Was Mandela A Terrorist?

Watching the Sunday talk shows I heard a conservative (possibly Mary Matlin) refer to Mandela's "terrorist past" as one of the reasons why conservatives were so wary about him in the 1980s. Nelson Mandela was the founder and leader of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation) or MK for short. MK began its sabotage campaign in December 1961 and it lasted for about 18 months before the South African Police managed to discover the headquarters of the organization at a farm in the Rivonia suburb of Johannesburg. During the sabotage campaign the MK attacked mainly symbolic targets such as electrical pylons, postboxes, and other infrastructure. Pro-German Afrikaner organizations carried out a similar campaign during World War II. At the Rivonia treason trial in 1964 Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to life in prison (except for a couple one of whom was white who received ten-year sentences). Mandela had actually been in prison since the second half of 1962 when, having been betrayed by the CIA, he was arrested for going abroad without a passport--which the government would not have issued him--and sentenced to five years.

Were Romney's remarks in Israel a gaffe? And were they true?

Romney's trip abroad has gotten much more coverage than he and his top planners probably thought it would. But working off of the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity (which is definitely not true for presidential candidates, at least those who are nominees of major parties), possibly it was intended this way. While Romney's remarks about the Olympics in London were possibly clumsy, they are unlikely to lose him votes in America. The same can be said of his remarks in Israel that culture was responsible for the difference between the Israeli GDP and the Palestinian GDP. But is the last remark true?