Aaron Klein, WABC Radio host and Jewish Press Contributor, offered an organizer of the upcoming Global March to Jerusalem (March 30th, 2012) $50,000 if he could name a single city in the Middle East outside of Israel that has more freedom than Jerusalem.
Klein was discussing the upcoming event and responding to a claim by organizer Frank Romano that Israel is an apartheid state. Klein started with an offer of $100, but when Romano obfuscated, Klein sweetened the offer. Romano continued to argue about definitions, goading Klein into gradually raising the offer to $50,000. “You should be protesting Syria, you should be protesting Saudi Arabia, you should be protesting real apartheid,” Klein concluded. “Shame on you.”
The organizers of the Global March to Jerusalem intend to initiate a number of simultaneous and coordinated marches to Israel’s borders from surrounding Arab countries and territories, and hope that millions of demonstrators from across the globe will converge to breach the borders. Another aim of the march, according to their official website, is to “confirm that the policies and practices of the racist Zionist state of Israel against Jerusalem and its people are a crime not only against Palestinians but against all humanity.”
According to CiF Watch, an organization that monitors anti-Semitism and attacks on Israel’s legitimacy, “[t]he organisers are a conglomerate of people representing the ‘red-green alliance’ the world over. Radical Leftists, Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamists and representatives of and sympathisers with the Iranian regime.” A report by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center corroborates the Iranian involvement in “organizational preparations for the marches,” but states that Iran’s presence is disconcerting more because it reveals the truly extremist nature of the event.