Originally published at Moral Low Ground

Rae Abileah, an activist from the anti-war group CodePink, was assaulted by a group of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) thugs after she interrupted a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint session of the US Congress in Washington, DC earlier today.

According to The Raw Story, Abileah shouted “STOP ISRAELI WAR CRIMES!” and was then tackled by the AIPAC Zionists. She sustained injuries to her neck and shoulder and was taken to George Washington University Hospital for treatment. While there, she was placed under arrest for bravely standing up to Israeli crimes against humanity.

Abileah said she was “in great pain” but her ordeal was nothing “compared to the pain and suffering that Palestinians go through on a regular basis.”

“I have been to Gaza and the West Bank,” she said. “I have seen Palestinians’ homes bombed and bulldozed, I have talked to mothers whose children have been killed during the invasion of Gaza, I have seen the Jewish-only roads leading to ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank. This kind of occupation cannot continue… I feel obligated to rise up and speak out against these crimes being committed in my name and with my tax dollars.”

Bravo, Ms. Abileah. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And yet she was arrested, not the vile war criminal Netanyahu, who presides over one of the most despicably racist, colonialist states on earth?

If I were half as much of a baby-slaughtering war criminal as Netanyahu, I would wish that every Israeli who supports their illegitimate state’s daily atrocities against the occupied Palestinian people could sample just a taste of the constant death, suffering and humiliation perpetrated in their names against their innocent neighbors. But I am not, and so I don’t. But I can certainly understand those who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and although I am a pacifist, I can empathize with those who would resort to “terrorism” out of utter desperation and hopelessness. After all, “terrorism” is in the eye of the terrorized. And as far as I’m concerned, Israel and its American enablers are two of the most prolific terrorist states on the planet.

As usual, Netanyahu hid behind the facade of democracy when confronted with dissent. “You know, I take it as a badge of honor, and so should you, that in our free societies that you can have protest,” he said to Congress right after Abileah’s interruption, a true humanitarian intervention (albeit a largely ineffective one). “You can’t have these protests in the farcical parliaments in Tehran or Tripoli,” he added, receiving thunderous applause from the congressmen and women who practically fall over each other to pander to their Zionist benefactors.

Of course, those who disgustingly defend Zionism and Israeli atrocities will probably call me an anti-Semite, and they’ll probably try to tar Ms. Abileah with the same desperately ugly brush. But they would be quite mistaken, for Abileah is Jewish, and so is my entire mother’s side of my family. I even attended several years of Hebrew school as an adolescent. The  Zionists  have a special hatred and a special name for their co-religionists who bravely stand up for what is right and just in that eminently unjust corner of the world: “self-hating Jews.”

Now there’s a real “badge of honor,” Bibi.