July 11, 2011

Glenn Beck visits Israel’s Knesset, plays to home crowd

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Glenn Beck

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck spoke with members of Israel’s Knesset as part of his tour through Israel, Monday, Time reports.

The topic of the day was attacks on Israel’s “legitimacy,” and whatever suggestions Beck might have on getting Israel’s message out to a world that seems less and less inclined to listen.  The star offered more reassurance than advice, emphasizing that Israel is doing well in what was the very first country to recognize it after independence.

“There are millions of people that you don’t see — because the media doesn’t like to tell your story, either, that you are not alone,” he said.  This may have been fairly apparent from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, interrupted by 29 standing ovations. But Beck was thinking of his July 4th in Driggs, Idaho. “Idaho is milk-toast, golly gee USA,” he told the Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs. “I don’t know if there’s very many Jewish people in Idaho. If they’ve seen ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ that’s probably their Israeli experience.”  But they identify with Israel, he said. “As Israel goes, so goes the rest of the world.”

Beck, whose site bills him as “the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment,” also spoke of his recent trip to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where perhaps a million Jews perished, and the unlikely message of “hope” he found there while filming a documentary. He touched at length on the March killing of a settler family, including an infant, in the Itamar settlement. The subject of more than one his programs, Beck called it a “horror show” beyond Hollywood’s imagining with “villains not like I’ve seen before.” A pair of Palestinian teenagers have confessed.

Read more at http://globalspin.blogs.time.com.