Netanyahu Silences Gun Grabbers with Perfect Definition of 'Independence'
It was Israel’s version of the Fourth of July, but Benjamin Netanyahu could have been talking about the Second Amendment, too.
At an Independence Day ceremony in Jerusalem Wednesday celebrating Israel’s 70th year of existence, the Israeli prime minister devoted a portion of his speech to saluting his country’s armed forces.
And he delivered a line that would have made America’s Founding Fathers proud.
“Independence is being able to defend ourselves,” Netanyahu, a former Israeli commando, told his country’s soldiers, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
“I salute you.”
No one who has paid attention to the past seven decades of history would doubt for a second that Israel has been able to handle itself while being surrounded by neighbors that want to drive it into the sea.
Since literally its first day of existence, when the armies of five Arab countries tried to destroy it, Israel has depended on its own armed forces to keep its people safe.
It took a politician who became Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to declare the country’s independence on May 14, 1948, by the Western calendar. But it has required the force of arms to maintain that independence ever since.
And that’s the kind of argument gun-rights supporters have been making in the United States, where the Declaration of Independence of 1776 eventually led to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including the right to bear arms.
The Founding Fathers understood how closely the concepts of independence and self-defense are. The Second Amendment was a guarantee that the federal government would be forbidden from exactly the kind of gun control and confiscation gun grabbers fantasize about today.
Whether it’s a budding young fascist like Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg, or a former Supreme Court justice like John Paul Stevens (whose senescence was sadly showing in a New York Times Op-Ed aimed at repealing the Second Amendment), the gun control elements in the United States either ignore or refuse to consider how vital that link is.
Fortunately, a Republican Congress and President Donald Trump have been a bulwark against liberal infringements on the rights of Americans to defend themselves, despite constant pressure from Democrats and their mouthpieces in the liberal media.
In a Twitter post last month, Trump made it all-caps clear the Second Amendment wasn’t in danger on his watch.
“THE SECOND AMENDMENT WILL NEVER BE REPEALED!” Trump tweeted in response to Stevens’ Op-Ed column.
It’s no coincidence that Trump is a strong supporter of Netanyahu. Both men understand, as America’s founders did, the essential need for force to maintain self-defense.
As Netanyahu put it, “Independence is being able to defend ourselves.”
The Founding Fathers couldn’t have put it better.
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