In a Yahoo! News podcast called Skullduggery, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D – Mich.) made an outrageous claim about the Holocaust (emphasis added):
“There’s always kind of a calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and 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, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports. And 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 and it was forced on them.”
One of the first to report on Tlaib’s comments, Phillip Klein of The Washington Examiner observed, “Tlaib’s claims that her Arab ancestors provided a ‘safe haven’ to Jews after the Holocaust ignores the Jewish presence in the region and efforts to establish a Jewish state that predated the Holocaust, ignores that her ancestors allied with Hitler at the time of the Holocaust, and ignores decades of violence and terrorism directed at Israel both before, during, and after the Holocaust.”
That the Arabs living in pre-state Israel (who would have called themselves “Arabs,” not “Palestinians,”) welcomed Jews is an inversion of the historical record. The Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi sympathizer, organized pogroms against the Jews and brought pressure on the British to prohibit Jewish immigration to what was then called Palestine, which condemned millions to death.
Tlaib’s blatant historical inversion is an attempt to not just to deny the history, but to cast Palestinians as victims of not just the Europeans, but of the Jews too. It is common for the Palestinians to engage in Holocaust denial. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received his PhD for a paper alleging collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis.
Other frequent claims made by the Palestinians are that they shouldn’t be dispossessed because of the sins of the Europeans and that the Holocaust wasn’t as bad as advertised. (No these claims are not consistent.)
Tlaib’s assertion is that the Jews given protection by the Palestinians then betrayed them and stole their land.
Numerous commentators including Jeff Jacoby, Petra Marquardt-Bigman, and Sean Durns took to Twitter to set the record straight.
The Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzmann accused Tlaib of turning “history on its head,” and pointed out:
There were Palestinian Arab leaders who sought reconciliation and coexistence. Fakhri Nashashib, who was assassinated by Husseini’s agents, had good relations with Jews in British Palestine. His funeral was attended by Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Shertok and former Jerusalem mayor Daniel Auster. But in general, the voices that might have created a safe haven were either drowned out, ignored or assassinated by extremists.
In an excellent essay for The Federalist, David Harasanyi, wrote:
For Tlaib, the Holocaust was primarily a tragedy for the Palestinian people, who were unable to repel Jews’ immigration and stop the formation of a Jewish state. Her words are a helpful reminder of not only why Israel exists, but also that the tragedy of the Palestinian people is neither the fault of the Jews, nor the British, nor the Holocaust.
President Trump joined the criticisms of Tlaib, observing that “She obviously has tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people. Can you imagine what would happen if I ever said what she said, and says?”
But once Trump joined in the criticisms, the news was no longer about Tlaib’s reprehensible comment, but about the reaction to it as this article in The Hill attests:
President Trump on Monday accused Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) of harboring “tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people” in response to comments she made about the Holocaust.
Later, after quoting several other Republicans, including Rep. Steve Scalise and Rep. Liz Cheney, The Hill reported “Tlaib has stood by her comments, saying on Sunday that Republicans are trying to ‘ignite vile attacks’ against her by taking her comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ‘out of context.'”
The Hill article made no attempt to critique the falsity of Tlaib’s comment,s but turned the scandalous remarks into a partisan controversy instead of placing the blame where it belonged: on a Congresswoman who engaged in Holocaust revisionism if not outright denial. If a European public figure had said something comparable, that person would have been rightly ostracized.
It’s astonishing that Tlaib gets off on this after engaging in an anti-Semitic smear back in January.
But Rep. Tlaib, like fellow freshman Rep. Omar, continues to be protected.
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