Dissection of a smear: What it means to use 'anti-semite' as a slur

Getting under the hood

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.”

X post by Michigan state Senator Jeremy Moss, September 13, 2024.

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!

Comment at Washington Post, August 22, 2024.

“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.

Excerpt of appeal, submitted December 2023, to administrators of a non-Substack platform regarding an essay that had been censored in its entirety.

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:

“Tlaib slams Nessel for targeting pro-Palestinian students at U-M: ‘A dangerous precedent,’” Detroit Metro Times, September 13, 2024

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:

“Tlaib: I wish Dana Nessel were running for President,” Michigan Advance, July 28, 2019.

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.”

X post by Steve Neavling to Jake Tapper, September 23, 2024.

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.

“Fact-check: Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish,” Detroit Metro Times, September 23, 2024.

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.