The Foreign Ministry’s budget for public diplomacy totals approximately $3.5 million per year, MKs learned during a Tuesday morning meeting of the Knesset’s Immigration, Absorption and Public Diplomacy Committee.

"The Foreign Ministry budget is really just change, especially when divided among all of the offices throughout the world. Today, public diplomacy is the central front, and lectures at overseas universities, Facebook pages and interviews in Arabic are worth as much and have as much impact as a tank – and sometimes even more,” Committee Chairman Danny Danon said.

The committee chairman said Jews in the US and France are “afraid to assert their presence at some universities because of Arab propaganda.” Danon called on both the Foreign Ministry and the Diaspora Affairs Ministry to “go from defense to offense” and repeated calls for the establishment of Israeli English and Arabic-language satellite television."

JPost.com

By MK Danny Danon

About 17 years ago, an American visitor to Jerusalem decided that his 11-year-old daughter was mature enough to be told about the Holocaust. Not a Jew, he was in Israel to express his love for the nation and introduce his children to the Holy Land.

He gently guided her through Yad Vashem, explaining the unthinkable history, standing in silence, musing. When they concluded this personal journey into the savagery of genocide, the father asked his daughter if she would like to sign the "memory book" at Yad Vashem's exit. She did.

He asked if he could read what she wrote. She agreed. She had written: "Why didn't somebody do something?"

Two weeks ago, Mike Huckabee – who in the past two decades has become a respected US governor, presidential primary candidate and immensely popular TV personality in the US – was moved to recount this special story inter alia in his address on the American economy and the national debt crisis at the annual National Rifle Association convention.

Incredibly, unfathomably, one leading Jewish organization put aside all other problems of the day to respond sharply to Huckabee's comment.

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