#and tell palestinians + arabs and muslims + everyone who understands that genocide is bad that they SHOULD | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ahaura · 1 month

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im sure its been said already but as the election draws near more and more liberals will come out of the woodwork to shame people with a conscience to give away their vote to the democrats for free. i'm already seeing posts saying "why aren't people more concerned about a trump presidency?" you want to know why? it's because people already know he's bad. everyone already knows what he is and what he's done and what he'll do. there's nothing to discuss. he's a racist despotic worm of a man. there's nothing else to say.

biden is currently president. the genocide is happening under his watch. he's the one funding isra*l and arming them; he's sidestepped congress more than once to give them weapons. by oct. 27, the biden administration already knew that "Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets." the state department/biden have engaged in atrocity propaganda, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the death toll recorded by the gaza health ministry, and so on. the united states is currently in the process of trying to pin the "war in gaza" on netanyahu (see sen. schumer's speech) after months of backing blatant genocide as a means to act as if they're "doing something" about the genocide (Instead of, say, threatening to cut off all aid to israel with the condition that all hostilities in gaza, the west bank, and occupied jerusalem are halted immediately and permanently, allowing palestinians freedom to travel, allowing aid into gaza, etc etc etc.)

the long and short of it is that liberals view their own lives as being worth more than palestinians'. that's it. they'll vote for another 4 years of the guy ushering in genocide and supporting apartheid + settler colonialism because he isn't outright attacking them (despite various laws and rulings happening both at the supreme court level and at the local level all over the country that will endanger people). they'll settle for the illusion of safety and security and shame anyone with a conscience and accuse them of "supporting the republicans" when in an actual democracy you would be able to use your vote as leverage to extract concessions from those who want to be elected. that's how it's supposed to fucking work.

democrats are not owed people's vote. if biden loses, it will be biden's fault; it will be his campaign's fault; it will be the democrats' fault. trump is bad; the republicans are bad. we already know this. this is not an endorsement of either. but if democrats are too cowardly and feckless and servile to the motivations of the american empire and never do anything for their constituents then why the fuck should anyone vote for them. you want to get mad at someone, why don't you do something useful and stop worrying about team-sports with a purely selfish basis and start hounding the people in power who are supposed to serve you, the voter.

#i think i already said this and frankly idc #uspol #📁.zip #to me personally it's abhorrent and vile to tell palestinians 'biden is facilitating the murder of your people culture and history but you #still have to vote for him!!1' like how is that not unbelievably callous and ghoulish #frankly speaking. a lot of this 'you should be concerned about trump' is going to turn into #blaming palestinians and arabs and muslims and anyone remotely with a conscience for biden's loss #instead of doing something productive like pushing for people in power to do something they'll nitpick and belittle #and tell palestinians + arabs and muslims + everyone who understands that genocide is bad that they SHOULD #settle for a decrepit genocidal monstrous freak who is CURRENTLY facilitating genocide because #it makes THEM feel better and they aren't personally threatened (yet) by the guy currently in power #any and all 'you're not taking trump seriously' comments should be met with extreme skepticism #because i promise i PROMISE that the vast majority of people unhappy with biden are not going to turn around and vote for trump #and if they do? well guess what THAT'S BIDEN'S FAULT! nevermind the vote uncommitted campaign that was very successful and #will be replicated in the near future. but liberals only care about asthetics and superficial and not #about real material change which is why they'll dress up their callousness and racism in a 'you hate gay people if you dont vote for biden'#like this country is already going to shit we are rapidly descending into fascism and i dont see biden doing anything to even remotely #challenge it do you???? once agian. NOT an endorsement of the republican party but my GOD when the 'lesser evil'#is DOING the evil or normalizing the evil then you cannot settle for 'the lesser'! end of story.

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hypomanicsatanicpanic · 1 month

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a few thoughts on the queer Purim comedy show I went to last night

The queer humor was fantastic. Some of the Purim content was ok. I am a non/post-Zionist, but I absolutely expected and looked forward to jokes about Israel and Zionism, given that I found out about this event in an explicitly anti-zionist discord server, and 50% of the money raised by tickets and donations went to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, but I at least expected them to be jokes, you know? The whole thing gave "white guilt." It gave "white savior" and "noble savage." It gave "I'm one of the good ones."

