Anti-democracy leftist protesters gathered Monday night in Jerusalem to hound the chairman of the Tikvah Fund, Elliott Abrams, as he addressed an audience at the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University.
“The Tikvah Foundation, the body that finances the Kohelet Forum and tries to import foreign ideas to Israel from abroad, has many shares in the coup d’état,” the protesters claimed, exposing their own blatant aversion to free speech and open discussion — the hallmarks of democracy.
“We came today to demonstrate against the foundation’s chairman and tell him that Israel will not be Hungary or Nicaragua. We woke up.”
“Woke” indeed.
The Tikvah Fund supports the free exchange of ideas and welcomes debate — unlike the thousands of leftist anti-government anarchists who have done their best to disrupt the daily lives of those who elected Israel’s current right-wing government with a comfortable majority.
The protesters held banners calling on Tikvah to “Fund Dictators in Other Countries.” Israel’s vociferous left-wing sector has worked hard to silence Israelis who disagree with their views, endlessly harassing right-wing lawmakers at their homes and elsewhere.
Tikvah, the organization headed by Abrams, is “committed to supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish State,” according to a statement on its website.
The organization’s “animating mission and guiding spirit is to advance Jewish excellence and Jewish flourishing in the modern age,” according to the website.
“Tikvah is politically Zionist, economically free-market oriented, culturally traditional, and theologically open-minded. Yet in all issues and subjects, we welcome vigorous debate and big arguments. Our institutes, programs, and publications all reflect this spirit of bringing forward the serious alternatives for what the Jewish future should look like, and bringing Jewish thinking and leaders into conversation with Western political, moral, and economic thought.”
As for the Kohelet Policy Forum, that organization “strives to secure Israel’s future as the nation-state of the Jewish people, to strengthen representative democracy, and to broaden individual liberty and free-market principles in Israel,” according to its website.
