Claims of Rashida Tlaib’s Antisemitism Are False

Sep 30, 2024

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib recently criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for selectively prosecuting pro-Palestinian protestors at the University of Michigan. She was quickly condemned on numerous fronts for supposedly being antisemitic toward Nessel, who is Jewish.

CNN host Jake Tapper, in an interview with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, asked the governor what she thought of Tlaib’s comment that Nessel was “only doing it because she’s Jewish.” The Jewish Insider, a weekly paper in the Los Angeles area repeated Tapper’s assertion, which led Jonathon Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, to chime in, “When a congresswoman accuses the attorney general of prosecuting protestors simply because she’s Jewish, it’s bias.”

Governor Whitmer initially attempted to take a neutral stance when she responded to Tapper saying, “I’m not going to get in the middle of this argument they’re having.” After receiving criticism for her failure to defend Nessel, Whitmer reversed course, saying in a statement put out by Tapper, “The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic.”

Then a Detroit News columnist submitted a ‘cartoon of the day’ to the National Review depicting Tlaib as a Hezbollah member whose pager just exploded on her desk. While condemning the obviously racist depiction of Tlaib in the cartoon, Nessel doubled down on the claim that Tlaib’s comments were antisemitic.

There is one problem with all these attacks on Tlaib’s supposed antisemitism. She never said a word about Nessel being Jewish in her original criticism of Nessel’s decision to prosecute the protestors. Her original comment, which she made in an interview with the Detroit weekly newspaper MetroTimes, 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.” It was the writer from the MetroTimeswho mentioned Nessel being Jewish, saying “Tlaib also criticized Nessel, who is the first Jewish person elected Attorney General of Michigan, for what she believes is a biased approach to the protest.”

Rashida Tlaib was right to call Nessel out for her selective choice to charge the pro-Palestinian protestors at the university. The real issue is that Nessel chose to intervene as the state’s Attorney General overriding the decision of local Washtenaw County prosecutors not to.

Nessel and Whitmer are powerful players in today’s Democratic Party and with the elections not far off, they dutifully defend the policy of U.S. imperialism in its support of Israel’s murderous campaign against the Palestinians. They and their supporters in the corporate media use the false flag of antisemitism in an attempt to silence any dissent against continued U.S. support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder against the Palestinians.

And this is the real issue. It’s not the last example of such repression they are preparing.