Khalek and EI head Ali Abunimah want readers to associate being "pro-Israel" with racism and hatred of Muslims. And this crazy habitual criminal from Florida is all they need for their bigoted readers to connect the dots.
As Khalek says:
In a 12 July Facebook post, Schreiber wrote, “ALL ISLAM IS RADICAL , and should be considered TERRORIST AND CRIMANALS [sic].”And who are those individuals and organizations? Follow the links and you find many pro-Israel organizations and people who are surely against Islamic terror and Islamic political extremism, but most of whom do not in any way "spew anti-Muslim hatred."
With such rhetoric, Schreiber was echoing the anti-Muslim messages emanating from organizations and high-profile individuals who have been spewing anti-Muslim hatred for years.
Under EI's rules of journalism, if you can find any link between a criminal bigot and a Zionist - they vote for the same party, for example - then the Zionist is proven to be bigoted. If A and B both belong to set C then A=B. This is the false equivalence fallacy and it is Electronic Intifada's lifeblood.
EI has a long history of using guilt by association using this fallacy. It does it to an insane degree - it appears that if someone's uncle's dog's previous owner once said something that could be interpreted as pro-Israel, they label him as a "Zionist extremist." Using this bizarre logic, Khalek once attempted to link me with Anders Behring Breivik using a post where I explicitly called him evil, a psychopath and a terrorist. (Max Blumenthal eagerly picked up on that association, showing that his journalistic standards are exactly equal to those of Electronic Intifada.)
If those are the rules, then we can safely link Rania Khalek and Ali Abunimah with everyone who shares their opinions that a Jewish state should not exist. By their own rules, the editors and fans of Electronic Intifada can all be associated with neo-Nazis.
And ISIS.
And the KKK.
And Syria's president Assad. And Saddam Hussein. And Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei. And Islamic Jihad. And Hamas.
In fact, if Khalek can associate a crazed arsonist with pro-Israel organizations who she claims are Islamophobic (most of them aren't, by any sane definition), then it would make a great deal of sense to associate Khalek and Abunimah with the Palestinian who used a meat cleaver to slice up a New York cop, and who had previously harassed Jews by screaming "Allahu Akbar" outside a synagogue. He is just doing what his fellow Palestinians like to do to civilians in Israel. After all, there is no doubt that the madman was pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, just like they are. Therefore, by their logic, they are associated with their fellow Arab who attacks innocent New Yorkers.
But why stop there? The 9/11 terrorists also shared the same anti-Israel and anti-American philosophy Khalek and Abunimah do. Therefore, Khalek is linked to Al Qaeda, using her own methods of fact-finding and journalism! She's just as bad as Bin Laden, who hated Israel just like Khalek does!
(Actually, the links between Abunimah/Khalek and antisemitism are far closer than the links they try to forge between Zionists and racists. After all, they explicitly deny the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.)
I don't need to resort to such lazy and illogical methods to smear haters like those who write for Electronic Intifada. Their own lies damn them directly. But it is important to show how low they are willing to go to push their agenda by using their major weapons of guilt by association and false equivalence - even when there is no association to speak of.
Why do they rely so heavily on this method?
Because when it comes down to actually debating facts and ideas, they've got nothing.