(Headline USA) Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., is reportedly a part of a private social-media group that celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israeli civilians and called for increased violence against the Jewish state.
The group is called the Palestinian American Congress and is hidden from non-members on Facebook. Its founder, Maher Abdel-qader, has extensive ties to Tlaib and a long history of anti-Semitism, including past social media posts on which he questioned whether the Holocaust occurred.
Tlaib has been a member of the private group for at least six years and even posted in it during her 2018 congressional campaign, encouraging the group’s members to help her campaign.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, members of the Palestinian American Congress repeatedly posted pro-Hamas content, according to Fox News.
One member posted a picture of an Israeli woman being held captive by a Hamas fighter and wrote, “We don’t want to throw you in the sea … we want you to ride it back where you came from.”
On Oct. 19, another group member applauded the “achievements” of the “resistance in Northern occupied Palestine,” along with a picture of a Hamas terrorist.
Others denied that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
“You consider Hamas a terrorist organization and I am not going to argue with you at the same time you have been broadcasting that they have been killing women and children, guess that is what terrorists do at the same time no mention to the killing of Palestinian women, children and entire families killed on a daily basses [sic] by the [peace-loving] state of Israel using American gifts of weapons and jet fighters,” one user wrote.
Tlaib’s refusal to condemn Hamas’s attack on Israel has prompted backlash from her peers in Congress, who voted to censure her, as well as from her own constituents.
Though Tlaib’s district includes the largest Arab–American population in the country, several local residents said she is only listening to the most radical groups.
“I was hopeful that she was going to represent the whole district,” resident Pamela Lippitt told the New York Times. “But she just—she doesn’t represent me.”
