'Weekly Press Pakistan' wishes Israel happy birthday

Toronto-based newspaper highlights Israel's contribution to technology, urges Jewish state to 'recognize significance of non-Arab Pakistanis and Ajmi Muslims'

Ynetnews|Published: 04.24.12 , 15:02

"Anyone who denies the existence of Israel, actually denies his own existence," according to a special article published by Toronto-based Weekly Press Pakistan on Tuesday, ahead of the Jewish state's 64th Independence Day.

The article, which was published in the Urdu language on the Toronto-based newspaper's website, was distributed through a popular journalists' forum on Google and included a video clip titled: "What does Made in Israel mean to you?"

The video highlighting Israel's contribution to technology and asked: "If Israel didn't exist, where would such wonderful inventions coming from?"

'Guilty-till-proven-innocent scrutiny'

The newspaper also mentioned Israeli humanitarian projects, including IsraAid and the Save a Child Program.

"The day is not far when talented and educated people from both countries (Israel and Pakistan) will join hands to serve humanity together. But for this to happen, Israel will also have to promote media-to-media dialogue and recognize the significance of non-Arab Pakistanis and Ajmi Muslims," Weekly Press Pakistan said.

The influential newspaper also published a commentary which stated that Israel has the "dubious distinction of being the only UN member state whose right to exist is regularly challenged, whose elimination from the world map is the aim of at least one other UN member state, Iran, and whose population centers are deemed fair game by Hamas-controlled Gaza and Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. Thus, Israel’s sheer act of survival from year to year is itself noteworthy."

In the article, David Harris wrote, "None of the countries that are serial human-rights violators — not Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or any of the others — gets anything near the relentless, obsessive, guilty-till-proven-innocent scrutiny that democratic Israel receives from UN bodies, with their built-in, anti-Israel majorities, in New York and Geneva.

"No other country is the target of such non-stop, well-funded, and highly-organized campaigns to discredit, delegitimize, and demonize a sovereign state. No other country faces such systematic attempts to launch boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions against it, not to mention flotillas and flytillas, and all the while those behind the efforts, claiming to speak for human rights, blithely ignore places like Syria, where thousands were killed in the past year alone, because they can’t claim an Israeli connection," he said.

"And no other country has its right to self-defense challenged as Israel does, even though it does no more than any other nation would do if confronted by periodic terrorist assaults and deadly missile and rocket attacks."