Former Muslim Sandra Solomon fearlessly defends Israel
Sandra Solomon, an Arab born in Ramallah who converted to Christianity more than ten years ago and became a supporter of Israel, explains in an interview to the Kan broadcasting network her motivations and goals in a single-woman crusade for sanity that constantly places her in danger.
Niece of one of the Fatah movement's founders, Sahar Habash, a close confidant of former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, Solomon frequently repeats her unequivocal disapproval of attacks carried out by Muslims against Israelis, citing education as the cause of the violence.
She condemned the recent Neve Tzuf attack in which a Muslim broke into a home and killed three members of the Salomon family: “The Palestinian terrorist who murdered a family on Friday evening in Halamish - where did he get the idea to enter a home and kill the people who were in there?” asked Solomon. “The young Palestinians who carry out attacks are already murdered from a psychological point of view by the education that is given to them.”
“As a child, I was brought up to hate Israel,” she related. “The most important thing to us was the liberation of the Al-Aqsa mosque, the liberation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the State of Israel.
“We watched the second intifada on television” she said, recalling her childhood spent in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. “After every big terror attack—including when children were killed—candy was given out. The education that was given to me was that only Palestinians are the victims, that they are oppressed in this conflict and that the Zionists are the occupying criminals who took the land for themselves.”
Commemoration gone wrong
This week, Mayor of Rome Virginia Raggi reversed the municipality's decision to memorialize late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat by naming one of the city's public parks after him. The original plan sought to honor the Nobel Prize laureate who, in the municipality's view, worked to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For balance, it was decided to name a street in the Italian capital after the late chief rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Elio Toaff.By His Own Admission, Wilkerson Cannot Be Trusted
In a letter to the municipality, the head of the Jewish community in Rome, Ruth Dureghello, condemned the decision for even drawing a comparison between the two figures. Explaining that the plan would debase the late rabbi, she demanded it be called off. Noting Arafat's direct involvement in the terrorist attacks that killed a young Jewish man in Rome in 1982, Dureghello wrote, "The municipality must decide whether it wants to memorialize the terrorists or their victims."
The municipality responded with that well-known anti-Semitic refrain: "Some of my best friends are Jewish." The supposed "balance" in this trick of transfiguration through the use of an exalted rabbi far removed from politics is reminiscent of the actions of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who, when he rose to power Italy in 1923, met with Rome's then-Chief Rabbi Angelo Sacerdoti to ease the minds of Italy's Jews. But when the Grand Council of Fascism embraced the race laws, it adopted the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and sent the Jews to their deaths. Around 7,900 of Italy's Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and lest we forget, it was Italy that bombed Tel Aviv, killing 130 people, in September 1940.
There is something shocking about the municipality's initial decision to turn the man who made terrorism a Palestinian start-up, who pledged to send "millions of martyrs to Jerusalem" to kill Israel's Jews and in fact did as much right up until his death despite signing the Oslo Accords, into a figure worthy of being memorialized as a peace activist.
On July 23, retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson appeared on MSNBC and accused Israel of increasing the tension surrounding Al Aqsa Mosque by installing metal detectors nearby. "The ultimate [Israeli] goal with regard to the mosque is to drive the Palestinians and Arabs in general out completely," he said, adding that the Israeli government's "ultimate goal is to cause the Palestinians to react in a way that it can then react viciously and violently as it has in Gaza repeatedly."
With such invective, Wilkerson depicts metal detectors, which are used at holy sites throughout the Middle East, as a provocation against the Palestinians. He also inverts cause and effect, portraying the metal detectors (and Israel's attacks on Hamas in the Gaza Strip) as the cause, rather than the response to Palestinian violence.
A few days after Wilkerson offered his assessment on MSNBC, Israel removed the metal detectors it had installed, thereby demonstrating that when it comes to assessing Israeli intentions, Wilkerson had no idea what he was talking about. If anyone is trying to increase the tensions surrounding the Temple Mount, it is Palestinian leaders who have used the Al Aqsa Mosque as a pretext and as a staging ground for jihadist attacks against Jews for decades.
Wilkerson's recent appearance on MSNBC was not the only time he has defamed Israel. In 2016, he declared that a gas attack on civilians universally blamed on Syrian President Bashar Al Assad "could have been an Israeli false flag operation." When pressed by his interviewer from an internet TV station to describe what the motivation for an Israeli gas attack would be, Wilkerson dodged the question. All he could say is that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was "too clueless" to know what was in his country's best interest in the Middle East.
It is Wilkerson who needs a clue. In the same July 21 MSNBC interview, Wilkerson reported a conversation he had with an unnamed Catholic Bishop in Ramallah in 2002 or 2003, who had declared that, "that the biggest enemy for him -- for Christians -- in that region was not the Arabs, it was the Jews."