Last month, I drew attention to Leila Khaled’s tour of South Africa under the sponsorship of BDS-South Africa. Khaled is a member of the “Political Bureau” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP has claimed credit for murdering four worshippers and a policeman at the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem in November. Khaled, who made her name as a hijacker and remains an advocate of violent resistance, is out raising money for the supposedly nonviolent boycott, divestment, sanctions movement against Israel.
So far, the trip is going quite well. Khaled has been welcomed by the ruling African National Congress, scoring a seat at President Zuma’s State of the Nation Address. People seem to be responding to her pitch. For example, as I wrote last week, the student government of the Durban University of Technology, a day after a visit from Khaled, called for the expulsion of Jews (the student government has since apologized: “oops, by ‘Jews’ we meant ‘people funded by the Israeli government.’”). BDS South Africa has proudly reported on the tour, including its finale in Soweto. Rebecca Hodes, who was on the scene in Soweto, gives this remarkable description of Khaled’s remarks.
According to Hodes, toward the end of her speech, Khaled said: “ISIS, I tell you, is a Zionist, American organization. Boko Haram is another Netanyahu. [Its leaders] are more Zionist than the Zionists… Beware the imperialists. They are vicious and they are collaborating with the Zionists to control the whole world….”
You may think that BDS-South Africa, just for the sake of damage control, would distance itself from Khaled’s remarks, or at least avoid mentioning them. Instead, they repeated them on Twitter. After the speech, Khaled “was presented with a gift as dozens of audience members vied for a decent angle for a cell phone snap.” But not before the crowd sang “one more revolutionary song” for, as BDS-South Africa put it, the “freedom fighter.”
Although Khaled has made similar statements in the course of her tour, not one supporter of BDS, as far as I know, has seen fit to distance himself from her. Wouldn’t want to alienate the base.