USA Today reports:
The Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.
“After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.
Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.
“After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.
Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.
I was at this breakfast, and as the so-called ambassador was leaving and getting into his Cadillac, I asked whether he was endorsing an apartheid state.
TWS: Are you endorsing apartheid?
Areikat: Apartheid?
TWS: Yeah, like separation?
Areikat: No! Absolutely not. I mean, what I talked about separation in a way that you have your own sovereign independent state. What, is the United States an apartheid state because it is separated from Mexico and Canada?
So there you have it: The so-called ambassador from the PLO does not think the Jews and Palestinians should live in the same state–but it absolutely isn’t apartheid!
