Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democratic state lawmaker, and some news agencies are falsely claiming that U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Nessel’s office only filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she’s Jewish.
The spurious claims stem from an interview that Tlaib did with Metro Times on Sept. 13. Tlaib, who was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrants and is the only Palestinian American member of Congress, argued the charges were an unjust and heavy-handed response to peaceful civil disobedience.
Tlaib pointed out that Nessel, who has been in office since January 2019, has not filed charges against protesters opposed to racism, police brutality, water shutoffs, and environmental contamination.
Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.
Shortly after the article was published, state Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat who is Jewish, posted a screenshot of the story on X and claimed that Tlaib’s response was an attempt “to divide us into ‘good’ Jews she accepts & bad Jews.”
On Sunday, CNN host Jake Tapper followed up with a segment in which he falsely claimed that Tlaib said Nessel only filed the charges “because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not.” Tapper made the statement while interviewing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and tried to get her to weigh in on his false claim.
I realized after reading the very long (and mostly very good) response you got from anarcho-blinkenist that I completely misread your original comment. Now I see that you were trying to use her as a shield for the Democratic Party despite the dems and dem-aligned media attacking her on a regular basis for being an “anti-semite” and so on. Your subsequent comments still don’t really make sense to me, but I don’t think following who you are accusing of being what would really help me anyway.
Somewhat like what a.b. said, opposing genocide and being a communist for me are not separate things. I don’t want people to live in squalor and be subject to arbitrary violence in either the streets of Gaza or New York City, and in both cases it has been made abundantly clear over the decades that neoliberals don’t want to help those people, the only range of opinions they have are between perpetual brutalization and full-on extermination.