The Slander Against Rashida Tlaib Proves Her Point

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…