Ron DeSantis isn’t backing down from his pejorative position about Bethlehem.
During a campaign stop in Iowa, the Florida Governor maligned the religiously significant city as a “pigsty” and a “disgrace,” which he attributed to it being under the control of “Palestinian Arabs.”
“And when I visited Bethlehem, honestly, it was a pigsty, it was a disgrace, how nasty it was,” DeSantis said in Clinton Wednesday.
“So, you have this beautiful church that commemorates the birth of Christ and it’s not, it’s beautiful, but you come out of the church and they built this, like, massive mosque towering over it. That’s intentional. That’s what they would do,” DeSantis added.
The Governor seems to be referring to Omar Ibn Al Khattab, which is the sole mosque in Bethlehem’s Old City, opposite the Church of the Nativity.
Lonely Planet notes it “was built in 1860 on land granted by the Greek Orthodox Church in honor of Omar, the Prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law, who in 637 took Jerusalem from the flagging Byzantines and then stopped for prayer at the Christian Church of the Nativity.”
The Pact of Omar declared it would forever be a Christian place of worship.
DeSantis had bashed Bethlehem before on the 2024 trail.
“In fact, Bethlehem is controlled by the Palestinian Arabs. And so there, there’s a church where you can go where they, they say, is where Christ was born. And it’s a beautiful church. But (when) you walk out, first of all, it’s like a pigsty. The city, it’s not well-kept. And then they built this massive mosque right in front of it to like tower over it,” DeSantis commented at the 2023 Presidential Thanksgiving FAMiLY Forum in Iowa.
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