Some
people may not realise it, given that her solidarity work with the Palestinians
has been erased from coverage of her death, but Kayla Mueller, the most recent
hostage killed by ISIS, had a history of Palestine solidarity work.  Kayla had accompanied children in Hebron to
school and back to help protect them against the vicious thugs who constitute
the Hebron settlers.  She was involved in
the Sheik Jarrah protests.

But
if the BBC has erased all mention of her Palestine solidarity work Zionist activists
in the United States have actively celebrated her death and demonstrated
vividly their own sickness.

Tony
Greenstein

Electronic Intifada, Rania Khalek on Wed, 02/11/2015 –
22:17

Hardline
supporters of Israel are expressing joy over the death of 26-year-old
humanitarian aid worker and sometime Palestine solidarity activist Kayla
Mueller, who was killed while in captivity of Islamic State last week.

Islamic
State (also variously abbreviated as IS, ISIS or ISIL) claimed that
Mueller died in a Jordanian airstrike in Syria coordinated with the United States.

Although
it has yet to verify the circumstances, the US government on Tuesday confirmed that Mueller was killed, prompting an
outpouring of tributes from people around the world lauding her humanitarian
activism.

But for
Israel’s most hawkish supporters, Mueller’s solidarity work with Palestinians
resisting Israeli occupation made her unworthy of sympathy and even deserving
of death. 

Joel
Pollak, editor-in-chief at Breitbart, called Mueller an
“anti-Israel activist” who admired the terrorists who killed her. 

In an
opinion piece at the ultra-nationalist Israeli publication Arutz
Sheva, anti-Palestinian activist Lee Kaplan called Kayla Mueller’s death “another Rachel
Corrie propaganda story in the making, and the western media is falling for it
again, or embracing it on purpose.” 

Rachel Corrie, an American human rights activist, was
deliberately run over and killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003
while defending a Palestinian home in Gaza from demolition.

Rightwing
Zionists often refer to Corrie as a “terrorist” who deserved to die and
characterize the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the nonviolent
solidarity organization she volunteered for in Palestine, as a supporter of
terrorism. 

While in
Palestine in 2010, Mueller, like Corrie, worked with ISM in solidarity with Palestinians
resisting ethnic cleansing and dispossession in the Israeli-occupied West Bank,
including Jerusalem.

Mueller
participated in nonviolent protests with Palestinians against Israeli home
demolitions and walked Palestinian children to school to protect them from
harassment by Jewish settlers — the kind of work ISM is known for. 

“As an
ISM activist [Mueller] was a tool for the worldwide jihad,” wrote Kaplan,
adding, “she paid the ultimate price for that choice.”

American-born
Rabbi Ben Packer shared Kaplan’s op-ed on his Facebook
page along with the comment, “All sympathy – GONE!!”

Packer,
who served as the “Rabbi on Campus” at Duke University and the University of
North Carolina (UNC) after a stint in the Israeli army, is currently “Supreme
Commander” of “Heritage House,” a Jewish settlement in
occupied East Jerusalem that provides lodging for Jewish tourists and “lone
soldiers,” essentially foreign fighters recruited from abroad to participate in
Israel’s military occupation in Palestine.

Packer
went on to respond enthusiastically to a friend who remarked that Islamic
State should have burned Mueller alive like it did the
captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasassbeh. 

In a blog
post titled, “Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch,” conservative
blogger Debbie Schlussel calls Mueller “a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap
who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block
them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel.”

Schlussel concludes
her post with the following farewell: “Buh-bye, Kayla. Have fun with your 72
Yasser Arafats.”

Right-wing
blogger Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit added his voice to the mix, accusing
Mueller of “protesting Jews.” 

As
right-wing Zionists and Islamophobes cheer Mueller’s death, mainstream media
outlets are actively whitewashing her Palestine activism.

In a timeline of Mueller’s humanitarian work, USA
Today completely erased her work in Palestine, saying only that
between 2010 and 2011, she worked in “Tel Aviv, Israel, volunteering at the
African Refugee Development Center.” 

Although
a more in-depth USA Today article specified that Mueller worked with ISM
for the Palestinian cause, the article claimed she did so in Israel, vaguely
noting that Mueller “would walk to school with children in the morning and then
make sure they returned home safely later in the day.” 

Mueller
escorted Palestinian children to school in Hebron in
the occupied West Bank, not “Israel,” to protect them from violent Jewish
settlers. Leaving out such crucial details obscures the reality of Israeli
violence. 

While
some outlets shied away from emphasizing Mueller’s Palestine activism, others
framed her death as a consequence of it.

The
liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz implied that her involvement in
Palestine led to her death with the headline, “US idealist Kayla
Mueller’s road to ISIS captivity went through West Bank.” 

The
Washington Post seemed
to agree, with an article titled, “How Kayla Mueller’s pro-Palestinian
activism led her to Syria.” 

Despite
the gross displays of celebration from pro-Israel extremists, the vast majority
of people have expressed sadness for Mueller’s death. However, it
is difficult to take them all at face value. 

For
example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his condolences. “On behalf of the people
of Israel, I wish to send condolences to President Obama, the American people
and the family of Kayla Mueller. We stand with you,” he said. 

This is
the same man whose army routinely targets and kills aid workers while obstructing
desperately needed humanitarian assistance to Palestinians trapped in the
besieged Gaza ghetto. 

Equally
disingenuous were the remarks by US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who enables American and Israeli
atrocities for a living by vetoing any and all attempts to hold either power
accountable for human rights abuses and war crimes.  

Between
the Zionist backlash against Mueller, the outlets erasing her Palestine
activism and those using her death to advance their own agendas,
there is one constant: Mueller’s support for Palestinians against Israeli
oppression is a taboo that must be ignored, obscured or ridiculed.