From Jaweed Kaleem’s article for the Los Angeles Times:
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said armed Israeli settlers detained him and other U.S. citizens during a recent tour of the occupied West Bank in an incident that is thrusting the California congressman into the international debate over human rights in the Palestinian territories and U.S. foreign aid to Israel as he openly weighs a 2028 presidential bid.
Khanna said settlers surrounded his group’s van on Wednesday near the Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta in the southern West Bank. Carrying U.S.-made rifles, the settlers kicked the van’s tires and filmed the scene, “laughing at us,” Khanna said during an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Twenty minutes later, four soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces arrived. Rather than securing their safety, Khanna said, the soldiers detained his entourage until he reached an official at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Seventy-five minutes after the settlers first stopped the group, Khanna said, they were allowed to leave.
“How dare they mistreat people with an American passport,” Khanna said.
“I saw the arrogance in the eyes of those settlers, 21- and 22-year-olds with guns, laughing that they had detained us,” Khanna said in a video interview he reposted to X. “It is the arrogance of power, of a power that has had no accountability, total impunity, and has created a toxic culture of oppression.”
Uh….
….did Rep. khanna, or the author of this article, just accidentally forget to mention that khanna and his pals drove into a hotly contested, highly inflammable situation – so-called “occupied land” between “Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews – without bothering to clear their moves with Israeli forces? And that a van with a bunch of guys driving into that area would be sure to attract attention/raise security issues?
And does it matter that the video I have seen of this incident shows that nothing was done to khanna and his people other than being detained until it was clear that they were not a threat, and then let go?
I guess not.
ro khanna is a nepo-baby whose family money made him rich but happily attacks the wealthy to impressive his left wing/socialist pals.
khanna aspires to the U.S. Senate, maybe even the White House. And these days, attacking Israel is one of the necessary bona fides for such a move. So he created this incident and now wants you to simultaneusly see Israelis as terrible people and him as some kind of victim who handled things bravely in the face of great adversity.
What a conscienceless political attention whore he is. What a joke. But, in today’s Democrat Party? It just may be his ticket upstairs.
That should tell you plenty.