First, it was a mixed bag on funny:

Four of the eight comics were hilarious, I fell out of my seat laughing during about half of those sets. I would pay money to see any of these people do comedy again.

Two were ok, laughed out loud at least 1-2 times during their sets. Wouldn't leave if they were at stand-up night, but probably wouldn't remember their sets after the fact.

Two were very seriously talking about things they obviously (and understandably) found upsetting, but trying to pass them off as deadpan jokes. One of those comics (who identified themself as an Arab Muslim) repeated several pieces of misinformation about Israel and Palestine-not even different opinions, verifiably false information that has been widely debunked. The other (who identified herself as a secular Jew) made several boomer wife jokes at the expense of her Palestinian wife. Those two comics also repeatedly complained about being called names by Zionists, concluding they "gave off incel vibes" as a punchline. For that to be funny, you've gotta unpack it! Say something original and unexpected, or you're just regurgitating antisemitic Tumblr posts and my former friend who uses "zios" as a slur. These two also made fun of people in diaspora who were feeling uncomfortable about being visibly Jewish in public. This same person also called Purim "just another Jewish holiday celebrating genocide" without unpacking that at all either.

It was also such a weird tone-clash for people to be talking about "ongoing genocide" and "40 family members killed" and "people sacrificed for a brave and noble cause" completely seriously--**during their comedy set**-- right between people joking about spelling out their pronouns in nipple grafts after top surgery, and other people joking about yonic hamantaschen and boric acid suppositories. That's not to say we shouldn't talk about it, it's just *how* and *when* felt pretty badly off in this case.

I'm not one to call other Jews self-hating, or kapos. But it really felt gross to see such performative hatred of other Jews who did not share the exact same views or life experiences get so much applause, despite being low-effort and unfunny. Like, don't get me wrong, the content was low-level upsetting, but became much more so because it was such lazy comedy. I think I would have enjoyed it much more if those statements/jokes were balanced with some good-humored, self-critical jokes. Telling the audience whatever they want to hear is cheap and boring. Tell us shit that confronts us, makes us uncomfortable, but forces us to laugh at it!

And the assumptions that everyone there would be 100% on board with everything said about other Jews present and historical, no matter how nasty, bad-faith, or false. The absolute and wilful misunderstanding about others' actual beliefs and experiences, the lack of compassion for Jews struggling with antisemitism *in their own cities and communities*, the self-pity, the failure to successfully lampoon OR engage meaningfully or originally with the ongoing conflict or the more troubling parts of the Purim story... The assumptions about the views and experiences of everyone else there. The absolute certainly and smugness about being morally superior to the vast majority of other Jews.

It was troubling to have so much in common with so many of the people there, and yet to feel so alienated. We were almost all queer Jews, with all of that attendant baggage. And I'm 100% certain we want the people who live in the Levant (Arabs, Jews, everyone!) to have lasting peace and safety, and also want Jews to be able to live and thrive in diaspora. Ultimately though, I'm not willing to throw other Jews (most of whom actually share those goals!) under the bus to signal those beliefs or get a couple of feeble chuckles. I wouldn't want to make money at their expense, even if some of the money went towards a worthy cause.

Next time this event comes around I'll probably skip it and just donate what I would have paid for admission to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (which you can do here )

#purim 2024 #israel palestine #jumblr #queerposting

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politicaltheatre · 3 years

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Empathy, pt.3

Let’s start with this: Jamal Kashshoggi was a man.

Do you remember him? He was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories.

He was also a journalist. After years of supporting the Saudi royal family and their authoritarian regime, he was murdered in 2018 for writing and speaking out against their abuses and, eventually, their war in Yemen. That was the version of him who fled Saudi Arabia, and the one who was marked for death by the Saudi crown prince he had once called a friend.

Last fall, the Saudi regime commuted the death sentences of the men it offered up as his murderers. Three months ago, an investigation confirmed that it was the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who had ordered his death.

We’re forgetting him. Even now, reading this, we are already forgetting. We can’t help it. At least, we tell ourselves we can’t.

