Five Minutes for Israel

Do you have the TIME for this?

It’s polls like this that remind me why I stopped subscribing to TIME Magazine decades ago. Each year they produce a list of the one hundred leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes that readers think are the most influential people in the world – and I wonder what were they thinking.

Somehow the potential candidates has already been reduced to 153 beginning with Ben Affleck (yikes!) and ending with Malala Yousafzai. It’s quite a trivia contest for a wet night seeing how many of these most influential people you can actually identify. Official voting ends on Friday, April 12th.

Political correctness has led to the inclusion of one Israeli (Benjamin Netanyahu) and one Palestinian (Emad Burnat). I’m not sure whether I would have nominated either  but one is the leader of his country with a prominent position on the world stage and the other a previously unknown documentary filmmaker who, if he had been from anywhere but ‘Palestine’ would have been ignored by Hollywood as second-rate propagandist. I wrote about him in Oscarwinningwabbit. Personally I would have nominated one of the many hi-tech innovators coming out of Israel  without whose contribution the world would have been a different place. Personally I don’t think any Palestinian qualifies for this list. But if one had to nominate a Palestinian surely Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister who succeeds in persuading European and American donors that Western-style progress and not mafia-style terrorism is the face of Palestine and keeps those Dollars and Euros flowing is a more rational choice.

Still, on principle, in any competition support the Israeli over the enemy. As of writing Burnat is way ahead of Netanyahu. We can do something about this.

Click image and vote ‘Absolutely’

Click on the image and vote ‘No Way’

Action Item: Vote Absolutely for Benjamin Netanyau and No Way for Emad Burnat – and vote for lots of others to push Burnat down the list.

In case you were wondering I gave up on TIME when I discovered they were publishing different stories and graphics on Israel in their Middle East than in other geographical regions. Presumably that was to avoid upsetting the Arabs. Not what a respected new provider should do.