Lt. Col. Oliver North said Wednesday that if the Palestine Liberation Organization has truly renounced terrorism, then it should condemn its murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany.
“Why not also renounce the Munich massacre, the children’s carnage in Ma’alot and deliver up the man who masterminded the seizure of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer?” he said.
He was referring to the May 1974 massacre of Israeli school children by PLO infiltrators and the October 1986 hijacking of an Italian cruise ship.
North was the keynote speaker at the eighth annual Roundtable Prayer Breakfast for Israel at the National Religious Broadcasters convention here. North, whose trial for alleged illegal activities in the Iran-Contra affair opened Tuesday, was greeted with a 40-second standing ovation.
A few hundred Christians and Jews attended the breakfast, which featured Israeli flags at each guest’s seat, the singing of Hatikvah, and a former refusenik, Alyosha Ryabinov, at the piano.
The event was sponsored by three Christian groups: the Religious Roundtable and the Brother-hood Forest of Israel, both of Memphis, Tenn., and Interessors for America of Reston, Va.
North spoke of faithfulness extending from “this country to those with whom we have made commitments. That is an appropriate issue today at a breakfast honoring Israel.”
He criticized intellectuals, journalists and politicians for “believing that (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev is good and that (PLO leader Yasir) Arafat is all right and that we should forget the past.
“I believe that if we do so, we will do so in the jeopardy of the future,” he said.
North recalled the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in November, which marked “the day in which Adolf Hitler turned loose his jack-booted thugs to start one of the most murderous atrocities known to man.”
Earlier, the Rev. Charles Mims of the Tabernacle of Faith Baptist Church in Los Angeles welcomed “my friends of Israel,” and said he is fighting anti-Semitism in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles.
ISRAEL AND SOUTH AFRICA PRAISED
Ed McAteer, the master of ceremonies, who during the presidential primaries headed Christians and Jews for Bush, praised Israel and South Africa for being the only two countries that banned the showing of “The Last Temptation of Christ” from movie theaters.
McAteer also praised the United States and Israel as the sole countries to oppose a United Nations vote on moving the U.N. General Assembly to Geneva to hear Arafat speak.
Moshe Aumann, consul general at the Israeli Embassy here, told the crowd, “It is good to be among people whose faith, whose deep and abiding love of the Bible are not just things remembered from some distant past or learned by rote once in Sunday school, but something that lives in you.”
Jewish and Christian groups participating in the convention plan to lobby members of Congress later in the week, urging an end to the U.S. dialogue with the PLO.
The Jewish groups are Americans For a Safe Israel, Herut-Zionists of America and the Jewish Political Caucus. The other groups are the Religious Roundtable and the International Christian Embassy/Jerusalem.
The groups issued a seven-point proclamation, which, among other things, calls on the U.S. government not to sell any weapons to countries in a state of war with Israel.
Herbert Zweibon, chairman of AFSI, said his group will press lawmakers to have Israel’s $1.8 billion in military aid transferred from the State Department to a line-item in the Pentagon budget.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
