Perhaps outshining the accomplishments of the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce at its 2024 annual meeting were the ways that Arkansas political and commercial legacies were celebrated.
Chamber President Jay Chesshir kicked off the 159th annual meeting Thursday by welcoming and thanking sponsors and guests. Once the expected acknowledgments had completed, Chesshir acknowledged the meeting was the Chamber's first to ever host two current presidential nominees for ambassadors to foreign countries.
Chesshir shared praise of the now-nominee to the United Kingdom and the Court of St. James, Warren Stephens, calling attention to his “boundless philanthropic work” and family’s “rich business heritage.” “We are amazingly blessed for his work, and his willingness to continue that work in a foreign country,” said Chesshir.
Stephens is the Chairman and CEO of Stephens Incorporated, a Little Rock-based financial services firm with an estimated worth of more than $7 billion.
Following a break and a few pre-produced videos promoting the chamber, Baptist Health CEO and Little Rock Chamber Chairman Troy Wells called the meeting officially to order and led the board to name the 2025 executive committee, including naming Nat Lea, CEO of WEHCO media and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as 2025’s chairman.
The board also named Diane McCoy, construction account manager for Republic Services, as its 2024 Ambassador of the year. The chamber also thanked Karl Freeman for 25 years of service.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders led the introduction of the meeting’s keynote speaker, President-elect Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, her father Mike Huckabee.
“The only downside to the latest news about my dad, aside from the fact that my parents will be moving to a dangerous warzone, is that our kids are losing their favorite babysitter and the cheapest too,” said Gov. Sanders. “But in all seriousness, I cannot imagine a better culmination of all of my dad’s life, than as America’s ambassador to Israel.”
Mike Huckabee also began by praising his fellow nominee for a foreign ambassadorship, saying that Stephens was a man who never wanted to call attention to himself.
“It’s just an extraordinary thing to know that Warren Stephens will take all this extraordinary business acumen that he has shown us through the years and bring it to the service of our country in a way that I think will be simply astounding.”
Huckabee then spoke at length of his own appointment. Touting himself as the first Evangelical Christian to be named to the position, he recalled his first trip to Israel at the age of 17.
“Here’s a place I had never been in my life, but it was the only place in the world that I’ve ever been that I felt at home in a place that I had never been to before.”
Calling back to his Evangelical roots, Mike Huckabee spoke about Abraham handing “the title deed” to his sons, telling them this was their land, and called it the most bitterly fought over piece of real estate in the world. He compared Israel in size to roughly that of New Jersey.
“Its landmass is 1/644th of the landmass that is controlled by Muslim nations. Which makes many of us scratch our heads when we hear that the solution that people have in the Middle East is that Israel, with its tiny little real estate imprint, should give up land so that those with much more can take a little bit of theirs,” said Huckabee.
Huckabee spoke about the “Biblical truth” of Israel, referencing the book of Isaiah.
“I’ve seen something happen in this country over the past 52 years, in over 100 visits there, that just brings to life for me that Biblical truth of the prophets when they said that ‘the dry bones will live again, and the desert will bloom.’”
Huckabee said he did not seek out this appointment, clarifying he did not ask President-elect Trump for the position, but saying that for him it was not a political issue, but a spiritual one.
“And I saw the spiritual nature of it just a few weeks after October 7th, [2023]… when Hamas had invaded from Gaza; went in and savagely slaughtered Jewish civilians who thought they were living peacefully just a few hundred yards from Gaza.”
He then spoke at length of the “extraordinary level of indecency” inflicted during the attack.
“Elderly people, women violently raped in front of their families, babies were beheaded and burned in ovens in front of their mothers. The horrific crimes against any sense of civilized behavior was such that it was just hard to even listen to the stories of those who had experienced it.”
Investigative group Human Rights Watch concluded in a July report that Hamas-led groups had committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity during the October 7 attack, including summary killings, hostage-taking, and crimes involving sexual and gender-based violence.
In the year of conflict that has followed, Human Rights Watch has noted that Israel’s response amounts to collective punishment, also a war crime. It has called for both nations involved in the conflict to abide by international humanitarian law and to surrender anyone facing a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
The ICC has issued warrants for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, the highest commander of the military wing of Hamas, as well as Yoav Gallant, Israel’s minister of Defense, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mike Huckabee chastised college students protesting the conflict in Gaza, saying they did not know what they meant by chanting ‘From the river to the sea,” saying it would amount to the “Annihilation and the slaughter of 15 million Jewish People.”
Huckabee closed his speech by summarizing that the conflict was not geopolitical or socioeconomic, but as one of good versus evil.
“It’s really that simple. It’s light versus darkness. It’s whether or not we believe that as civilized people, that we deal with our conflicts only at last resort militarily, but we seek to bring some sense of human decency and respect for other human life.”
