By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency
Jerusalem, Israel — June 14, 2016 … Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today in Jerusalem, met with ambassadors from NATO member states and told them at the start of the meeting:
“Thank you to all of the ambassadors representing the NATO countries that are here today. I look forward to this opportunity to discuss our common interests, based on our common values. I want to thank NATO for inviting Israel to open an office in your headquarters in Brussels.
This meeting obviously comes at a difficult time. Two days ago, a terrorist walked into a nightclub in Orlando and murdered nearly 50 innocent people, men and women. These people were doing nothing wrong. They were dancing with friends and enjoying music with loved ones. The terrorist murdered them because he was driven by intolerance to the LGBT community and driven by hatred for freedom and diversity.
Now, days before that, a terrorist walked into a café in Tel Aviv and murdered four civilians. They too did nothing wrong. They were drinking coffee and enjoying the celebration of birthdays.
Paris, Brussels, London, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bali, Mumbai, New York, San Bernardino and now Orlando and so many other cities have been struck by the same evil. Terror knows no bounds, and that is why our cooperation in the battle against terrorism must know no bounds as well.
One day ISIS kills gays, the next day Yazidis and then Jews and Muslims and Christians. They have no bounds. Terror, the indiscriminate, systematic attack on innocent people, must always be confronted and must always be fought, and that doesn’t change. In any case, it doesn’t depend on the identity of the victims. It depends on the nature of the act.
The act is evil and is perpetrated by people with evil designs, and we, the people of the civilized world, have to band together to defeat it. We stand ready to help NATO in this collective struggle. We are prepared to share our intelligence and our experience to help in this common effort.
Now, in three weeks you’re going to have an important summit in Warsaw and I believe the combat against global terrorism has to be, should be and probably is already a central part of your agenda. Know that Israel stands ready to advance that agenda, and I have no doubt that if we work together, we can roll back this terror, and I have no doubt that we can defeat ISIS. I think it can be defeated.
I think with the right amount of international cooperation across the widest spectrum, this goal can be achieved, and I think that if we work together we’ll achieve it faster and we’ll defeat ISIS and terrorism faster.”