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If you listen to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) relive the details of his brief “detainment” by a Jewish security team near Hebron, you might be under the impression it was akin to being in the first wave landing on Omaha Beach in 1944.
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The incident was provoked by Khanna, whose convoy drove into a military zone for just such a moment. A Jewish security team, with an off-duty Israeli soldier, almost surely didn’t know who was in the car when they stopped it. When police and the Israeli military showed up, they cleared the way and asked Khanna to take another road.
The congressman was “detained” in the same way a person is “detained” at a traffic stop.
The Israeli military, incidentally, had offered to accompany Khanna anywhere he wanted to go. He rejected its help. Obviously, it wouldn’t have been conducive to his stunt.
Jewish residents of Judea have their own security teams because they’re susceptible to Palestinian violence. Do some act poorly on occasion? Yes, they do. This is the real world. But “West Bank” Palestinians have been targeting Jews for 70 years as a matter of policy. If the Israeli military weren’t there, Jews would be massacred. Because they, like Khanna, demand a Judenfrei Middle East.
“This is the first time that I have been acutely aware of being brown,” Khanna said, adding a little racial politics for his progressive domestic audience.
Those who haven’t been to Israel might not be aware how utterly preposterous it is to claim anyone is able to detect any racial distinction between the progeny of the 850,000 or so Jews, who were expelled from their ancient homes across the Middle East after 1948, and an Arab. Around 60% of Israeli Jews trace their ancestry back to the Middle East or North Africa.
“Free advice to the Israelis,” Khanna told the New York Times, “it’s not a good idea to detain long-shot presidential candidates.” The congressman then told Reuters that his brief stop made him “more resolved” to run for the White House in 2028.
Most presidential hopefuls claim they are spurred to public service to improve the lot of Americans. Khanna’s political aspiration is to give Fatah and Hamas their own terror states. Or, at least, this is what he believes the modern progressive wants to hear. And he may be right.
Khanna desperately wants to be president. Though there are a few obstacles. First, no one else wants him to be president. Second, judging from his hamfisted Hebron stunt and the string of recent embarrassments at home, his political instincts are awful.
Not long ago, Khanna joined fellow Jew-baiting congressman Thomas Massie as the face of the “Epstein files” release, which, as a lawyer, he surely knew would amount to nothing more than uncorroborated accusations and third-hand accounts.
In the end, not only was there no secret cabal of rich pedophiles running the world, there weren’t even any names for Khanna to smear. Not that it stopped him from endlessly decrying the sins of the “Epstein class,” emphasis on the Epstein.
Khanna’s “Epstein class” rhetoric and obsessive focus on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is just an oily way to tap into ugly conspiracies about Jewish money and its alleged control over politics. Khanna doesn’t merely argue that AIPAC is sitting on the wrong side of a foreign policy debate — he accuses the group of stealing his constituents’ healthcare and childcare to perpetuate a “genocide.” Though Israel’s aid amounts to something around 0.05% of the federal budget, and is spent here in the United States, the Third World Marxists whom Khanna desperately wants to impress blame virtually every problem on Israel.
When an Islamic dad-son jihadi duo murdered 15 people, including three women and a 10-year-old girl, at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, Australia, Khanna went on television to blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “actions,” which he argued weren’t “making either Jews more secure” or “creating peace.”
Because, of course, everyone knows Hamas wants to “create peace” and the scourge of Islamic terrorism only popped up during Netanyahu’s time as prime minister and will surely come to an end once he’s retired.
Khanna was also perhaps the most ardent fan of the former Maine senate candidate, Nazi tattoo-sporting nepo baby, and alleged rapist Graham Platner.
The congressman now says that “we all need to see the signs earlier of people who may engage in domestic violence.” We? Khanna was the only national politician to travel to Maine to personally show support for Platner after initial allegations of sexual misconduct had been leveled in a New York Times piece. Since the woman who came forward with the accusations, Lyndsey Fifield, had worked in right-wing circles in Washington, Khanna dismissed her just as he dismissed a Totenkopf tattoo.
Khanna has a highly selective sense of outrage. Never once, as far as I can tell, has he been critical of any brutality in the Islamic world. The congressman visited the “West Bank” without uttering a single word about the corrupt and authoritarian Fatah party, an entity that’s not only rejected numerous offers for an independent state, but siphons billions of dollars of international aid into its coffers.
There hasn’t been an election in the “West Bank” for 20 years. Everyone understands why. An election would put Hamas, or some party like it, in charge. Palestinian culture is rife with corruption, nihilism, and extremism. If Khanna cared about their future, he’d demand accountability before demanding our ally create a new terror state on its border.
As far as we know, Khanna did not visit the Dalal Mughrabi Girls’ Elementary School in Hebron, named after the mastermind of a terrorist attack that killed 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. Instead, he met with Hisham Sharabati, “a journalist and activist” who was shot by Baruch Goldstein, a terrorist who murdered 29 Palestinians back in 1994. The point, like the manufactured confrontation with the scary “settlers” and their “machine guns,” was to cast Jews as the terrorists.
This is an inversion of reality. Goldstein’s actions weren’t sanctioned by the Israeli government, and had he survived, he would have spent the rest of his life in jail — unlike those responsible for the thousands of attacks on Jewish children over the past century, which were sanctioned and rewarded by Palestinian groups, and celebrated by the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. The families of Jewish terrorists, the very few that have existed, don’t get monthly stipends from the government.
Because Israel is an open society that opens its doors to its enemies, it will have to be more diligent in pushing back against propaganda. Recall that popular groyper podcaster Tucker Carlson also claimed to be “detained and interrogated” at Ben Gurion Airport last year. When security footage was leaked, we learned that Carlson spent a few minutes answering routine questions, signing routine documents, and then smiling and posing for selfies with the airport staff.
Khanna, however, did make history by being the first American to soft-launch a presidential campaign on foreign soil. And it makes complete sense. Nothing gets Third World Marxists more animated than ginning up anger at the Jewish state and its supporters. We’ll see how that plays with the rest of the country.
