I want to revisit the recent smear campaign against Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, because it perfectly encapsulates one aspect of the overuse of accusation of ‘anti-semitism’. In fact, it demonstrates a use that few have ever considered: ‘anti-semite’ launched as a slur.
The use of ‘anti-semite’ as a slur is one in which I am keenly interested. And I plan to explore this over several essays. It’s a topic with many depths to fathom, so I won’t attempt to put it all in one space.
Yet, here, because this campaign against Tlaib was so compressed in time, and it fell apart so spectacularly, that it affords us an opportunity to deconstruct it and peer at its individual pieces.
The unfolding of this epic lie appears to be an encapsulation of a tendency displayed among various segments of the public and among certain personalities, and it points to a penchant for bad-faith portrayals by some to serve a separate agenda. That agenda is anti-antisemitism, which sounds righteous; but some advocates take an ends-justify-the-means approach and enact a slash-and-burn strategy, often even if that means, as we see here, that the target is smeared, their words distorted.
I spent a lot of time going into the controversy in my last essay, because it was important to set out the main factual bases of the controversy. This story is one where the timeline tells the tale. Still, there were things that occurred that I was not able to fit into the timeline, as they appeared somewhat incidental. One of the people who jumped into the fray was Michigan state senator Jeremy Moss.
The slant
Moss, a Democrat, tweeted in response to the original Detroit Metro Times piece that began this saga. (That article appeared on September 13, and Moss wrote his tweet the very same day.) He said that Tlaib was attempting to divide Jewish people into “good” and “bad” Jews. “This is a disgusting charge of dual loyalty — Jews in America cannot fully uphold American ideals because we are fundamentally biased in favor of our religion over our citizenship. Rep. Tlaib continues to divide us into ‘good’ Jews she accepts & bad Jews.”
The problem with that characterization is that, as the author of the Detroit Metro Times’s interview, Steve Neavling, said, Tlaib never referenced Nessel’s Jewishness at all. Not once, in any capacity. So there’s no way that she could have made such a division of Jewish people.
So what happened here, in Moss’s tweet? Well, I cannot say for sure, but it is very reminiscent of what someone in the comment section of the Washington Post admitted after a rather bland post by another user. This person (whose handle I’ve redacted) went out of his way to cast his interlocutor’s comment in the worst light possible, then tore that strawman to pieces. More than that, he elucidated his strategy!
“I brazenly confess my Jewdiosity to them, translate their ‘zionists’ and other boneheadisms back into ‘Jew’, and reply to that rather than the semantics.”
That’s the whole strategy. It’s a deliberate attempt to take criticisms, make them sound as anti-Semitic as possible, then respond to the newly crafted mischaracterization as though that’s what the original person said. This is entirely dishonest.
I know about this tactic, as it happened to me on another platform. To give a little background, I had written an essay that was removed by the administrators, and I was silenced for two weeks as a result. I prepared an appeal of the rest of my sanction (which was to never again write about the Israel-Palestine conflict for as long as the hostilities were underway, even though my essay had not broached that topic), and in that appeal I noted that this was what seemed to have happened: that people had mischaracterized what I had said, then complained, using that misinterpretation as the basis of their claims.
The author of the Detroit Metro Times piece, Steve Neavling, also noted this pattern when he explained the controversy in an interview with Status Coup News:
“I thought it was a bold time to attack Rashida [Tlaib], at a time when she just attacked in a very disgusting, racist cartoon, and [attorney general Dana Nessel] did it that day. So that surprised me. … It did surprise me that she would come out and mention this on the day that that cartoon was published.
“But also I was surprised that she used Rashida’s words, misrepresented them, and then attacked them based on that misrepresentation.”
Just to recap, this is what Rep. Tlaib actually said:
This was what AG Nessel said in response, a full week after that article was published (but the same day that the racist cartoon appeared in the National Review):
As it happened, one of the people commenting on this controversy, Mike Figueredo of The Humanist Report, noted that Nessel probably took the interpretation offered by Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar (who reported on Tlaib’s tweet as though it were manifestly anti-Semitic), then utilized Kraushaar’s suggestion as a jumping-off point.
However, I believe that Nessel may have relied more on Sen. Moss’s take from a week prior. I say that because she and Moss have professional ties to each other, and indeed they had teamed up ten months ago to publicly criticize Rep. Tlaib in a press conference over Tlaib’s bolstering of protesters who had chanted “from the river to the sea,” claiming that Tlaib was in danger of inciting those protesters by providing support.
Moss, in his September 13 tweet, had already framed Tlaib’s remarks in Detroit Metro Times as being situated in a long, storied history of rank anti-Semitism. Had Nessel relied upon Moss’s interpretation, despite that frame being utterly wrong, that may have informed her own view of the remarks. I don’t know; this is merely my speculation.
And here’s the thing: I’m willing to mark my ideas as speculation. That’s part of being willing to be corrected should further information emerge. It’s an acknowledgement that I don’t have all of the facts, so I can’t condemn Nessel on that part of the story. Yet I do condemn Nessel for her subsequent interview with Jake Tapper on CNN where she reiterated her accusation of anti-Semitism quite explicitly.
