It’s another week of absurd, contrived controversy aimed at the only Palestinian-American member of the U.S. Congress.
Over the weekend, a clearly coordinated smear campaign was launched against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) centering around comments she made about Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s outrageous decision to charge protesters on the University of Michigan campus with felony charges. Here is what she said:
We have the right to dissent, the right to protest. We have dissent on climate issues, immigrant rights, black lives matter, even the injustice of water shutoffs. But the Attorney General seems to have decided that if the issue is Palestine, she’s going to treat it differently. That alone is enough to suggest that there may have been bias within the institution she runs. I think people at the University of Michigan pressured her to do it, and she fell for it. I think President Ono and the board of trustees were very heavy-handed on this. There must have been pressure from somewhere.
Across the political and media establishment, people quickly jumped on those comments from nearly two weeks ago to condemn Tlaib for saying Nessel prosecuted these protesters because she is Jewish, including Nessel herself, a state senator who was quick to claim the comments were an example of anti-Semitic “dual loyalty” accusations, Jewish Insider and its editor-in-chief, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, pressured by CNN, also jumped on the phantom outrage bus.
All this may be confusing, since for all to see, there seems to be nothing anti-Semitic about Tlaib’s comments: she was talking about how pro-Palestinian protesters are being treated very differently from other activists (which is undoubtedly a fact), how this suggests political bias within the prosecutor’s office, and that she may have been pressured by university authorities to act in this way.
The Metro Times report also includes other statements from Tlaib about how the charges would make campuses less safe and set a dangerous precedent, how they could negatively impact students’ futures, how the protests were peaceful and welcome, and the hypocrisy of a university that has praised student protests in the past but is now cracking down on them. But none of this lines up with what Tlaib’s opponents claim she said. Read it for yourself if you’re not convinced.
In fact, the accusations against Tlaib are so patently false that the Metro Times ran a fact-check of the claims made by the author of the original article, calling them “false” and citing a condemnation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a “blatant, hateful fabrication.” The reporter has since publicly accused Tapper of “spreading lies.”
All this happened two days after National Review, a magazine with a long and storied history of racism and support for apartheid, published a cartoon of Tlaib with an exploding pager on her desk, implying that she is a member of Hezbollah, with whom Israel is now trying to start a war. (Hezbollah is not Palestinian, but Lebanese Shiite, so National Review is not only racist, it’s stupid.) Tlaib has long been the target of harassment from both pro-Israel and white supremacists for her support of Palestinian rights and criticism of Israeli policies, and she is one of the progressive caucuses to have received death threats since October 7 for making exactly these misleading and irresponsible claims.
Tlaib’s critics will point to her comments about “possible bias” within the attorney general’s office as evidence of what they are saying — the last remnant they have to fall back on in this sea of nonsense. What bias, they will ask, are they talking about if not bias arising from Nesser’s Jewishness?
The answer is simple: the anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotry that this conflict reminds us of remains pervasive and widely accepted among the establishment. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2021, “the evidence that critics of the Squad are anti-Palestinian is far stronger than the evidence that the Squad is anti-Semitic,” yet this fact goes completely undiscussed in American politics and media. “It’s not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare, but because it’s ubiquitous.”
The list of examples we have seen since October 7 could fill a book: blatant calls for genocide, patently offensive comments, and slogans that we have been told not to use, are being circulated with zero official rebuke when directed at Palestinians.
When Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of hating Israel and Arabs during a presidential debate, both the moderator and the candidate herself only felt the need to rebut the Israel part. Just last week, at a hearing on hate crimes, a senator accused an Arab American witness of supporting Hamas and told him to “hide his head in a bag.” He was not rebuked or condemned by many of his colleagues, and his remarks did not garner the same media attention as this Tlaib fabrication.
This is shameful behavior, especially for a network like CNN that positions itself as a conveyor of truth and facts, yet some of its top anchors are spreading completely fabricated statements and then becoming even more condemned when they are called out for them.
This is part of a pattern at the network: When Rep. Pramila Jayapal told the network that people should be outraged at the 15,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, Bash responded, “As horrible as it sounds, I’ve never seen an Israeli soldier rape a Palestinian woman.” (Reports have since come to light about widespread rape and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers.)
