Ro Khanna’s Unfortunate Encounter With Face-Eating Leopards

Ro Khanna was having a great week.

Everyone was feeding right into the publicity stunt he pulled by traveling to the West Bank and getting “detained” by Israelis. Ink was spilled in think-pieces, man-hours were spent on thorough “debunkings,” and Khanna got to fling all the slop he could in various Twitter fights.

In the attention economy age, things were going perfectly to plan. Ro was dominating the conversation.

There’s just one problem: it wasn’t enough for the people who it was meant to impress.

After his trip, Khanna did an interview with the terrorist-friendly third-worldist outlet Drop Site News, seeking to capitalize on his momentum. There, he was confronted by journalist Jeremy Scahill.

???? Jeremy Scahill asks Rep. Ro Khanna:

“Do Palestinians have a right to kill Israeli soldiers, Congressman?”

“On October 7, did Palestinians have a right to attack Israeli military bases in the Gaza envelope? Yes or no?”

???? Watch Khanna’s response in the attached clip. Longer… https://t.co/x05LkvFxgU pic.twitter.com/CmZqgpahBZ

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) July 14, 2026

“Do Palestinians have a right to kill Israeli soldiers, Congressman?”

“The first targets that were hit on the morning of October 7 were multiple military bases. Did Palestinian forces have the right to attack those military bases?”

Scahill, who does very cool things like call terrorists by their formal names (“The Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Forces”), subjected Khanna to a seven-minute struggle session where he repeatedly asked the Congressman to say October 7 was a good thing.

Khanna was forced to flail and give generic answers about “non-violent resistance” and even invoked Gandhi. But it wasn’t good enough for Scahill. He needed to endorse killing Israelis. He needed to say October 7 was justified. Anything less was insufficient.

I must say I delighted in the exchange. I will admit there was a time I fell on the more non-interventionist, anti-war side of foreign policy. I still do, to a large degree. But I was forced back toward the center as I realized gradually over time just how insane the “anti-war” faction is.

The reality is most of them aren’t anti-war when you scratch just a tad below the surface. What they actually are is anti-American and anti-Western. They side with terrorists, dictators, and adversaries of the United States. People like Scahill cry anti-imperialism and then have nothing to say about Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war of aggression against Ukraine.

Drop Site wasn’t the only one to call BS on Khanna’s stunt because it didn’t go far enough. Hasan Piker delivered the presidential hopeful a backhanded compliment, calling him “moveable” on Israel, which is better than, say, Chuck Schumer.

????”If he’s movable on this issue, we can get others to be far, far more aggressive in their posture. I will take Ro Khanna over Chuck Schumer. I will take Ro Khanna over Haley Stevens. I will take Ro Khanna over Cory Booker.” Hasan Piker discussing @RoKhanna‘s inconsistencies on… pic.twitter.com/vre16FIuAZ

— adri ♡ (@socialistadri) July 14, 2026

His audience’s reaction? To turn on Piker himself and call him impure.

The comments under Piker’s post and the Drop Site interview indicate that Khanna is learning a harsh lesson. Until he embraces out-and-out extermination of the Israeli state and support of Hamas, his silly games will get him nowhere. Only pure, uncut radicalism will do. He joined the leopards-eating-faces party, and now he’s got to dislodge the teeth from his orbital bone.

‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015