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This morning Drudge is linking a report on a news conference held yesterday by Israel's UN Ambassador, Dan Gillerman: "Israel's UN ambassador calls Jimmy Carter 'a bigot'". I'd been invited to attend that news conference, by telephone hookup, and can report on a lot more that Gillerman had to say. From my typed notes (not expected to be verbatim):
Today I believe we are no longer in a clash of civilizations... but in a clash of civilization, singular. In most of the bloodshed within the Muslim world, the vast majority of the victims are Muslim. Every day hundreds of Muslims are slain by their brethren.
What worries me is the eerie silence of the Muslim world. No Muslim leader, secular, religious, or academic, gets up and says, 'What are we doing?'
[On press coverage of this:] When Westerners kill Muslims, it's a crusade. When Jews kill Muslims, it's a massacre. When Muslims kill Muslims, it's the weather channel.
But there is a shot of optimism. I don't know what woke them up. Maybe it was the war in Lebanon in 2006, which most of the Arab nations realized was only a preview of a something coming soon to a theater near you. They realized that the real threat, is Iran, with its ambitions of spreading Shia extremism and terrorism, and generating it all over the world. They came to Annapolis defying Iran, and forming a coalition of the moderates, with a view toward being more pragmatic and realistic regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel has no war with the people of Iran. We respect and admire the history and the people of Iran. We feel the people of Iran were dealt a very raw deal, with the extreme, reactionary leaders of Iran, including a president who denies the Holocaust while preparing the next one.
Iran is a danger to the stability and civilization of the world as we know it.
We have no war with Iran, but Iran has a war with us.
Iran is a thousand miles away from Israel, but it has proxies on our borders. Iran's proxy Hezbollah is on our northern border, and its proxy Hamas is on our Southern border, armed and controlled and trained by Iran. 60 years after its birth, Israel is under real threat from Iran. All Israelis - seven million Jews, Muslims and Christians, are under range of missiles, mainly supplied by Iran.
The world realizes this, and the Muslim world realizes this, and realizes that there is a limit to what Israel will take. Hamas continuously shells Israeli cities and villages and schools, trying to kill and maim Israeli civilians and children. And all this is done with very direct supplies from Iran.
Not only most of the world, but most of the Muslim world, will choose to side against the Iranian extremists.
It is important to bolster and embolden the moderates, while marginalizing extremists. So I am very happy with Abbas' visit to Washington and the support he's getting from Washington.
What would be the ramifications in the event that the majority of Arab nations sided with the US against Iran, and joined us in an effort to halt Iran's sponsorship of extremism and terrorism in the world? Gillerman also stated that "Basically, Syria and Iran, together with Hamas and Hezbollah, are the main axes of terror and evil in the world." If this is correct, the elimination of Iran as the principal driver of extremism and terrorism, could contribute substantially toward cutting the heart out of the global Islamist and extremist movement.
