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Micah Lakin Avni

Turning Trauma into Triumph: New Narratives for a New Israel

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Love and Jihad in Kindergarten

Jul 2, 2016, 3:47 PM

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Have a good look at the two pictures below. The juxtaposition speaks a million words. The first is a picture from my daughter’s nursery school graduation in Tel Aviv today. It is a typical Israeli nursery school. In the background is a mural depicting children of various cultures. The Hebrew caption reads: “Children all around the world hold hands.” My daughter and her friends are holding traditional Arab drums called Darbuka and demonstrating how they learned to count in Arabic. We are educating our children to the core values of freedom, diversity, pluralism, love, and mutual respect.

The second picture is from a kindergarten play in Gaza. Two boys point guns at the head of a third child who kneels on the ground, his hat adorned with a blue and white Star of David. Tragically, this is a typical Palestinian elementary school. They are teaching their children to hate and to kill.

My late father taught me that every child is a precious miracle; a miracle that should be nurtured, not poisoned. So long as radical Islamists teach their children to hate and to kill, terror will continue to spread throughout the Western world.

Have a look again at the mural on the wall in my daughter’s school: you will notice iconic images of London, Paris, New York, Rome and Mumbai. For us, these are centers of culture and history. For the ISIS, Al Qaida, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Hamas and all other Jihadists, these are targets.

If we want to stop the terror, we must demand that all of our Muslim brothers teach their children the core values of freedom, diversity, pluralism, love, and mutual respect. And we must hold accountable those who fail to do so.

About the Author

Micah Lakin Avni founded Peninsula Group Ltd., a publicly-traded Israeli commercial finance institution and served as CEO for 18 years. He was ranked among the 100 most influential people in Israel by The Marker Magazine in 2015, 2016 and 2018. Prior to founding Peninsula, Micah served as a General Partner with Jerusalem Global Ventures, and Israeli venture capital firm. Before joining Jerusalem Global Ventures, Micah was a corporate attorney with Yigal Arnon & Co., one of Israel's premier law firms. Micah serves in a volunteer capacity as the chairman of "Voices of Israel”, a long-term partnership between the State of Israel and the global pro-Israel leadership to facilitate ongoing strategic cooperation, counter the global Israel delegitimization movement and improve Israel's positive image and standing in world public opinion. In 2015, Micah’s father Richard Lakin was murdered by Hamas terrorists on a Jerusalem bus. While mourning the loss, Micah dedicated himself to raising awareness of the dangers of allowing terrorists to roam free on social media, communicating, recruiting, and inciting. He wrote op-eds in international newspapers, gave interviews, helped produce movies, lectured at universities, filed lawsuits and lobbied for legislation. These efforts helped set in motion a campaign that yielded dramatic change: While there is still plenty of work to be done, social media titans built significant infrastructures to remove terror groups from their platforms. Micah holds an LLB in Law from the Hebrew University Law School and a joint MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Recanati School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University. Micah lives in Tel Aviv, Israel with his wife and four children.