In an interview on the left-wing media MSNBC on Friday, Rep. Rohit “Ro” Khanna (D-Cal) made several libelous comments which included, but were not limited to, accusing Israel of “burning down Palestinian villages.” When confronted about these claims, Khanna doubled down, insisting these claims were accurate.

Interview: Israel is “Burning Down Palestinian Villages”

Khanna was interviewed by Mehdi Hasan, is a Shia Muslim also born to Indian parents. Hasan’s unreasoning bias was evident when he referred to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital. 

In the interview, Khanna accused Israel of “burning down Palestinian villages.”

Khanna insisted that President Biden would drastically change relations between the US and Israel. Biden, he said, is “going to make clear that Israel is an ally and always has been an ally.” Khanna insisted that US allying with Israel must be conditioned on Israel recognizing “Palestinian statehood.” He also called for putting a stop to Jews living in Judea and Samaria of Jews.

“[Israel] can’t be having new settlements, “ he said. “They can’t be burning down Palestinian villages.”

Biden Administration Will Change Policy

“Human rights are going to matter. We’re going to have a human rights-focused foreign policy,” Khanna added.

Khanna doubled down on this claim in a Twitter exchange on Saturday, saying that he “should have clarified with time that Israeli settlers burn Palestinian orchards and olive trees, while the military has bulldozed and demolished Palestinian homes and villages.”

Lies Revealed

His explanatory tweet referred to two articles to substantiate his claims. An Associated Press article accused Israel of destroying the village of Khirbet Humsa in November. CAMERA, a media watchdog, noted the inaccuracies in the article:

United Nations officials alleged in November that Israel demolished dozens of structures in a single Palestinian encampment in Area C of the West Bank, which is under full Israeli control. COGAT, the Israeli authority which carried out the demolition, disputed the U.N. assertion, maintaining that the demolitions in Khirbet Humsa involved 15 structures — seven tents and eight pens — illegally built in on land that had served as a military firing zone since the 1970s. Israel’s High Court has ruled repeatedly the squatters had no ownership rights to the land, a fact which the Bedouin did not dispute in court.  CBS, another major American network, was compelled to issue multiple corrections to its story claiming Israel “destroyed” the entire “village” of Khirbet Humsa, in actuality no more than an encampment of a few European-funded shepherding pens. 

But CAMERA was even more critical of Khanna’s libelous assertion that Israel is “burning Arab villages”.

In a second blatant falsehood that Hasan failed to challenge, Rep. Khanna’s reference to Israel building new settlements is also not true. As MSNBC itself acknowledged in a correction this past October, Israel has not built a new settlement in some two decades. Ironically, though he espoused falsehoods about Israel completely detached from reality, the Congressman opined about his view in favor of President Biden returning to the Iran nuclear deal: “And at some point, data has to matter. This is not just a matter of opinion.” 

CAMERA contacted MSNBC, calling on them to make on-air corrections “making clear that, in fact, Israel is not burning and has not burned Palestinian villages, it is not building new settlements and its capital is located in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv.”

CAMERA was also critical of Khana’s assertions that a human-rights based agenda would focus on  Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel.

“Apparently, he hasn’t heard of the conflict in Syria, in which close to some 400,000 have reportedly killed, and more than 6 million displaced, or of the dire political, health and economic situation in Lebanon, a country further devastated by the horrific explosion of a stash of ammonium nitrate last August in Beirut,” CAMERA wrote. 

Khanna served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of Commerce under President Barack Obama. While claiming to support close ties between the US and Izrael, Khanna was critical of President Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

His parents are Indian immigrants to the United States. Khanna, a Punjabi Hindu, describes his faith as “Gandhian Hinduism”.