Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., insisted this week that she is not anti-Israel, despite multiple anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist comments she’s made in the past.
In an interview with the Detroit Jewish News, Tlaib claimed her position on Israel has been “misinterpreted or not fully understood.”
She also argued that she should have “complete freedom” to speak up about Palestinian rights “without being targeted as being anti-Jewish.”
However, there’s nothing subtle about Tlaib’s anti-Semitism. Just this month, she tweeted her support for a Palestinian terrorist who rammed his car into an Israeli police checkpoint in an attempt to kill several officers. Tlaib retweeted several users claiming the driver had been “murdered” by Israeli officers who were just trying to defend themselves.
In January, Tlaib falsely blamed Israelis for the death of a Palestinian child, disseminating a blood libel spread by Palestinian propagandists. Tlaib eventually deleted her tweet, but did not apologize for spreading blatant falsehoods about Israel.
And this week, Tlaib reiterated her support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. She told the Jewish News that the boycott is “part of our American fabric,” arguing that there is nothing racist or anti-Semitic about it.
“People want to taint the freedom to boycott. It’s a peaceful way to speak up and say: ‘I’m against these human rights violations or these policies and this racism.’ And I am absolutely, very much adamant that people need the right to boycott,” she said. “So absolutely, people need to stop saying that the BDS movement is somehow anti-Semitic — there are Jews who support the BDS movement. There are folks who truly believe in stopping racism of all forms, and they use the boycott as a form of speech.”
The BDS movement is sponsored by a number of Palestinian terrorist groups that regularly target Israeli citizens. Its ultimate goal is to cut off Israel from the rest of the world financially, thereby forcing it to surrender its government over to Palestine. Several BDS leaders have even admitted that they’d like to see Israel wiped off the map completely.
Tlaib has refused to address these facts about BDS, though, and instead told the Jewish News that criticism of her support for the movement is in bad faith.
“I think some of it is anti-Arab. It’s anti-Palestinian…. My mere existence created this tension of, ‘She must be this way. This is who she is. This is how all Palestinians are,’” she said. “Before I even opened my mouth, as soon as I won, it was just complete attack. And it was anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab movement. Not as much Muslim. The white supremacists, those folks came after.”
She then doubled down on her call for a one-state solution, claiming that the current conditions in Israel make a peaceful two-state solution “impossible.”
“The two-state [solution] is almost impossible now around the racist policies of [Israeli Prime MInister Benjamin] Netanyahu — that [a] two-state would be impossible without actually hurting Israelis,” she said. “If you think about some of the Israeli families [who] have been in those communities for almost five decades, is the solution to push them out and recreate that kind of hurt? I just don’t know how you uproot people yet again.”
