Romney Preps for Charm Offensive Speech
Silent Prayer: After praying at the Western Wall, Mitt Romney prepared for a policy speech in jerusalem. Image by Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Finished with his prayers, at the Western Wall, Mitt Romney is now gearing up for his charm offensive. This evening he will give a policy address in Jerusalem, in which he looks set to send out a message that he’s on the same page as Israelis.
The speech will apparently be entitled Our Enduring Alliance, and focus on democratic values, defense, and security. “Our two nations are separated by more than 5,000 miles. But for an American abroad, you can’t get much closer to the ideals and convictions of my own country than you do in Israel,” he is scripted to say. “We’re part of the great fellowship of democracies. We speak the same language of freedom and justice, and the right of every person to live in peace. We serve the same cause and provoke the same hatreds in the same enemies of civilization.”
He will then declare: “It is my firm conviction that the security of Israel is in the vital national security interest of the United States. And ours is an alliance based not only on shared interests but also on enduring shared values.”
He will mention events and names with emotional significance to Israelis, including the Holocaust and the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. “When Iran’s leaders deny the Holocaust or speak of wiping this nation off the map, only the naïve — or worse — will dismiss it as an excess of rhetoric,” he is expected to say. “Make no mistake: the ayatollahs in Tehran are testing our moral defenses. They want to know who will object, and who will look the other way.
“My message to the people of Israel and the leaders of Iran is one and the same: I will not look away; and neither will my country. As Prime Minister Begin put it, in vivid and haunting words, ’if an enemy of [the Jewish] people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him.’”
Romney will argue against those who say that attacking Iran would be irresponsible, saying that preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons “must be our highest national security priority,” and say: “I want to pause on this last point. It is sometimes said that those who are the most committed to stopping the Iranian regime from securing nuclear weapons are reckless and provocative and inviting war.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