In many ways, Kashshoggi was a lot like Alexei Novalny. Novalny hasn’t left the news quite yet. Like Kashshoggi, he supported the corrupt, authoritarian regime in his country, Russia, before turning against it. The attempt on his life, by poison, failed. Barely. He’s still alive, locked up in a Russian prison, a cautionary tale for those daring to oppose Vladimir Putin.

How long before we’ve forgotten him, too?

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, remembering everyone around us. Sure, in some abstract way most of us try, “Good will towards men,” and all that, but we have the luxury of looking away and of not having to commit ourselves to thinking of others the way those two men did.

For each of them, it was an inescapable empathy for the suffering of they saw around them that compelled them to risk their lives to draw attention to it. They did so knowing the cost.

That cost - personal loss, imprisonment, death - is enough to keep most of us looking away. So much of what we do is to enable us to look away, to keep unpleasant reality at a distance. When others are already physically far away, it only makes it that much harder for us to do the right thing.

Looking out past our borders, the world today is filled with men, women, and children suffering, more than a few at the hands of authoritarian regimes, and of them far too many paying that cost for standing up against abuse.

The most present case this past week, because videos on social media have made it impossible to ignore in ways that it has been, has been that of the Palestinians.

The facts of this latest series of abuses against them should not be in doubt. During the last days of Ramadan, Israelis began forcing Palestinians out of their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district in East Jerusalem. This was followed in quick succession by Israeli troops occupying the Al-Aqsa mosque following a confrontation between Palestinians at the mosque for Friday prayers and Israelis celebrating the capture of the mosque in 1967.

This was all a deliberate provocation, beyond the aggressive offense of what the Israelis were doing. The timing of it, during the Muslim holy month while right wing Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to cling to power, was intended to add insult to injury.

It worked. Clearly.

Hamas, ever eager for an excuse to be violent and to be seen to be violent, gave an ultimatum that would make Netanyahu’s regime look weak if accepted, Netanyahu gratefully rejected it, and Hamas began firing rockets, knowing that Israel would escalate and retaliate with a kind of brutality that can only be described as criminal.

The unpleasant reality is that both political powers rely on perpetuating the conflict between them, doing so at the expense of the people they claim to want to serve and protect. And those people pay the cost of it.

Note, please, how I have avoided referring to those instigating these atrocities as Muslims or Jews. That they use their religions and their histories as justification for violence and abuse should not be taken as representative of either religion. If anything, it should be taken as a kind of cruel irony, or perhaps an insight into how the abused, as individuals or groups, can become abusers themselves.

Zionism is not Judaism. It never was and never will be. It grew out of two things: the technology-driven late 19th century belief by Europeans, and their North American “cousins”, in their right to colonial domination of non-Europeans; and the centuries-old, routine and systematic attacks on Jews - pogroms - especially in Central and Eastern Europe that led millions of Jews to flee for their lives, many of them to the United States.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 followed the same pattern: that same, late 19th century belief in the right to claim or assign ownership of others’ land - no matter that it had once belonged to your ancestors; and the routine and systematic attempted genocide of all Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - by Europeans who chose to believe Jews not to be Europeans but some other, lesser race from West Asia.

That, of course, has been the assigned role for Jews the world over: they are accepted as insiders when times are good and scapegoated as outsiders when times are bad. To be Jewish - I am - is to understand that this never quite goes away. There’s always somebody having a bad day, always a big lie ready for justification.

Technically, it is true that Jews are Asian, in the way that Palestinians are also Asian, and that Egyptians are, too, but also African because different people have had different maps which they used for different purposes at different times.

Also true is that these things are only true due to the arbitrary drawing of continental lines on maps made by Europeans, from the ancient Greeks to those carving up the “New World” in the century after Columbus to the 1885 conference in Berlin carving up Africa for colonial exploitation.

This is not, strictly speaking, a European thing. Every culture has a tendency to see themselves as the center of the world. Just ask those living in China, or as they call it, Zhongguo, the “Middle Kingdom”.

