Uri Savir says the Yala Young Leaders group will hold its interactive conference on Monday and Tuesday. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actress Sharon Stone, Barcelona football coach Pep Guardiola, National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern and others are set to address the virtual gathering.
Savir directs the Peres Center for Peace, a sponsor of the Facebook group. It counts 36,500 members across the region.
Nimrod Ben-Zeev, the site’s administrator, says the conference aims to send a message of peace to the region’s leaders and create concrete programs, such as online leadership academy.
Meanwhile, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said in Munich on Sunday
that governments must strike a balance between policing the Internet to protect copyright and upholding freedom of expression.
Reding was reacting to a US crackdown on hundreds of websites accused of offering pirated music or movies or counterfeit goods, as well as calls for new legislation to guard intellectual property.
"The protection of creators must never be used as pretext to intervene in the freedom of the Internet," Reding told an international Internet conference in the southern German city of Munich, noting the "heated debate" surrounding the issue.
US authorities have seized more than 350 website domain names since launching an anti-online piracy campaign dubbed "Operation In Our Sites" more than 18 months ago, including a spectacular global swoop on file-sharing site Megaupload.com.
But US congressional leaders put strict anti-online piracy legislation on hold following a wave of protests led by Google and Wikipedia denouncing the bills as a threat to Internet freedom.
Reding warned against an overzealous approach that could have a chilling effect on the industry.
"You'll never have from Europe a blocking of the Internet — that's not the European option," she said.
"Freedom of information and copyright must not be enemies, they are partners... European policy aims at equilibrating the respect of both rights."
She outlined proposals to protect the online data of European citizens to be presented in the coming days.
The current legal "patchwork will be replaced by one law which will apply to all member states, to all companies which are offering their goods and services to consumers, even if their servers are based outside the EU," she said.
