Saturday, March 10, 2012

Israel's Dalai Lama

OK, so he doesn't have a crimson robe or a giggle, but Israel's president, Shimon Peres, has guru-babble down to a fine art:

"The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, praised Facebook as a vehicle for social change during a visit to the company in Menlo Park, California. Peres, 88, arrived on Tuesday to launch his personal page on the site that he hopes will open a dialogue with Arabs. 'The matter of peace is no longer the business of governments but the business of people', he told Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview streamed live. 'Today the people are governing the governments. And when they begin to talk to each other, they are surprised. We should be friends'. Asked what Facebook could do to promote peace in the Middle East, Peres said: 'What you are doing is convincing people they don't have a reason to hate'. (Peres gets on Facebook, LAT/Sydney Morning Herald, 8/3/12)

"Israel is a small piece of land. We are not even 1% of the Arab space, you know. We don't have water. We don't have oil. Our greatness, if one may say greatness, stems from the fact that we had nothing to start with. So we turned to human talent because there weren't natural resources. The Arabs can do it too." (Epiphanies from Shimon Peres, Foreign Policy, March/April 2012)

1 comment:

MERC said...

Exactly! And then talk endlessly about dialogue and peace.