Florida State Senate Candidate: Former PFLP Terrorist Is Like Mandela

Dwight Bullard, a Democratic Party candidate for Florida’s 40th state district, took to Twitter recently claiming that his former terrorist turned tour guide in Eastern Jerusalem was just like the late Nelson Mandela.

@DerekGSilver So #Mandela was accused of similar acts. Is he also a terrorist? Or is your opinion exclusive to tour guides?

— Dwight Bullard (@DwightBullard) September 27, 2016

Bullard visited Israel this past May to commemorate the “Nakba,” in which the Palestinian-Arabs consider the establishment of Israel to be a “catastrophe.” His tour guide in Jerusalem was Mahmoud Jiddah, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist group responsible for numerous terrorist attacks against Israel. These include the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969, killing two Hebrew University students. Jiddah himself was arrested in 1968 for planting bombs and was later released in a prisoner exchange in the mid-1980s.

Bullard’s comparison between Jiddah and Mandela ignores a simple fact about Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa: He supported both the Israelis and the Palestinian-Arabs. In an interview with Ted Koppel in 1990, Mandela said that while he identified with the Palestine Liberation Organization, his political party (the African National Congress) never

“… doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state legally. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secure borders.”

This assertion differs from Jiddah, who never denounced a terrorist organization that has never accepted the existence of Israel.

The Miami Herald conditionally endorsed Bullard for the 40th District, saying that “Sen. Bullard’s disregard for the rules of campaign finance tarnish his candidacy… However, he has been a stalwart for his constituents for nearly a decade in both the House and Senate.”

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