Why would England’s most important Christian religious leader embrace supporters of a terrorist group that slaughtered seventeen American Christians?
The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories last week. To judge by the photos and remarks she posted on her website, she spent a good deal of time in the company of two supporters of a terrorist group—and had only praise for them.
One was Layan Nasir, whom the archbishop described only as “a 26-year-old Anglican woman who has spent three periods in Israeli administrative detention and prison over the last five years.”
What Archbishop Mullally didn’t mention is that Ms. Nasir was detained because of her activities with the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
During her years as a student at Bir Zeit University, Nasir was an active member of the “Progressive Democratic Student Pole.” That’s the PFLP’s campus branch. PFLP flags are proudly visible in Nasir’s social media posts. “Long live our Front!,” she exclaimed in one of them.
Archbishop Mullally also had herself photographed with a 25 year-old Arab woman whom she did not name, but whose “powerful testimony” she praised. David Collier, the British investigative journalist, has identified the woman as Zeina Barbar.
Ms. Barbar’s social media posts show her proudly marching with an official PFLP poster, in a protest demanding the release of PLFP terrorist Samer Arbid. He’s presently serving life in prison for murdering a teenage Israeli girl.
What makes this distasteful episode rich with irony is that the PFLP perpetrated the most notorious massacre of Christians in Israel’s history.
The terror group that the archbishop’s new friends, Layan and Zeina, support organized the May 1972 attack at Lod (later Ben-Gurion) Airport. The terrorists slaughtered 26 defenseless civilians and wounded 80 more. Seventeen of the dead were American citizens—Christians from Puerto Rico who had just completed a pilgrimage to religious sites in the Holy Land.
Read it all at the Jewish Journal