Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., told Jews on Tuesday that she loves them and does not hate them, despite years of hostility toward Jews and Israel, the Sun Sentinel reported.
“Tell everybody, I don’t hate you. I absolutely love you,” Tlaib said during an online panel hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that opposes the right of Jews to live in Israel.
New York Times columnist Peter Beinart, professor Barbara Ransby and professor Marc Lamont Hill, who oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, also spoke on the panel titled, “Dismantling Antisemitism, Winning Justice,” the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reported.
“If anybody comes through my doors or through any forum to try to push anti-Semitism forward, you will hear me being loud with my bullhorn to tell them to get the hell out,” she said.
Tlaib and JVP also support the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which asserts that Jews live on stolen land and that Israel must abandon some or all of its territory.
Many describe the BDS movement as anti-Semitic and some believe it has connections to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, but Tlaib called it “part of our American fabric.”
The left-wing Anti-Defamation League said Tlaib may support the destruction of Israel based on a statement that she retweeted: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free – code for eradicating the State of Israel and its millions of Jews. Reminder—this is a sitting U.S. Congresswoman,” StopAntisemitism.org said, according to Fox News.
Tlaib also stood by her comment that thinking about the the Holocaust gives her a “calming feeling,” saying that Republicans distorted the meaning of her words.
“There’s always kind of a calming feeling, when I think of the tragedy of the Holocaust,” she said in May 2019, “that it was my ancestors—Palestinians—who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways have been wiped out … in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust, post-tragedy and the horrific persecution of the Jews across the world at that time.”
The radical leftist panelists agreed that the greatest threat to Jews comes from conservatives, though the Left suffers from anti-Semitism, too.
“There is anti-Semitism on the left as well,” Beinart said. “It’s very important that as we fight against the greatest anti-Semitic threat, which is from the [w]hite nationalist [R]ight, that we also show a great concern to make sure that progressive movements are not tainted by anti-Semitism.”
Tlaib said her support for Jews comes from a shared experience of oppression.
“I realized just how anti[-S]emitism was so connected to my freedom, to my right to live as a Muslim in our country, as a child of immigrants,” she said.
“I really realized just the connection of the anti-Muslim, anti-blackness, anti-immigrant and Jewish movement that was out there, and … if you open the curtain, it’s the same people coming after us.”
She said she does not think that the fight for justice should embrace intersectionality—the progressive doctrine that certain physical and social characteristics determine a person’s position as oppressed or privileged.
“I also think it’s really important to really center something I heard from one of my beautiful black neighbors, who teach me more and more about fighting racism, including anti[-S]emitism and so much more, is that there’s no hierarchy of who’s hurting the most,” she said.