The difference here is that modern day Israel was carved out of Palestine, a colonial “protectorate” which was itself carved out of the Ottoman Empire and awarded to the British following World War I. As a spoil of war, formerly-Ottoman Iraq, with its vast oil reserves, had greater value to the British. Palestine had ports on the Mediterranean - “the center of the world” - but was otherwise an afterthought.

Not, however, to the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. We must remember that the rest of the world didn’t want them. Jews attempting to flee the atrocity they and everyone else couldn’t help but see coming were turned away by everyone else, including the United States.

This in no way justifies what was done in Palestine in the 1930s and 40s, it’s just to place it in context. By turning Jews away, by attempting to forget them and their suffering, the world gave weight and power to right wing groups within the refugees.

Starting in the 1930s, those groups began to engage in terrorism against Arabs to force their position into Palestine and against the British to force them out. Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and later the Stern Gang carried out assassinations and killed hundreds of Arabs and British with bombs.

After what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, memorialized in newsreels for all the world to see, who would take the Arabs’ side? Who could? The British were in no position to hold onto their colonial possessions anywhere, so they gave up and pulled out and in 1948 the state of Israel was born. Palestinian Arabs were forced from their homes and stripped of rights they had held under the Ottomans and even the British.

Again, this was not Judaism. As the name “Irgun” suggests, those terrorists were a right wing, nationalist militia doing what right wing, nationalist militias have done before and since, using an ethnic or religious identity to justify committing atrocities to take land and property.

After standing by and allowing the Nazis to do what they did, the world vowed never to forget; part of the price they were willing to pay - that they were willing to allow the Palestinian Arabs to pay - was to forget what Irgun and the Stern Gang had done, and to turn a blind eye to anything the Israelis did going forward.

There was a racist element to it, to be sure. This is part of the pattern of colonial withdrawal, negotiating a partition of land and possessions among the colonized groups, pitting them against each other, and then letting them fend for themselves. Nothing like creating a power vacuum to draw out the worst of us.

The British did the same thing in South Asia in 1947, pitting Muslim and Hindu groups against each other, erupting in spasms of violence before settling into a Cold War, complete with nuclear weapons. Even in their most secular eras, religious nationalism has defined the politics and leadership of each nation.

The result of this, naturally, has been an increasingly corrupt leadership exploiting religious hatred and mistrust to gain more power and wealth for themselves. It should be noted, yet again, that the political entities of Pakistan and India, though led by religious nationalists, do not represent Islam or Hinduism.

Their actions and failures do not represent those religions in any way. They are the actions and failures of men and women seeking power, seeking to acquire it and seeking to hold onto it. They are no different than the Netanyahu regime or Hamas, or our own right wing leaders in the United States.

For all of them, it is in their interest to cling to memory of conflict as a means of manipulation; in Israel and Palestine, nationalist leaders preach as if 1948 or 1967 are now; in India and Pakistan, it’s still 1947; and for America’s white nationalists, it’s either 1865 or 1965, take your pick. For the Serbs slaughtering thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica twenty-six years ago, it was 1389, the year the Ottomans conquered the Balkans.

The wars, cold or hot, can never end because time is never allowed to change. This, again, is a function of proximity. By freezing themselves in the increasingly distant past, the leaders and those choosing to follow them do not have to accept the changes facing them in the present. Their fantasy is to return to that idyllic, earlier time, when they possessed everything and did not have to be accountable to anyone.

And they will all fail for the same reason: in the present or near future, we will have reached a point at which we can no longer allow ourselves to ignore those suffering and in doing so forget them.

That is what we have done to the Palestinians. What has been done and what is being done now is in no small part because we forget them, routinely and systematically and purposefully.

The videos sent from Gaza of children being pulled from rubble should help us remember. They should. Ideally, they will have the same effect as those of last year’s Black Live Matter protests, but the people of Gaza remain far away. For many of us, it will be enough that the missiles and rockets have stopped.

Videos sent from India’s emergency rooms and crematoria should help us remember, but they, too, remain far away. Already, we’re starting to put India’s crisis behind us.

Will we remember either of them a month from now? Two? Or will they fade into the background, as the imprisoned Hong Kong democracy protesters have, or those dying of Covid-19 in Brazil, or those shot down in the streets fighting police brutality in Columbia, or those caught between warring factions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region? Or, for that matter, those half a century ago in Argentina who were simply “disappeared”?

