Thousands of Israelis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Wednesday night – its first conference in Israel.
Many of those attending came specifically to hear conservative media personality and Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro, who delivered the keynote speech.
Other speakers included former Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt and other Trump administration officials but the main draw seemed to have been Shapiro, with the seats only filling up prior to his speech.
Shapiro spoke about a wide variety of topics, including why US-style conservatism hasn’t taken off in Israel, saying that Israel’s success despite being a “welfare state” is the reason for that.
“All politics is oppositional,” he said. “It’s difficult to talk about economic progress and liberalization in the absence of massive failure of the welfare state. It took stagnation of the US economy for ten years to get Reagan elected. When a country is on an upward trajectory, there tends to be less overt conflict over issues like economics.”
Shapiro added that much of Israeli society has more traditional views on moral behavior which means that certain cultural issues are less of an issue. “The transing of children is not a big issue in Israel,” Shapiro said. “People here say this is nonsense. This is a much more traditional society in its views of proper moral behavior, well to its benefit.”
Shapiro was also interviewed on stage by popular Israeli journalist Amit Segal of Channel 12 News.
Segal asked Shapiro his opinion on a past statement of former Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, who said that Israel should invest more in the Evangelical Christian community that the Reform Jewish community.
“As a matter of blunt fact, that’s true,” Shapiro responded. “It’s an unfortunate reality of life in the United States that Reform Judaism, as a branch, does not see Jewish identity in a serious way as central.”
“It’s a very simple rubric for me – if as a Jew, your values are more in line with same-sex marriage, transgenderism and abortion than they are with, for example, the safety and security of the State of Israel – I have serious questions about how you think about yourself as a Jew.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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4 Responses
Ben is the absolute best
So that’s who won the prize in Oorah’s Chinese auction!
😉 iykyk
Why not call a spade a spade? In the USA All Jews have freedom of religion even chareidi ones. In Israel, charedim are 2nd class citizens like blacks during apartheid. If an American politician would say Orthodox Jews belong on the dung heap he would have to resign. But here in Israel we are so used to it no one bats an eyelash.
I always liked Ben untill a few mins ago.
I heard him speaking against limud hatorah, looks like he doesn’t share our values as am yisroel, he seems like a proud amarican that doesn’t really care about yiddishkeit, he only shares the Jewish values as long he understands it..
Even at the time of Duvid hamelech there was “elef lemala velef lemala”, elef join forces and elef are going to learn.
If not limud hatorah the entire IDF can go to sleep!
Salmid Torah kneged kilom!