A post from a Dutch IDF soldier appealing for help on Facebook after she was accused of being a jihadist by Al Jazeera. Photo: Facebook / Screenshot.

A young Dutch woman on Wednesday appealed for help on Facebook to counter slurs against her by a columnist for Al Jazeera, who used her photo without permission and called the blonde Israeli Navy recruit a jihadist.

Before describing “Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip,”  Al Jazeera columnist Hanine Hassan, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, the former home of the late unofficial spokesman Palestinian Professor Edward Said, chose to single out and humiliate Katie by featuring her by name, linking to her photo on Instagram and making her an object of scorn, in a long screed vilifying IDF soldiers and the thousands of foreign volunteers who served honorably for the Israeli Defense Forces.

“Her name is Katie. She is from the Netherlands, and chose to serve in the Israeli navy instead of remaining in her country.”

“Will her government label her and the rest of the hundreds of Dutch youth serving in the Israeli military as jihadstrijders (jihad fighters), the name given to the hundred or so that went to Syria? Katie, a Dutch-Israeli dual citizen, is after all a jihadist in occupied Palestinian lands.”

The Algemeiner removed Katie’s full name from a screenshot of her post on the ‘Secret Tel Aviv’ page on Facebook, where it’s since been deleted, as she sought desperately to find out how she could remove herself from Al Jazeera’s sights.

In the post, Katie said, “I’m in the Netherlands right now but I need your help urgently! Again there has been a false post about me being a jihadist with a link to my picture.”

She asked, “Does anyone know how I could do something about it, maybe sue them to take it down?”

On Al Jazeera, Hassan went on to indict U.S. GI’s after World War II who volunteered to serve in Israel’s War of Independence, when the Arab League refused the “two states for two peoples” concept introduced by the United Nations, and declared war on the nascent state.

Hassan wrote, “In the 1948 war, as many as 4,000 World War II veterans from the US, Canada and Europe carried out military operations against Palestinians, serving the Zionist project with their expertise in warfare, artillery, naval and aerial combat…”

“The late Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, later attributed the successful outcome of the war to the support of foreign fighters: ‘They came to us when we most needed them, during those hard and uncertain days of our 1948 war of independence.'”

“In supporting and developing Israel’s military power, these western recruits deliberately contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns, the dispossession and depopulation of Palestinian communities, and the massacres inflicted on them.”

She said,  “Israel is applying outright treachery in its recruitment of young Jews worldwide, through tens of programmes… There are many faces to the Israeli occupation, some of which are well-known, and some of which are hidden. The indirect reinforcement of the Israeli army with European and American soldiers is one such opaque form of complicity.”

But it was Hassan’s post on Al Jazeera, which Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has proposed be banned for its incitement against Jews and hate speech against Israel, that showed the scholar’s own “opaque form of complicity.” By targeting Dutch IDF volunteer Katie, and using her image without permission, Hassan contradicted her own doctoral thesis through moral equivalency, doing to Katie online exactly what she accuses Israel of doing in Gaza.

After Hassan’s byline, Al Jazeera said: “Her research focuses on the long-term effects of humiliation as a tool of oppression by Israel in the occupied Palestinian Territories.”