Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer warned that the rest of the world will face a terrorist threat similar to the kind Israel faces in an interview broadcast on Wednesday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel.
When asked “when you look at what Israel has known, the violence that Israel has known for so many years and that so many of us sort of grew up, a whole generation watching that and feeling for the people of Israel, do you believe that the rest of us are about to live in a world where we have to either get used to, or get real about experiencing similar attacks like that all the time?” He responded “yes, absolutely. Because it’s one thing to have all of these radical preachers in suburbs of London and Paris, and Brussels. It’s quite another thing, Martha, to have trained killers coming back from a war theater and setting up terror cells, and there are so many soft targets in Europe, and of course in the United States. And every democratic society has to find the right balance between protecting civil liberties, which is the heart of democracy, but also securing its citizens. And we in Israel have had to find that balance. I think we’ve done a very good job of doing that for the last 66 years of our state, living with threats faced by no other country on earth, but remaining a liberal, democratic, and open society.
Regarding the fight against terror, he argued that the rest of the world must “first of all, identify the danger, and then you have to take action to meet it. You have to have effective policing, you have to have effective intelligence, you have to pass laws that will effectively deal with the problem. And you also have to wage a moral battle. The single most important thing in fighting terrorism is more clarity. You have to take a stand against terrorists.” And “I think the most important thing in fighting against militant Islam, and remember it’s not militants, it’s not Islam, it’s militant Islam. The most important thing in fighting it is to understand that all these groups that people think may have this or that local grievance, they’re all connected, they’re all fired by the same fanaticism.”
Dermer also said that he had no doubt about the resolve of the US and Egypt in fighting terrorism, praising the US for “leading the whole world in confronting al Qaeda…[and] leading the whole world in confronting ISIS.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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