Tapper: 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. What do you make of those today, noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?
Nessel: Well, a couple of things. First of all, in 2022, when my opponent accused me of being a groomer and a pedophile, everyone understood that those were homophobic remarks, because I happen to be gay. Right? I didn’t have to explain it to people. Rashida Tlaib is an individual who is well-known for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are anti-Semitic in nature, so this isn’t the first time that we would have heard these words out of her mouth. I think it’s very clear to everybody exactly what she was saying.
By then, she knew how the story had unfolded, and yet she wouldn’t back down from her erroneous view.
I guess, too, that I am drawn to this story because I have lost respect for Nessel in this process. It is true that Nessel’s office was responsible for the failure to prosecute those involved in the Flint water crisis, where an entire city was poisoned due to decisions of city managers, but I hadn’t held it against her. I suppose I was still going off the impression I had when she first was elected — she was seen as one of a trio of strong female politicians who had swept into office that year, along with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. They were seen as taking Michigan in a new direction.
It may be hard to believe, but even Rep. Tlaib was a big fan of Nessel back in the day. I came across this article where Tlaib — speaking to Jake Tapper! — gushed about Nessel in 2019, when Democrats were clamoring for the next standard bearer to go up against Donald Trump:
Those halcyon days are gone.
Make no mistake about it: AG Nessel’s comments about Tlaib are backbiting, even catty. I normally hesitate to use such a word when describing the actions of females — it can stir stereotypes. But an examination of Nessel’s tweet shows that she deliberately brings in innuendo and the slicing razor of gossip so as to recast Tlaib’s actual remarks. The tweet also allows Nessel to proactively bestow upon herself the mantle of victim.
Nessel’s comments are actually beneath her. They demonstrate a willingness to trade on the stature of her office in order to slime and libel a critic (essentially: “How dare someone say that I can’t do my job because of my background?”). Indeed, the structure of Nessel’s complaint mirrors that of middle-schoolers who are beefing or spreading rumors. It is entirely inappropriate, both in tone and substance, for someone occupying Nessel’s public position.
I’m not in Nessel’s head, so I cannot tell you exactly what she was or is thinking. However, I can point to her tweet as well as her comments to Jake Tapper to elucidate what I discern to be her motives. Because she has a motive here in what she’s doing, in her deliberate distortion of Tlaib’s criticism.
The heart of the matter
Tlaib was calling attention to the discrepancy displayed by AG Nessel’s office to charge these protesters on the one hand and to be lenient toward other protesters on the other. In the first instance, those of the student protesters arrested on University of Michigan’s campus last spring, those protesters were peaceful and had not engaged with police until the police forcibly moved in. In contrast, other protests for causes such as climate change, race relations (i.e., Black Lives Matter), immigration, and even the very local yet quite intense issue of water shutoffs have not garnered charges against participants, even when they happened to clash with police.
Rep. Tlaib has a right to ask why the AG’s office is choosing to prosecute in this instance when it declined in these others.
The choice by the Michigan Attorney General to pursue charges here is made even more stark when compared to the decisions of other institutions and jurisdictions. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, facing a similar decision, declined to press charges against students at Wayne State University, a very comparable situation. Indeed, when you look at the interactions of police in many of the protests that occurred in Texas (which produced, during that two-week stretch of nationwide student encampments dominating the news, some of the most agonizing images of police brutality), even Texas officials dropped those charges initially brought against students. So Nessel’s decision doesn’t even generally match what her peers in the field are doing.
So we are forced anew to consider Tlaib’s question: Why in this instance and not in others?
It doesn’t seem that Nessel wants to answer that question. If she had wanted to, she simply could have done so. Instead, she went on this smear campaign. This indicates that really she wants to deflect from ever having to answer the question, perhaps because she knows that the situation does not look even-handed. In fact, it smacks of institutional bias — precisely Tlaib’s charge.
So the smear is a misdirection. It’s meant to redirect the public’s attention away from Nessel and what she’s doing to Tlaib. But the content of the smear reveals that the nature of the sleight of hand is meant to be moral. That is, Tlaib is painted as morally deficient, while Nessel raises herself as a paragon of virtue.
Nessel attempts to accomplish this by identifying a supposed parallel between a cartoonist’s Islamophobia, wherein the comic depicted Tlaib’s pager detonating (an apparent allusion to the penetrating attack by Israel in Lebanon, wherein it booby-trapped pedestrian electronics in order to perpetrate a widescale, indiscriminate, instantaneous wave of explosions), and Nessel’s portrayal of Tlaib’s comments as anti-Semitic.
But note that Tlaib’s original comments were not anti-Semitic. It was Nessel’s contortion of those comments that brought about a tinge of anti-Semitism. But Nessel herself was the one who imported such a suggestion. That sense was not present in the original remarks. We know this because we can go back and read them. In no way, shape, or form did Tlaib reference Nessel’s Jewish background.
Indeed, the person who conducted the interview for the Detroit Metro Times, Steve Neavling, has emphasized that Tlaib never brought up Nessel’s background at all. As the person who was present for the conversation, he would know.
