Avigdor Lieberman Quotes
Every place in the world where there are two peoples - two religions, two languages - there is friction and conflict.
Weymouth, Lally. "Avigdor Lieberman: 'I Am the Mainstream'." Newsweek, Newsweek Media Group, 27 Feb. 2009.
Fiji is a nation which at the time was beset with ethnic strife and tension. In addition to the religious tension there were Indian immigrants who tended to be economically more successful than the indigenous Fijians. There was an English tradition from the days of being a British Colony and the traditional tribal leaders and chiefs were being disenfranchised by modern democratic structures. The military was not under the control of the civilian government and coups pitted some ethnic groups against others.
In addition to Christians, Muslims and Jews, each of these has enclaves and sects who are as different from one another as they are from the other religions.
The Roman Empire of 70 million people contained at the time 7 million Jews—the vast majority of the world’s Jews.
This was a common view of Southern leaders. Society had to be monolithic culturally. In the North, the constant immigration from the world over made pluralism much more normative. However, the vast majority of the North opposed slavery and believed that slavery and free labor could not coexist. So the Southern argument on that point was turned on them, and the monolithic views of the South has constantly eroded and become more tolerant and pluralistic and by the 21st century, there were parts of the South that were more tolerant and pluralistic than some parts of the North. Change, reform and liberalism was slow to take hold but it was inexorable.
After Independence, the original credo of the Indonesian hero and leader was slowly ignored. The Muslim majority established Islam as the dominant religion and began to create laws that discriminated against Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews. The ethnic Chinese had been very successful in business and commerce and soon they were discriminated against and even physically attacked in Pogroms.
Avigdor Lieberman is a Soviet-born Israeli politician who served as the Defense Minister of Israel from 2016 to 2018; on 14 November 2018, he resigned because of a ceasefire in Gaza which he characterized as "surrendering to terror." He served as Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2012, and again from 2013 to 2015. He has also served as member of the Knesset and as Deputy Prime Minister of Israel.
