It is a great pleasure today to be with you at AIPAC’s annual convention here in Washington, D.C. May I begin by commending you for the outstanding leadership provided by Howard Kohr that has helped AIPAC become one of the most reliable, respected, and effective public policy organizations in this town.
We gather here today at an extraordinary time for the United States, for Israel, and for the free people of the world. In the march of history there are occasions when great nations are confronted with great questions – questions dealing with war and peace, freedom and slavery, life and death. The United States and Israel are great nations – and today we face the very same questions that confronted free people and great leaders of the past.
Over 18 months ago, on September 11th the United States was awakened from its slumber when fanatical terrorists attacked our homeland. Three thousand innocent people were killed in an act of war simply because they were Americans.
In Israel there has not been, thank God, a similar single “mega attack.” But, there has been a persistent ongoing campaign of terror whose cumulative effect is spilled blood, broken bones, and ripped flesh. A terror campaign whose total impact has been even greater than what we suffered on September 11th.
Many years ago in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill posed a profound question. He did not ask what kind of people would do such a terrible thing. He, more than anyone, knew the evil we were facing when most of the world did not. No – the question Churchill asked was different. He wanted to know what kind of people our enemies thought we were.
His question has haunted me since the morning of September 11th when I sat in my car 100 yards from the Pentagon as that plane crashed into its side. What do Arafat and bin Laden, Hamas and Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad think about Israel and the United States? Why do they believe that killing Jews at worship, families eating together, women and children on buses will break the will of the Israeli people? Why did they think the brutal September 11th attack would somehow break the will of the people of the United States?
Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t have to guess about what they think about Israel and the United States. Bin Laden made long philosophical taped statements about us long before September 11th. Our enemies, those who would repeat the Holocaust, those who would destroy America, believe we are decadent. They think we are fat and weak, lazy and fearful.
They believe our civilization is in decline and that we are ready to crawl into a corner and die. They believe Israel is no longer capable of producing the kind of people that disembarked from boats from war torn Europe and went directly to the front lines to protect the infant modern state of Israel as its enemies tried to strangle it in its crib. They think America can no longer produce the kind of men we sent to Concord Bridge, the fields of Antietam and the beaches of Normandy.
Well they are wrong – wrong about Israel and wrong about the United States and together as Christians and Jews, we will show them how wrong they are.
Dan Rather, Phil Donahue and the editorial page of the New York Times just don’t get it. No matter how many times we explain it, they can’t figure out why Christians would stand with Jews, why America would stand with Israel.
Let me try to explain one more time. Israel and America are joined at the hip and joined at the heart. We are both democracies committed to the consent of the governed. We both believe in the dignity of each individual and in the sanctity of each life. Both of us understand that our liberty is not given to us by a Prime Minister or a President, or the Knesset, or the Congress, but comes instead from God.
In America’s case this reliance on God is recognized in the 2nd paragraph of the Declaration with 35 words that have changed the world, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In Israel there are not founding documents, but I know by talking to scores of Israelis that written on their hearts is the understanding that the God who led them out of captivity is with them still today.
But, you don’t have to be a political scientist or a theologian to understand why Israel and the United States should stand together. All we have to do is open our eyes. On September 11th when America’s heart was torn, we watched in horror as some in the Middle East danced in the streets. But, in Israel they lowered their flag, they declared a day of mourning, they cried with us.
Last week when the United States, with her allies, began the liberation of Iraq one of the largest newspapers in Israel ran a banner headline that simply said “God Bless America.” But in the West Bank horns are honked and people pour into the street firing guns in the air in celebration of every U.S. soldier killed and every helicopter shot down. New mothers in Nablus name their children Saddam. Palestinians demonstrate almost daily begging Saddam Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
But in spite of all of this, some will do or say anything to drive America and Israel apart and to drive a wedge between Christian and Jew. Some have played on your understandable fears by suggesting that Christian support for Israel is predicated on an “end times” scenario that inevitably involves suffering for you.
My friends, if you remember nothing else I said this afternoon remember this: I speak at hundreds of Christian events every year. The support for Israel I find from Dallas to Atlanta, from Denver to Tallahassee, is based on something both simple and profound. We believe in the Abrahamic covenant. We believe God owns the land and he has deeded it to the Jewish people, a deed that cannot be canceled by Yasser Arafat and cannot be amended - even by a president. This God has spoken clearly. He said, “He who blesses Israel I will bless, he who curses Israel, I will curse.” For believing Christians that is clear enough, and good enough for us.
I have a confession to make. In the 90’s I had almost decided wrongly that the beast of anti-Semitism was dead. Of course, I knew it stilled lived in the fevered brains of skinheads and Holocaust deniers. But it was relegated to the fringe, a matter of shame and ridicule, a relic of a dark past. I believed the world when it said, “Never again.”
