You may have never heard of Rania Khalek – a Lebanese-American “journalist” who thinks “objectivity is bullshit” and is apparently prone to anxiously counting how many Jews write about her favorite topics – but she is quite popular among anti-Israel activists. While Khalek is in no way original and keeps busy by simply amplifying the themes propagated by sites like Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada, she recently managed to provide a truly excellent example of the pervasive antisemitism that is a quasi-professional hazard for activists dedicated to demonizing the world’s only Jewish state as a monstrous evil that must be denounced in terms eerily reminiscent of the anti-Jewish bigotry of bygone times.
In an effort to promote the among anti-Israel activists popular claim that there was some sinister “Zionist collaboration with Nazi Germany,” Khalek recently posted a tweet linking to a clip of Max Blumenthal regaling an audience in Stuttgart, Germany, with his tall tales on this subject. As Nurit Baytch, who documented the resulting developments, put it so pithily, Khalek then tried “to link Zionism to anti-Semitism by linking to Holocaust denial site VHO.org, inadvertently laying bare the much more pervasive links between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.”
Khalek was apparently not much bothered that Nurit Baytch had caught her linking to a Holocaust denial site, but she did react when BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara took notice on Twitter.
Khalek deleted her tweet and responded to Gara that it had just been “an error,” insisting at the same time that the book she had recommended from the site was “completely factual.” In other words, Khalek is convinced that a site devoted to minimizing Nazi crimes and defending people “not believing in the existence of gas chambers” can be trusted to feature a “completely factual” book that presents Zionist Jews as Nazi collaborators – which is obviously an idea that deserves as much ridicule and contempt as the notion that a white supremacist site would be a good place to look for a “completely factual” book on blacks.
Of course, as I have noted in a previous post dealing with the same sordid subject, those truly interested in the alleged “collaboration” between Zionists and Nazi Germany could consult a serious scholarly study on this topic – though admittedly, Professor Nicosia’s book wouldn’t satisfy anti-Israel activists like Khalek, since Nicosia warns already in his introduction [pdf] that readers eager to “somehow equate Zionism with National Socialism, Zionists with Nazis, or to portray this relationship as a willing and collaborative one between moral and political equals” won’t find what they’re looking for.
So it looks like Rania Khalek and her ilk are reduced to relying on books that, for good reason, are promoted by Nazi-sympathizers and Jew-haters…
But Khalek provided yet another example of the antisemitism that inevitably infects the efforts to present Israel as the Jew among the nations. The idea that the Jews are to blame for what’s wrong with the world and especially for whatever evil you suffer from or hate most has formed the core resentment of Jew-hatred throughout the centuries. The Nazis succinctly summarized it in the slogan “The Jews are our misfortune.” Khalek presented her version of this pernicious and ancient meme updated for the 21st century at an event organized by Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley earlier this week. The preposterous title of her talk was “Palestine: A Laboratory of Global Repression,” and the advertisement highlighted just how monstrously evil the world’s only Jewish state is in Khalek's view [my emphasis]:
“What Israel does to Palestinians doesn’t stay in Palestine. Israel uses Palestine as a laboratory to test, refine, and showcase weapons of domination and control. These weapons are then exported around the world for use on other marginalized populations, from the killing fields of Gaza to the teargassed streets of Ferguson. Zionism is an engine for ‘combat proven’ repression technology that sustains racism and inequality across the globe.”
Khalek later retweeted a number of tweets posted by admirers who had attended her presentation, including one that cited her asserting that Israel was “becoming [the] ‘repression engine’ of the globe, spreading tech to maintain white supremacy world-wide.”If antisemitism wasn’t such a lethal and still all too vigorous hatred, one could almost be amused: One day Rania Khalek relies on a site run by white supremacists to demonize Israel, and the next day she demonizes Israel for “spreading tech to maintain white supremacy world-wide.”
But of course, whatever Khalek’s twists and turns, her message remains the same: the Jewish state is our misfortune. If it wasn’t for Israel, who would ‘sustain racism and inequality across the globe?’ And, as one of her fans tweeted from her talk: “Opposing Zionism [is] not just important for Palestinian self-determination, it’s important for [the] self-determination of all oppressed.” Naturally, without Zionism, the Kurds would have a state, as would the Baloch and the Tibetans and the people of Western Sahara and maybe even Iran’s Ahwazis; without Zionism, nobody would be oppressed – in short, a world without the Jew of the nations would be a much better place: it would be Juden-Staat-rein and its nations would live happily ever after in peace and prosperity, just as they did before there was a Jewish state…