After Rashida Tlaib complained about anti-Palestinian bias in elite circles, politicians and journalists spent days defaming her using a fake quote. It’s the kind of mendacious treatment that has become the norm against pro-Palestine voices since October 7.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaks during a news conference about the Justice for All Act outside the Capitol on March 9, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Another week, another ridiculous, ginned-up controversy aimed at the US Congress’s sole Palestinian American member.
Over the weekend, a clearly coordinated smear campaign got rolling against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), centered on comments she had made about Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel’s outrageous decision to charge protesters on the University of Michigan campus with felonies. Here is what she said:
We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs. . . . I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it. I think President [Santa] Ono and Board of Regent members were very much heavy-handed in this. It had to come from somewhere.
A broad swath of political and media establishment figures swiftly pounced on the nearly-two-week-old comments to accuse Tlaib of saying that the reason Nessel was prosecuting these protesters was because she was Jewish. That included Nessel herself and a state senator who had early on claimed the remarks were an example of the antisemitic “dual loyalty” charge, as well as Jewish Insider and its editor in chief, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has now also hopped on the phantom outrage bus, after being pressured to do so by CNN.
This all might be confusing since, as anyone can plainly see, there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely antisemitic about what Tlaib said. Her remarks were about how pro-Palestinian protesters are being treated very differently from activists for other causes (something that is undoubtedly true), that this suggests a political bias within the prosecutor’s office, and that she may have been pressured into such an action by university administrators.
There were other statements from Tlaib in the Metro Times report — about how these prosecutions are making the campus less safe and will set a dangerous precedent, how they may well harm these kids’ futures, how the protesters were peaceful and welcoming, and the hypocrisy of universities who crack down on protesters now while valorizing student protesters in the past. But none of these fit what Tlaib’s enemies are claiming she said. Go ahead and read for yourself if you’re not convinced.
In fact, this charge against Tlaib is so self-evidently false that the Metro Times has put up a fact-check of the claim written by the original report’s author, who has called the claim “spurious,” and included the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ condemnation of it as a “blatant and hateful hoax.” The reporter has since then outright accused Tapper of “spreading lies.”
Blatant Anti-Palestinian Bias
This all came two days after the National Review, a magazine with a long and storied history of racism and support for apartheid, published a cartoon showing Tlaib with an exploded pager on her desk, implying she’s a member of Hezbollah, which Israel is currently trying to start a war with. (Hezbollah is not Palestinian, but Lebanese Shia, making National Review not just racist, but stupid too.) Tlaib has long been a target of both pro-Israel and white supremacist harassment thanks to her support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israeli policy, and has been just one of the progressive Squad of lawmakers to get death threats after October 7 last year thanks to exactly these kinds of misleading and irresponsible claims.
Tlaib’s critics would likely point to her line about “possible biases” within the AG’s office as evidence of what they’re saying, the last piece of flotsam they have to cling to in this sea of bullshit. What biases could she possibly be talking about, they would ask, if not those stemming from Nessel’s Jewishness?
The simple answer is the anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim biases that this conflict reminds us are still rife and widely accepted in establishment circles. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2021, “The evidence that the Squad’s critics are anti-Palestinian is far stronger than the evidence that the Squad is anti-Jewish,” but this fact goes completely undiscussed in American politics and media, “not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare but because it is ubiquitous.”
You could fill a book with all the examples of this we’ve seen since October 7, with outright calls for genocide, patently offensive comments, and even the very slogans we keep being told are unacceptable to use going by with absolutely no condemnation in official circles — as long as they’re aimed as Palestinians.
During the presidential debate, when Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of hating Israel and Arabs, both the moderators and the candidate herself only felt the need to push back on the Israel part. Just the other week, in a hearing on hate crimes no less, a senator accused an Arab American witness of supporting Hamas and told her to “hide your head in a bag.” He was not censured nor condemned by many of his colleagues, and what he said got nothing even approaching the media attention as this made-up quote from Tlaib.
Part of a Pattern
This is all beyond shameful, especially for a network like CNN, which presents itself as a down-the-line purveyor of truth and facts. Yet here some of its top anchors are, spreading an entirely fabricated quote and doubling down when called out for it.
It’s part of a pattern at the network. When Rep. Pramila Jayapal said on the network that we should reserve some outrage for the at that point fifteen thousand Palestinians killed by Israel, Bash replied that “it’s horrible, but you don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.” (Reports of widespread rape and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers have since come to light.)
