Italian journalist Giulio Meotti said in a Friday op-ed that Nelson Mandela legacy paints him as an “enemy of the Israeli people” and an “enabler of anti-Semitic terrorism.”
ISRAELNATIONALNEWS.com reports that Meotti uses Mandela’s own words in stating his case, harkening back often to Mandela’s longstanding claim that “those who are the enemies of the Jews” were not necessarily “his enemies.”
Meotti writes that in 1990, “Mandela likened Israel to a ‘terrorist state’ and declared that ‘we do not regard the PLO as a terrorist organization. If one has to refer to any parties as a terrorist state, one might refer to the Israeli government because they are the people who are slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the occupied territories.”
Further, “In 1999 Mandela supported the Palestinian Arab use of violence. With Arafat seated next to him in Gaza, Mandela declared: ‘All men and women with vision choose peace rather than confrontation, except in cases where we cannot proceed, where we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence,’”
Meotti writes. In closing, Meotti states, “Nelson Mandela might be a symbol of goodness for many, but for Israel’s Jews he has been an enabler of anti-Semitism!
