Rashida Tlaib Is Once Again the Target of an Anti-Palestinian Smear Campaign

Earlier this month, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, for prosecuting 11 pro-Palestine student protestors at the University of Michigan. “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib told the Detroit Metro Times in an interview published on September 13. “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.” 

Tlaib, who is the only Palestinian American in Congress, was pointing out pervasive, institutionalized anti-Palestinian bias. But her comments have become the target of a smear campaign that's been given legitimacy by CNN, calling her antisemitic because she criticized Nessel, who is Jewish. 

Last week, Nessel tweeted, supposedly in reference to Tlaib’s quote to the Metro Times, “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.” And, proving Tlaib’s point about anti-Palestinian bias, this lie had legs. On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper said on his primetime show, “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish.” Of course, that's not what Tlaib said, but that didn’t stop another CNN anchor, Dana Bash, from doubling down and lying that Tlaib accused Nessel, “the state’s Jewish attorney general,” of “letting her religion influence her job.” Both Tapper and Bash questioned why Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) wouldn’t condemn Tlaib for something that, again, never happened. 

On Monday evening, Whitmer released a statement that appears to call Tlaib's (nonexistent) statement antisemitic. “The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic,” Whitmer said. The following day, 21 House Democrats—including Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Elissa Slotkin, who’s running to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate—issued a joint statement to Jewish Insider: “Casting doubt on Attorney General Nessel’s impartiality or implying these cases are being handled unfairly due to her religious background is antisemitic, deeply disturbing, and unacceptable,” they said, adding, “We owe it to our constituents to model methods of disagreement that do not invoke hateful tropes or false charges of unfair bias.”

The absurdity and shamelessness of it all was accentuated on Monday when the Metro Times clarified its own story:

Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened. U.S. Rep. @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she's Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people. https://t.co/SiHqDyF3sw

— Steve Neavling (@MCmuckraker) September 23, 2024

“This is a lie,” Steve Neavling, the journalist who interviewed Tlaib earlier this month, wrote in a tweet responding to Tapper on Monday. “You’re referring to a story I wrote for @metrotimes, and Rep. Tlaib never said what you’re saying she said.” He also fact-checked Bash: “Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened. U.S. Rep. @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she’s Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people.” 

By Tuesday evening, Tapper and Bash conceded that they "misspoke"; Tapper said he meant for his words to be a characterization of Nessel’s opinions, not his own. “I should note that I misspoke yesterday when asking a follow up of Governor Whitmer who I asked about this. I was trying to characterize your views of Tlaib’s comments,” he told Nessel when she appeared on his show on Monday evening. Bash issued a so-called “clarification” on Tuesday, reading out some of Tlaib’s actual quote—but still concluding with Nessel’s appraisal that accusing institutions like her office of anti-Palestinian bias is somehow fundamentally antisemitic.

But none of these incomplete corrections repair anything. Within the past year, Tlaib has been censured for saying “From the river, to the sea,” a standard slogan about Palestinian liberation; meanwhile, her colleague wore a foreign country's military uniform to his job as a member of the U.S. Congress with zero consequences.

While all of this is happening, at least 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October—the actual number is likely much higher. On Tuesday, while congressional Democrats were busy condemning the only Palestinian American in Congress over a lie, ProPublica reported that the U.S. State Department actively ignored reports from the U.S. Agency for International Development and other humanitarian organizations that Israel has been deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza. 

One year into Israel’s genocidal campaign—which has been funded, armed, and legitimized by U.S. politicians at every turn—“anti-Palestinian bias” is putting things lightly.