Neavling has gone out of his way to try to bridle this galloping lie as it has careened from outlet to outlet. After Jake Tapper attempted to corner Governor Whitmer so as to force her to condemn Tlaib based on Nessel’s misinterpretation, Neavling called CNN out, replying directly to Tapper and stating unequivocally, “You are spreading lies.”
The smear had grown to such gigantic proportions that the Detroit Metro Times ran a corrective, a full article fact-checking CNN’s claims, pointing out that it was Neavling himself who happened to mention Nessel’s background as part of his column, never attributing such a mention to Tlaib but placing the factoid in proximity to Tlaib’s comments. That proximity, Neavling surmised, is what led to this mischaracterization in the first place.
Neavling is probably right, but he is even now being too generous in his interpretation. The person who initially read those words in Neavling’s article committed an epic misreading, and one could speculate that such a misreading was willful, that the person wanted to read that into those words. Any responsible person would have read twice or even three or four times to ensure that they gotten the context right and that they hadn’t misinterpreted.
Instead, we see that this smear gathered steam and was amplified at each step, at each new node of communication. That means that people involved were looking to misread this and to deliberately convey this misinterpretation. That’s the essence of bad faith.
The motive is to silence anyone who speaks out against Israel. You can go way back to Jimmy Carter as a former president. He went to Gaza and came back and wrote “Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid” and for the longest, was treated like a lunatic. Those in power wanted nothing to do with him. Even the Democrats gave him the cold shoulder. Why? Because he dared to call out what Israel was doing.
As for the questions about why the US has such allegiance to Israel, I think it might be 1. We have been SO WRONG for SO LONG! Who wants to be running for office or trying to govern while reversing course in such a way. Nobody! It is just easier to perpetuate the lie that Israel is merely defending its right to exist. Almost ANY criticism of Israel gets this bull shit accusation and people will then tell you what YOU are thinking. And that is you are thinking Israel does NOT have the right to exist. They can read your mind! (snark) 2. AIPAC - the MOST powerful lobby. If you are running for office and don’t have support from AIPAC you are going to run into trouble. 3. Israel IS BAD. BAD. But not quite as bad as Iran. So the US will stick WITH Israel through thick and thin because we are worried about Iran. That was a big reason why we were good buddies with the freak Saddam Hussein. Right up until we weren’t. If he had NOT been stupid and invaded Kuwait, he would have lived a luxury life in his palace and continued all his cruelties. We did not care how cruel he was until he invaded Kuwait. I think Bush the senior decided he was getting too big for his britches and just wanted to teach him a lesson AND a little REAL combat practice is going to make the generals happy, get lots of promotions, keeps everyone sharper. So he got his little coalition together and we swatted Hussein on the behind. And then went home. A whole new era of war movies made bank.
I would like to see a BIG reset with regard to Israel. But for the reasons I have described, this is unlikely. Not many politicians can survive being called an anti semite. Seems college presidents who don’t have the campus police beat down protesters of Israel’s actions get fired pretty much immediately. The students get expelled and criminally charged. There will be no reset of our policy toward Israel. I expect Iran to retaliate any minute. And we might be looking at American troops on the ground there or maybe just air support for the IDF. Nightmare!
I think it was another writer on this platform who stated that, going forward, the only choices for voters in liberal democracies will be what flavor of autocracy one prefers: far-right or rainbow. In practice, there will be little to distinguish the two, except that in the latter you can feel good that the one overseeing the repression might be a racial or sexual minority. The fact that this repression against Palestinians and their allies is a bipartisan affair is telling. Protesters for other unpopular causes may be grudging tolerated in the same way one tolerates mosquito bites, but those fighting for the Palestinian cause go straight to jail, literally and figuratively. There’s already an assault on our rights happening under Democratic control. It will be more of the same under Trump, except then I suppose liberals will have permission to care somewhat, since it’s “the other side” doing it.
Some time ago it became apparent that the US is deeply concerned about anti-Zionism, but not so much antisemitism. Anti-Zionism threatens US military and business interests, whereas antisemitism doesn’t. I think often about the bombing of a synagogue that happened in my hometown during the Civil Rights Movement and how there was only a perfunctory investigation of it. They brought five guys before a show trial, and then once they got acquitted, the view was, “I guess we’ll never know what happened. Now let’s never mention this again.” TPTB are more than willing to look the other way at this kind of violence, especially if it serves as a warning to avoid getting involved in progressive causes. But criticizing the US’ foreign policy regarding Israel is an absolute no go.
However, as I said on the last post, I do not understand why the US is so ride or die for Israel. A vassal state like Israel shouldn’t have this much influence over its patron. As unpopular as the Vietnam protests were, I haven’t heard about anyone involved in them having their lives completely ruined as pro-Palestinian protesters are today. Apartheid South Africa was the US’ pet during the Cold War and it didn’t have any problem with dumping it once it stopped being useful. Speaking of which, anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s did the same things as today’s activists (eg building encampments) but the SWAT team wasn’t called on them and they weren’t threatened with being blackballed. People mention the Mossad having blackmail on world leaders, but one would assume that all intelligence agencies in the West do. I don’t understand what Israel gives to the US that South Africa or Rhodesia didn’t.