Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism | Opening Speeches | July 1979

Monday, July 2nd 1979. Footage of the opening of an international conference on terrorism in Jerusalem. It was organised under the auspices of the Jonathan Institute with the support of the Israeli government led at the time by Prime Minster Menachem Begin of the Likud Party. The footage contains excerpts of the speeches by Prime Minister Begin, U.S. Senator Henry Jackson and British Member of Parliament Hugh Fraser. Among those present was Israeli Labour Party Chairman, Shimon Peres. Source of footage: Reuters News Archive. Note: “The connection between Israel and Islamist militias is one which has continued through to the era of the so-called ‘war on terror’. The ‘war on terror’ is itself an Israeli construct with origins in the ideas promoted by the Jonathan Institute, a body founded in 1976 and run by members of the Netanyahu family. The Jerusalem Conference of 1979 which was held under the auspices of the institute and with the full support of the then incumbent Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, sought to fundamentally change perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Binyamin Netanyahu also wrote a series of books alongside the papers published by the institute which put forward the idea that acts of terror directed at Israel were based not on the precept of a legitimate struggle by a people dispossessed of their land and denied the right to self determination, but instead was predicated on a clash of values: the values of the Western world as supposedly represented by ‘democratic’ Israel and values antithetical to the West as represented by Arab ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fanaticism’. The argument posited by the institute involved a war being fought on a global scale that would involve the United States taking a lead in ways which included sending its military to fight in the Middle East. The ‘war on terror’ called for by Ehud Barak from a BBC studio on September the 11th 2001, only a short time after the attack on the World Trade Center complex by soldiers of al-Qaeda, was heeded by President George Bush. It was a war which was declared from the outset to be one of unlimited scope and duration.“ - From “Israel and Islamist Militias: A Strange and Recurring Alliance“ by Adeyinka Makinde, April 2017.