US Congressman Ro Khanna slams IOF after detention by armed Israeli settlers

Extremist Israeli settlers — is there any other kind? — detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna as he visited the occupied West Bank last week.

Khanna — one of the more critical of Israel among US politicians — was held for around 90 minutes by land-thieves armed with M4 assault rifles. He said that when Israeli troops finally turned up:

they sided with the settlers and continued our detention.

Khanna becomes the first US politician held by the apartheid colony. Surely his brown skin had nothing to do with it. The detention has been ignored by the White House and US Israel lobby. He is not, however, the first foreign politician held by Israel — mostly to either deafening silence or token expressions of disapproval from the victims’ home governments. Some have faced torture and/or sexual abuse for daring to try to take food to starving people in Gaza under Israel’s criminal siege.

Khanna was on a fact-finding visit to the West bank to examine the impact of Israeli occupation. He said:

We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” he said.

And these hoodlums come in with machine guns — M4, an American-made machine gun — and they detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF and ​the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.

Khanna is said to be considering a bid to stand for the Democrats in the next US presidential election.

Ro Khanna vs murderous land-thieves

The euphemistic term ‘settlers’ comes nowhere near the brutal reality of the mostly-imported land thieves driving the indigenous Palestinians from their land. ‘Settlers’ burn homes with Palestinian families inside. They beat and shoot Palestinians, poison water — a tactic used since the inception of the colony — steal or destroy crops and livestock — all under the protection of the occupation military and with complete impunity.

They also hold the whip hand in Israel’s government, with fascist bigots like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich free to demand mass murder and even more brutal repression of Palestine’s colonised, rightful inhabitants.

Featured image via House.gov