Israeli envoy panned for comparing Palestinian and Norwegian terrorists
Isaac Buchman told Swedish Radio on Tuesday that Israel’s freeing of 26 Palestinian prisoners as part of an agreement to launch peace talks was akin to Norway freeing Anders Breivik, a far-right activist who set off a bomb in Oslo and shot up a summer camp on a nearby island in one of the worst terror attacks in the Continent’s history.
“The horrors that [the Palestinian prisoners] did, to put it in a Scandinavian understanding, it’s like what happened in Norway with Breivik,” Buchman told the station, according to the Swedish news outlet The Local. ”Imagine if Breivik was released as a gesture of some sort.”
However, survivors of the Utoya island massacre and family members of Breivik’s victims cried foul over the comparison, saying the Palestinians, many of whom were convicted on terror charges after killing civilians, were part of a larger cause.
“The comparison does not make sense,” Bjørn Ihler, who survived the camp shooting, told The Local. “Breivik was a solo terrorist whose actions were based purely on an unreal situation. The situation in the Middle East is very different. There is a real fight for Palestinian freedom going on.”
Trond Blattman, who lost his son in the camp shooting, called the comparison “ridiculous.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-envoy-panned-for-comparing-palestinian-and-norwegian-terrorists/
= new reply since forum marked as read
