Archbishop of Canterbury Embraces Supporters of Killers of Christians

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.

One of the wounded was a British citizen, Ms. Ros Sloboda, who was a student in Israel at the time. It might be worthwhile for the Archbishop of Canterbury to meet her. That shouldn’t be too hard to arrange; they do live in the same city, after all.

In an interview with the BBC, Ros described how she heard the gunfire and saw “people dropping to the floor, and there was blood everywhere.” She “turned to run, and as I turned, this huge hole appeared in the back of my thigh, and I realized I had been shot.”

“I ran and I hid under a seat,” Ros continued. “It’s impossible to convey the utter terror when you think you’re going to lose your life, and I saw [in my mind] a picture of my house in London, and my family, and I was just waiting for the next bullet to hit me, because I was convinced that it would kill me.”

Then, suddenly, “there was an eerie quiet.” Ros “stood up to see the stuff of nightmares, really—the man next to me was dead. His head was resting in his wife’s lap.”

In the hospital where she was treated for her wounds, Ros found herself alongside a “visibly pregnant” Puerto Rican woman who was frantically asking for her husband. He was one of those who was killed in the attack.

Back home in London, all these years later, the terrible memories have never left her. “I often go into my garden,” Ros told the interviewer, “and I say to myself, ‘This is a good-to-be-alive day’.”

Ros mentioned in the interview that when she reads about Israelis who were wounded in Arab terrorist attacks, she often writes them letters of comfort, even though they are total strangers. Which is the sort of thing you might expect a Christian religious leader to be doing.

One would have thought that the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglican Christians worldwide would at least remember that horrific attack, and would decline to be photographed with supporters of the group that carried it out. But apparently not.

Remembrance of these American Christian victims of Palestinian terror appears to be confined to Puerto Rico, where the local government some years ago designated May 30 as an annual “Lod Massacre Remembrance Day.”

Perhaps next May 30, the Archbishop of Canterbury will pay a visit to Puerto Rico and take part in mourning the victims of the terrorists whose supporters she has been embracing.

In the meantime, though, there’s something even more constructive that the archbishop could do.

One of the mass-murderers at Lod was Kozo Okamoto, a Japanese Red Army terrorist who collaborated with the PFLP. He was originally captured and sentenced to life in prison, but then released in a prisoner exchange and granted political asylum by the government of Lebanon, even though he’s still on Japan’s most-wanted list.

Archbishop Mullally could use her stature as one of the world’s most prominent religious leaders to demand that Lebanon surrender Okamoto for prosecution—whether in his native Japan, or in one of the countries of his victims, such as the United States or Great Britain.

Because that’s where the Archbishop of Canterbury and her Church of England should be—on the side of the victims of terror, not on the side of the terrorists’ supporters.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.