What about the coup in Myanmar? Remember that? How about the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people, supported by the now-deposed and jailed regime of fallen-hero Aung San Suu Kyi? What was done to them was no different than what was done to the Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. That genocide was recently recognized by President Biden, an act of official, international recognition that took over a century and which itself is already being forgotten. The Rohingya may have to wait as long to be remembered themselves, or longer.

The point of all this isn’t that we forget, try as we might, but that despite it we find ways to remember. That Biden recognized the Armenians came because they did not forget and did not allow that crime to be forgotten.

If this sounds like what nationalists all claim to do themselves - always demanding that everyone remember this date or that insult - remember that actual justice never seems to be their goal.

Justice requires memory, full memory. For us to remember anything fully, we must take the good with the bad. We must recognize the good and bad in each of us and in each group and in each series of actions. We must understand that for the worst act done by anyone in the name of any group or religion, there remain those within those groups and religions who stand against it.

So, let’s end with this: George Floyd

George Floyd was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories. He died one year ago today in no small part because we forgot him.

We remember now, today especially, because of what was done to him on this date, but we should recognize the role that forgetting him and people like him played in the events that led to his murder. We as a society have looked away from the suffering of minorities in this country, and from the violence done to certain groups within our society.

The easiest thing to say, certainly as we watched that video and the countless videos of police brutalizing non-violent protesters all last summer, was that “all cops are bad”. They aren’t. Hard as it may be to hear, they aren’t.

They are, however, led by men and women who push an adversarial culture, who encourage violence and racism, who are corrupt, and who thrive on the failure of reform. And most of them, far, far too many, stand by in silence as men and women are murdered in that culture’s name. In that silence, they have failed us all.

If we want to change that culture, we need those who would stand for justice to stand up and speak. They are there, just as they are in Israel and Palestine, and in Pakistan and India and elsewhere: intimidated, ostracized, and struggling to be heard.

Of course, May 25th, 2020 wasn’t just any other day in America. It was Memorial Day. That is a cruel irony. Another is how little we do to honor that day. It was created to honor those who died for this country, to remember not only them but what they did and what they supposedly did it for. Instead, we grill meats and drink beer and forget our troubles for just one day.

Few deaths may have the lasting impact on this country that George Floyd’s has had and will have, and he died in no small part because he, too, had been forgotten. This coming Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember him and all of the others everywhere in this world who have died and deserve to be remembered.

- Daniel Ward

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popolitiko · 5 years

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Republican lawmakers like Rep. Lee Zeldin were criticized, deservedly, for distorting Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s comments about the Holocaust by suggesting she said that she gets a “calming feeling” when she thinks about the genocide.

If you read or listen to the Michigan Democrat’s comments, it is crystal clear that she said no such thing. The Republican pile-on, joined by President Donald Trump, is a further weaponization of anti-anti-Semitism, this time based on a comment that the target never made. But it’s not just Republicans who appeared to distort Tlaib’s now notorious remarks. It was the ostensibly nonpartisan Jewish commentariat and media as well, in which I will include our own site, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and take full responsibility.

Our headline on Monday read “Rashida Tlaib says her Palestinian ancestors made a ‘safe haven’ for Jews after Holocaust.” We quoted the remarks she gave to the podcast Skullduggery in which Tlaib asserted that she gets a “calming feeling” when she considers that the Palestinians “created a ‘safe haven’ for Jews during the Holocaust.” That was the take amplified around the Jewish world and the Israeli press, in which historians of the era pointedly refuted her purported version of history.

They noted that far from welcoming Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, the Palestinian leadership actively worked against their immigration to British-controlled Palestine and collaborated with the Nazis in their war against the Allies. “Rashida Tlaib is either completely ignorant of the history or is a deliberate liar,” Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, told Haaretz. Palestinians “did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Jews at Nazi hands. Rather, the opposite: The Arabs of [British Mandatory] Palestine, during the whole period — and supported by the neighboring Arab states — did all they could to prevent Jews trying to escape Nazi hands from reaching the (relatively safe) shores of Palestine.” That is an important assertion of the historical record, and one made repeatedly in the press and on Twitter in the wake of her remarks. But it assumes that Tlaib was crediting Palestinians with welcoming refugees and “creating” a safe haven for Jews, when the transcript of her remarks suggest she was saying something else. Here are the relevant quotes, which I transcribed from the video.

