Former Israeli Ambassador: ‘Make Your Reservations for Disney World Tomorrow’

Following the Islamist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Michael Oren wrote a touching comment on Twitter:

Terror in Orlando is the same as terror in Tel Aviv. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims. Israel knows and shares their pain.

Thursday morning, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren offered a simple suggestion for Americans who want to fight radical Islamic terror: Eat breakfast and go about your daily lives. And for those who are concerned about another terrorist attack happening in Orlando, he had even more advice: Book your trip to Disney World tomorrow.

“It’s interesting the day after the attack in Tel Aviv, that restaurant, the place was just packed with people,” he told nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt. “People came from all over the country to have breakfast there. That’s one way of fighting terror.

“Terror aims to terrorize. If you deny terror the ability to terrorize us, we have come a long way to defeating them. That’s extremely important. I remember after the Boston Marathon bombing. Boston shut down for the first, for like three days, and Israelis were nonplussed.

“Why let them win like that? Show them that we are going to defend our way of life just by eating breakfast, not by letting them impact us.”

Oren also addressed the “transition” American counter-terrorism officials need to make to prevent future attacks. He noted the fundamental difference in airport security between his nation and the U.S. as an example.

“American airport security is based on what people are carrying,” he said. “Our airport security is based on the way people act, and the way they look, frankly. It’s a very different approach.

“I mean, you’re going to take a woman in a wheelchair and put them through a machine that’s going to see what she’s carrying in her pockets. That doesn’t interest us as much. It’s depending on: Is she acting in a suspicious way? Does she have a one-way ticket without baggage? That raises an alarm with us. But it requires a kind of change.”

Oren also weighed in on the gun control debate that has once again erupted as a result of the Orlando attack. Although gun ownership is low—less than 3 percent of Israelis own guns—in his country, he said it’s an entirely different situation in the U.S., where gun ownership is directly tied to personal liberty.

The issues of terrorism and gun control must be divorced from one another, he said.

“I think that if a terrorist wants to get a gun, a terrorist is going to get a gun,” he said. “And the people that took down the Twin Towers in 9/11 didn’t have guns at all. And a plane can be a weapon too.

“But what I want to go back to talking about, about changing the, switching the gear. Switching the gear is, you cannot have an individual who has been under surveillance by the FBI, apparently several times, getting a job as a security guard, or you know, being able to, be able to get a licensed weapon. That is an issue. It’s not about gun control. It’s about terror control.”

Oren noted that an approach that only addresses ISIS territorially will ultimately fail because while the organization has territory—roughly an area the size of France in parts of Syria and Iraq—and it has leadership and a military apparatus, it is much more than that. He said ISIS is an “idea” that can spring up anywhere.

“It’s going to spring up in Brussels and Paris and San Bernardino, in Orlando, and you can’t bomb it,” he said. “You’ve got to fight an idea with another idea, and with a better idea, a stronger idea.

“And yes, with intelligence, yes with vigilance, yes with, you know, with greater resources devoted and allocated to fighting it, but also understanding you’re fighting an idea, which means getting into the trenches of ideas. It means getting on the internet and fighting them on the internet.”