When Nina Turner, discussing Michigan’s pending protest vote, mentioned the then-30,000 deaths in Gaza, anchor Anderson Cooper quickly interrupted her, saying “there were genocides in Israel, too,” and scolded Turner for “lecturing.” Unusually for a news organization, CNN subjects all Israel-related news to censorship by the Israeli military.
Also worthy of special mention is ADL CEO Greenblatt: By falsely claiming that Tlaib “was prosecuting a protester solely because she’s Jewish,” he played into the specific thing his organization, as its name suggests, is dedicated to fighting: defamation.
By contrast, just read Greenblatt’s statement about the truly anti-Semitic speech Trump gave last week to the Israeli-American Council, ironically about “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America.” In the space of just a few minutes, Trump said American Jews “should have their heads examined,” repeatedly suggested that American Jews should vote based on what’s best for Israel (they haven’t), and preemptively blamed Jews for losing, including casting the entire Jewish community as a target for his supporters’ angry hatred if things didn’t go well for him in November.
In that case, Greenblatt felt the need to repeatedly praise someone who had made anti-Semitic remarks and go out of his way to make it clear that he “appreciated” Trump’s entire speech.
This is all part of a pattern for Greenblatt and the ADL. Both have a long history of downplaying Trump’s blatant anti-Semitism, and the organization has defended and downplayed Islamophobia. The ADL’s former CEO outright defended bigoted protests against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in 2010. This, and many other reports that call into question the organization’s political impartiality, have led Wikipedia to consider the ADL an “unreliable” source on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to no longer use it, a decision vindicated by Greenblatt’s smears of Tlaib last weekend.
This is a fake news campaign no different from the nonsense reports by Trump and the right-wing media about Haitian immigrants eating pets, except that it is not being spread by Trump or the conservative media, but by Democrats and liberal-leaning networks who were condemning this kind of behavior when it was being done by the right just a week ago, and the target of this campaign is not Haitian immigrants in Ohio, but the most prominent Palestinian official in the country.
Amazingly, this whole affair has proven so embarrassing and potentially damaging that some of those involved have now chosen to retract their claims. Jewish Insider has downgraded its original statement that Tlaib “asserted things she did not say” to simply “suggested.” Greenblatt issued a near-retraction, thanking Whitmer for saying that “any such suggestion of bias is false,” and vaguely alluding to “misdetails in the Senator’s remarks” that remain unexplained. Bash also issued a half-assed “clarification” today, without clarifying explicitly whether she spread misinformation.
Meanwhile, Jake Tapper addressed Nessel on air last night, saying he “misunderstood yesterday when asking about the update on Governor Whitmer,” and “was just trying to express your position on Tlaib’s comments.” (For the record, I quote Tapper’s statement: “Tlaib is suggesting that[Nessel]should not prosecute individuals who Nessel says are breaking the law, and that Nessel is only prosecuting them because she’s Jewish and the protesters aren’t. That’s a pretty egregious accusation. Do you believe that’s true?”)
This is somewhat encouraging, but ultimately proves Tlaib’s point: if an anchor or news organization had invented such inflammatory statements from an official of another background, they wouldn’t have simply quietly tweaked the language, issued an “explanation,” or blithely claimed error. They would have issued a lengthy apology. They would have been fired. Maybe even their careers would have been over.
This absurd incident is just one of many since October 7th. When Palestinians are involved, not only are the normal rules of journalistic ethical practice ignored, but basic respect for clearly observable truth and fiction no longer seems to matter. Consider how Bash and others have blithely compared campus protesters (many of whom are Jewish, and 98 percent of the protests did not result in property damage or physical confrontation) to the Nazi genocide of the 1930s. History will one day look back on this period as a dark one in which society’s most authoritative interpreters of reality repeatedly lied to us about the so-called bias of people like Tlaib, who committed the felony of opposing genocide.
Either way, the ploy clearly worked. We’re still talking about what Tlaib did or didn’t say. We’re not talking about the racism directed at her over the weekend and how it’s part of a broader anti-Palestinian prejudice that is shockingly prevalent among government officials. We’re not talking about Nesser’s absurd, autocratic attack on the right to protest in Michigan. At least since Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the purpose of this kind of accusation has been to deflect attention from the issue at hand and portray the perpetrators as victims.
Anyone who has slandered Tlaib in this way should feel ashamed. No one would feel ashamed in a regime culture that sees Palestinians as barely human.