Interviewer: Congresswoman, you’ve created something of a stir by coming out in favor of a one-state solution, Israel and Palestine, and I think you may be the only Democrat who’s publicly supported a one-state solution. So what is your vision for a one-state solution that meets both Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish national aspirations? Tlaib: Absolutely. Let me tell you — I mean, for me, I think two weeks ago we celebrated, or took a moment I think in our country to remember, the Holocaust. And there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust in the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways had been wiped out, and some people’s passports — I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right?, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right, and it was forced on them.

Tlaib does not assert that Palestinians welcomed Jews or worked in any way to create the “safe haven.” Instead, she says, using the passive voice, that Palestinians were displaced “in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews.” In fact, “it was forced on them” — that is, the Palestinians. And despite the cost to her people in property and dignity, she goes on, she “love[s] the fact that” something good came of it — a safe haven for Jews who were suffering “horrific persecution” around the world.

She does say that it was her “ancestors that provided that,” but “provided” is different than “created.” And Tlaib qualifies “provided” with “in many ways” — hardly an assertion of open arms — and immediately says that “they did it” (presumably, Jews created the haven) in a way that “took their human dignity” (that is, the Palestinians’ dignity).

Far from claiming that her ancestors worked to bring Jews to Palestine, or welcomed them when they arrived, she is saying that even if the Jews did come and take their land and rights away, at least it was for the alleviation of another people’s suffering. In acknowledging that suffering and noting her own people’s, her remarks are closer in spirit to the anti-Zionist refrain that the Jews escaped the window of a burning house only to land on someone else’s head. There is a lot to disagree with in Tlaib’s remarks. The Holocaust is hardly the sole justification of the existence of Israel. She denies the Jews the right to autonomy in a state of their own. She rejects the idea of two states for two peoples and instead holds out for the impossible idea that Israel will surrender its sovereignty in hopes of creating some sort of United States of Isratine. It’s that kind of wishful, almost messianic thinking that has prevented Palestinian leaders from accepting anything less.

But it’s a tremendous and dangerous distraction to attribute to her words and ideas she didn’t say.

In defending Tlaib, Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American activist, tweeted: “It’s not about what we say, it’s who we are. It’s based on orientalist tropes that deem Muslims and Arabs inherently anti-Semitic. It’s racist. It’s bigoted. It’s finally being exposed.” In invoking Islamophobia, Sarsour exactly mirrors critics who are too quick to hear anti-Semitism in everything she and fellow high-profile Muslim women, including Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar, say.

Each has indeed uttered remarks that invoked anti-Semitic tropes. There’s fair criticism and criticism made in bad faith. Sarsour seems to suggest that Muslim Americans like her should take no responsibility for the things they say that Jews and others take as offensive. And she ignores the single biggest factor driving these charges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: political expediency. Tlaib and Omar are a gift to the Republican Party, just as they are a headache for the Democrats. By broadcasting their misguided statements and inventing others, the right uses both freshman lawmakers to portray Democrats in ways sure to rile their own base and energize their Jewish voters and givers: as radical, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and, frankly, un-American. It doesn’t hurt that they are Muslim, a handy “other” for political factions that like to invoke America’s “Judeo-Christian” tradition. Democrats often join in attacking these celebrity newcomers in order to separate themselves from the increasingly diverse insurgency on their left — and sometimes they distort comments on the other side to score political points. Tlaib and Omar seem only too happy to provide fodder for these firefights, in which everyone is shooting blanks. But in this instance Tlaib didn’t say what they say she said. Although she is no Zionist, she acknowledged Jewish suffering and offered up a slice of understanding as to why Jews needed a homeland. It’s hardly a path to reconciliation, but it isn’t anti-Semitism either. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

https://www.jpost.com/American-Politics/What-did-Rashida-Tlaib-really-say-about-the-Holocaust-589711

#anti-Semitism #Islamophobia

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