame your mother for everything, and Albert Einstein, who introduced the Theory of Relativity proving that relative to his hair style yours is not so bad? And if we’ve stopped being thankful to Jonas Salk, who developed the first polio vaccine, I know I couldn’t live without my daily dose of Google and Facebook, both created by Jews. How much slower our world would have been if Galileo hadn’t discovered the speed of light. None of us would have a day off from work nor Macy’s a Columbus Day mattress sale if Jews had not invented the astronomical tools that made the explorer’s discoveries possible. And also remember The Manhattan Project, America's World War II effort to develop the atomic bomb which included the contributions of many American Jewish physicists. And then, again, I couldn’t have stitched this beautiful case together for the Jewish people if Isaac Singer hadn’t invented the sewing machine.
The Israeli army is also involved in non-military missions such as the rescue and relief of people around the world, including Haiti post the tragic earthquake. Just this past March Israel offered to send aid to Turkey after a strong earthquake there. Their thank-you note came in the shape of a flotilla. And in 2003 after Iran suffered a quake measuring 6.6 in magnitude, Israel then too offered to be a helpful part of the rescue but Iran officially announced that they were willing to receive help from any country except for "the Zionist entity."
Israel regularly rises to the top in a region known primarily for its oil and intolerance. As Warren Buffett stated, “If you are going to the Middle East for oil, then don’t stop in Israel. But if you are going for brains, energy, and integrity, then it is the ONLY place to stop.” Israel has more university graduates—and particularly more engineers—than any other country on earth. It also has the highest rate of research and development investment per GDP in the world. As a consequence, it has the largest concentration of high-tech companies outside the United States’ famed Silicon Valley. It has more companies listed on NASDAQ than any country outside North America. Every day new, world changing discoveries are coming out of Israel. Both Checkpoint, the leading firewall Internet security system, and Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world, are Israeli companies. Comverse, ECI Telecom, Keter Plastic, Iscar, Netafim, Amdocs, and Orbotech are also Israeli companies and have become known and respected around the world. Amazing what you can do to a desert in 62 years when you focus on productivity instead of death and destruction.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s President, once said that the Arabs are not the children of the desert, they are the father of it. Maybe the next time the Palestinians pick up a shovel they can use it to plant tomatoes instead of rocket launchers and digging graves. Let them look to Israel as a role model as to what they too can achieve instead of bringing the whole world into a war and into desert ruins.
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