But the beast has stirred again. It stalks the streets of Europe where Jews have been beaten in Paris, Berlin, and London. It has been unleashed on synagogues that have been fire bombed and defaced. Jewish cemeteries across Europe have been desecrated. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the worst anti-Semitism has arisen in Europe where the churches are empty and the mosques are full.
France has practically erupted in a spasm of hatred. A Christian friend in Paris told me recently the horror he felt one morning to be awakened by marchers in the streets below his window chanting “Death to the Jews!”
But even worse than the marchers was the reaction of his neighbors who treated the chant as if it were cheers for a local soccer team. And what was the first reaction of the French government? It advised French Jews to not wear any public evidence of their faith. Jacques Chirac with a straight face said there is no anti-Semitism in France. Why were we surprised when the same man worked non-stop to block U.S. efforts to deal with Saddam Hussein?
Even here in America the unthinkable is happening. In the streets of this historic city I have seen the Israeli flag defaced with the swastika. It have watched some of the most progressive universities in the country tolerate the harassment and intimidation of their Jewish students. And, I have heard a liberal congressman, and a conservative commentator, along with editorial boards of major newspapers blame the Iraqi war on the Jewish faith held by some of those who believed we must fight it. Surely they know this is an ancient libel that always precedes persecution. This is obscene, it is unacceptable and it will not stand.
In the last week many have voiced surprise at the tactics we have seen in Iraq. Children being used as human shields. Terrorists dressed as civilians. POW’s mistreated. But these are not new tactics. Israel has been subjected to this day-after-day during the infitada.
Jewish families have been blown up eating pizza together. The most sacred religious observances have been punctuated with the screams of Jews ripped to shreds by bombs laced with nails and glass. Buses carrying people to their jobs, students to their schools, and mothers to the market have been turned into hell by the smiling bombers who think they are pleasing Allah.
And what has been the reaction of the so-called “civilized world?” The Foreign Service diplomats and the weak kneed politicians wag their limp fingers at the terrorists, but pound the table telling Israel it must not militarily respond. On the highest floors at the United Nations headquarters, and in the governing offices of too many nations, there is an inexhaustible supply of tolerance for dead Jews.
I was proud last July to personally deliver to Prime Minister Sharon a letter signed by dozens of Christian leaders saying what should be obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself against the thugs and dictators that surround her and against the terrorists they spawn. It doesn’t need U.N. permission, New York Times permission, EU permission or the State Department’s permission.
My friends, if Israel and the United States are to prevail we must know the enemy we face. The terrorists of September 11th were not created by George Bush or a failed American foreign policy. The smiling homicide bombers that blow themselves up in Israel are not the creation of Ariel Sharon, or of poverty, or social injustice. These murderers are the children of radical Islamic jihadism.
It is the same philosophy that motivates the government of Sudan to kill 5 million Christians in the last decade. It inspires the gunmen with AK 47’s who run into churches in Pakistan and open fire on women and children. It inspires the kidnappers of Daniel Pearl who tormented him on video tape, forcing him to say over and over again “I am a Jew” before they decapitated him and sent the pictures of his severed head throughout the Middle-East as a recruiting tool. This philosophy causes the Palestinian mother to leap with joy at the news her teenage son has blown himself up as long as she is assured he killed Jews in the process.
And so it is a time of choosing. The U.N. bureaucrats and Kofi Annan have made their choice. The EU diplomats and axis of weasels in Europe have cast their lot. The hate America crowd and the closet anti-Semites have chosen their side. They will stand with Arafat and Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah. But for me, and millions of Christians around the world, we will proudly stand with Israel.
I began my remarks by suggesting that the enemies of Israel and America believe our best days are over, that our shared civilization built on Judeo/Christian values is in decline. They are wrong.
The spirit and resolve of the Israeli people is alive and well. Jews have survived pogroms and persecution. You have outlasted the Pharaoh’s slavery and Hitler’s final solution. Israel has defeated every army ever put in the field against her. And I have no doubt that long after Yasser Arafat, Hamas and Hezbollah are merely pitiful examples in history of the depraved, that the Israeli flag will fly over Jerusalem and the land from the river to the sea will still be home to the Jewish people.
They are wrong about America too. With all of our problems – we saw the real America on the morning of September 11th. Fireman and policemen willing to run up the stairs into the jaws of hell to rescue strangers. Americans, who believing they were moments from death, called home – to parents, husbands, wives and children to say, – “I love you,” “Don’t forget me,” “Forgive me,” “Tell the children every day what they meant to me.”
Ladies and gentlemen there are days ahead that will test our resolve and our faith, but I am convinced if we stand together, that next year, and fiver years and a hundred years from now the Star of David will still proudly wave over Jerusalem, that the Stars and Stripes will wave unbowed here in this good and decent land and that America and Israel will remain – two shining cities upon a hill. |
