Presidential hopeful compares Gilad Shalit to Nelson Mandela and occupation to the cause of Martin Luther King Jr.

United States (QNN)- Shabtai, a Jewish leadership group at Yale founded by presidential hopeful Cory Booker, released a video of Booker at Shabtai in 2012, greeting Gilad Shalit, the former Israeli soldier.

“A person like Nelson Mandela, thrown into a prison and forgotten about by many but still held on to by a love of a people who have not let his memory die, who every day worked for his freedom”, Booker said describing Shalit.

Shalit was serving in the Israeli army during the war on Gaza in 2006. He was captivated by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza to be exchanged 5 years later for thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Booker ignored that thousands of Palestinians are routinely imprisoned, mostly with no charges, by Israeli authorities. He focused on a captivated soldier, who was in Gaza to kill.

He said that ‘Israel’ is “under attack by Hamas, by Hezbollah”, and by Iran in which “there’s a madman standing in Iran determined to have a weapon of mass destruction, who has sworn that he wants to and will destroy Israel and the Israeli people”, he said, ignoring the fact the the occupation state is the only entity in the Middle East which already has a nuclear weapon.

Later in that speech Booker linked Israel’s cause to “the cause of freedom,” led by Martin Luther King Jr. and again lauded the Israeli soldiers.

“We were all caught up in something that is bigger than race and religion and geography. It is the cause of freedom. You may put a man into a pit, you may steal from us our greatest leaders but as long as we are determined to fight for freedom, to stand for democray, to defend those ideals that others are trying to take away from us, then we will in this world secure the highest ideals of humanity… Today as we gather… giving honor to a group of the most courageous men imaginable, I ask us also to recommit ourselves to the cause of freedom.”