President Shimon Peres in Facebook interview 390.
(photo credit: Screenshot)
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In an interview at Facebook headquarters in California on Sunday, President
Shimon Peres praised the social network and modern Internet-based technology in
general for reversing the role of the ruler and the ruled.
Peres told
Facebook COO and interviewer-for-the-day Sheryl Sandberg that due to technology,
today “people rule governments more than the other way around.”
As part
of his appearance at the company’s headquarters, he opened an official Facebook
page Tuesday. Although he sidestepped a question about what he planned to do
with the page, he said, “We were the people of the books, now we can face the
books.”
The president also discussed the role technology was playing in
breaking down borders and advancing peace.
As technology gives young
people more access to one another, he explained, people from different countries
speak to each other for the first time and are surprised that they can be
friends. Those youngsters, Peres continued, begin to question why they were
taught to hate each other.
The president said his biggest hope for his
lifetime was that “the matter of peace [will] no longer be the business of
governments, but the business of the people.”
Asked how Israel became a
technological leader, he explained, “We don’t have any natural resources, but
then we discovered we have something that is greater than anything else – the
human being.”
He added, “This is a case where the people enriched the
land more than the land enriched the people.”
Telling the audience of
Facebook employees and online viewers he believed each and every one of them had
untapped potential, Peres stated that “if the economy is global, then science is
individual.”
With a brilliant invention or idea, he explained, “a single
man can change the world.” On the president's
Facebook page, he also debuted a video entitled, "Be my friend, for peace."
The president also addressed the Iranian
issue, reiterating that Iran was the only country in the world calling for the
destruction of another country. Iran, he added, “is an example of moral
corruption.”
He also warned that if Tehran were allowed to take over the
Middle East and control its oil supply, the United States would find itself in a
situation very different than the position of power it holds today.