When Nina Turner brought up the then thirty thousand dead in Gaza while discussing the uncommitted protest vote in Michigan, she was quickly interrupted by anchor Anderson Cooper, who said “there’s also been slaughter in Israel” and admonished her for giving a “lecture.” Unique among news outlets, CNN allows all of its Israel-related stories to be subject to the Israeli military’s censor.
Also deserving special mention is ADL CEO Greenblatt. By falsely claiming that Tlaib “accuses the attorney general of prosecuting protestors simply because she’s Jewish,” he was engaging in the specific thing that, as per its name, his own organization is dedicated to combating: defamation.
By contrast, read Greenblatt’s statement on a genuinely antisemitic speech Trump made last week to the Israeli American Council about, ironically, “Fighting Antisemitism in America.” In the space of just a couple of minutes, Trump said US Jews “oughta have your heads examined”; repeatedly suggested American Jews vote based on what’s best for Israel (they don’t); and preemptively blamed Jews for losing, turning an entire community into targets of hate for his supporters’ ire if things go wrong for him in November.
In that case, Greenblatt felt the need to repeatedly praise the person who made the antisemitic remarks and go out of his way to make clear he “appreciate[d]” Trump’s speech overall.
This, too, is part of a pattern for Greenblatt and the ADL, both of whom have a lengthy history of downplaying blatant antisemitism by Trump, with the organization also defending and minimizing Islamophobia, as when the ADL’s previous CEO expressly defended bigoted protests against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” in 2010. This kind of thing, as well as a number of other reports casting doubts on the organization’s political impartiality, is why Wikipedia deemed the ADL an “unreliable” source on the Israel-Palestine conflict that it would no longer use, a decision vindicated by Greenblatt’s slander of Tlaib this past weekend.
A Campaign of Fake News
This is a campaign of fake news no different from Trump and right-wing media’s nonsense about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets. The only difference is that it’s not Trump and conservative outlets spreading it, but the Democrats and liberal-leaning network that just a week ago was condemning this kind of behavior when the Right was doing it; and that the target of this campaign isn’t Haitian migrants in Ohio, but the most prominent Palestinian official in the country.
Amazingly, this whole episode is proving so embarrassing and potentially damaging, some of those involved have now chosen to walk back their claims. Jewish Insider has downgraded its original description of Tlaib having “claimed” the thing she didn’t say to merely having “suggested” it. Greenblatt issued a sort-of retraction, thanking Whitmer for saying “such suggestions of bias are wrong” and alluding vaguely to an unexplained “error in the specifics of the congresswoman’s remarks.” Bash, too, issued a half-hearted “clarification” today that didn’t quite make clear she had spread misinformation.
Meanwhile, Jake Tapper said to Nessel on air last night that he “misspoke yesterday when asking a follow-up of Governor Whitmer,” and that he had simply been “trying to characterize your views of Tlaib’s comments.” (For the record, here is what Tapper had said: “Tlaib is suggesting [Nessel] shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not. That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?”)
While this is somewhat encouraging, in the end it proves Tlaib’s point. If an anchor or news outlet had fabricated an incendiary quote like this from an official of almost any other background, they would not have simply quietly tweaked their wording, announced a “clarification,” or offhandedly claimed they misspoke. There would have been lengthy apologies. Heads would have rolled. Careers might even have ended.
This absurd incident is just one among many since October 7 in which it is not just that the normal rules for ethical journalistic practice are tossed out the window when Palestinians are involved, but also that the basic respect for clearly observable truths and fictions no longer seem to matter. Just look at Bash and others flippantly comparing campus protesters — many of whom are Jewish, and involved in protests 98 percent of which have seen no property damage or physical altercations — to the Nazi pogroms of the 1930s. History will someday look back at this period as a dark one where our society’s most prestigious interpreters of reality repeatedly lied to us about the supposed bigotry of figures like Tlaib for the high crime of opposing genocide.
In any case, the gambit has clearly worked. We’re still talking about what Tlaib did or didn’t say. We’re not talking about the racism aimed at her over the weekend and how it’s part and parcel of the wider anti-Palestinian bigotry that’s shockingly pervasive in official circles. We’re not talking about Nessel’s absurd and authoritarian attack on the right to protest in Michigan. Since at least as far back as the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, this has been the point of these kinds of accusations: to distract from the issue at hand, and to turn victimizer into victim.
Everyone involved in slandering Tlaib in this way should be ashamed of themselves. The culture in establishment circles that sees Palestinians as barely human means none of them will.