There has been a lot of anger at Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s statement about the Holocaust.
Unfortunately, much of it has focused on her use of the term “calming feeling,” which has enabled defenders to claim the term was taken out of context. But those defenders ignore the rest of the context, which was far worse than the term “calming feeling.”
Here’s what Tlaib said (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.”
Putting aside the “calming feeling” wording, the Tlaib statement contains two themes: First, the Palestinians are the true victims of the Holocaust because it forced the Jewish survivors on them causing loss of land, property and lives; and Two, Palestinians helped create a safe haven for the Jews at much personal and national sacrifice.
The first point, portraying Palestinians as the true victims of the Holocaust, is a historically perverse and malicious claim. Six millions Jews died, Jewish communities throughout Europe were wiped out, yet it is the Palestinians — who backed the Nazi effort — who are portrayed as the victims. It is fair to consider this an offshoot of Holocaust Inversion, the attempt to portray the Jewish victims of the Nazis as the Nazis. It’s also a historical theft, an attempt to deprive Jews of their history and to repurpose that history to attack Jews.
The second point, that Palestinians supposedly helped provide safe haven to Jews during and after the Holocaust, is a historical falsehood of immense magnitude. We explored this falsehood in our prior post, pointing out that the Arabs of the British Mandate (who did not refer to themselves at that time as Palestinians, a more recent term), boycotted, slaughtered, and discriminated against Jews throughout the time period, and did everything they could to prevent Jews from finding a safe haven. The Grand Mufti was a strong supporter of Hitler and the extermination of the Jews.
Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli publication that regularly attacks the current government, investigated Tlaib’s claim by interviewing both Palestinian and Jewish historians. The result was that these scholars agreed that Tlaib’s ‘safe haven’ narrative had no historical basis, ‘Safe Haven’? What Israeli, Palestinian Scholars Think About Rashida Tlaib’s Holocaust Comments:
Both Israeli and Palestinian scholars told Haaretz that they had great difficulty embracing any view of history in which the Palestinians played any part in providing a “safe haven” for Jewish refugees of the Holocaust.“Rashida Tlaib is either completely ignorant of the history or is a deliberate liar,” charged Prof. Benny Morris, one of the leading scholars of British Mandatory Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the War of Independence in 1948-1949.Morris said Tlaib’s ancestors, meaning 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.”The anti-British and anti-Zionist revolt launched by Palestinian Arabs between 1936 and 1939 both deterred European Jews from escaping to Mandatory Palestine and motivated the British rulers to prevent more refugee Jews from entering Palestine so as not to inflame the Arabs, Morris said.He also pointed out that the leader of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, during his exile in Berlin from 1941-1945, “called for the massacre of Jews in the Arab world on Nazi radio stations — an anti-Jewish ‘jihad’ — and helped the Nazis recruit Muslims from the Balkans for the SS and Wehrmacht.”Palestinian historian Dr. Adel Manna, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, expressed bewilderment when asked about Tlaib’s “safe haven” reference.“I don’t know what she meant,” Manna said.He said that history shows that Jewish immigration before, during and after the Holocaust represented a “colonial settler project” that was clearly leading to Palestinian displacement. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Manna said, Palestinians actively resisted Jewish immigration — as they had in the period preceding the rise of Nazism.“It was natural that when the Palestinians thought that the danger to their existence was real, they started to resist the Zionist project,” Manna explained. “From the beginning, it was clear to the Palestinians from the history of other indigenous people that when other colonies come to a country … that they will be marginalized, kicked out or exterminated.”That resistance began after World War I and culminated in the 1936-39 uprising — the direct result, he said, of Hitler’s rise to power and the resulting spike of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.Therefore, it was “not true” that Palestinians played any role in creating a “safe haven” for Jews, whose leaders were already planning “to occupy their country and transform it into a Jewish state,” Manna said….
Liel Liebovitz documents the Unbelievable Lies of Tlaib’s statement:
There were 433 more Holocaust survivors killed by Palestinians and Jordanians violently opposing the creation of a safe haven for Jews in what had historically and spiritually been their homeland. To attempt and rewrite their well-documented experiences is to victimize them yet again, an unforgivable and deeply anti-Semitic act.
Even CNN’s John King noted the historical fraud perpetrated by Tlaib:
“[She] ignored the fact that Palestinian leaders at the time allied themselves with Hitler and that total war is how the Arab world reacted to the declaration of Israeli independence.”
Against this backdrop of Tlaib’s Holocaust inversion and revisionism, the two top Democrat House leaders could have rebuked her. But as with the anti-Semitic comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democrat leadership jumped to Tlaib’s defense.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeted that Tlaib’s critics needed to apologize:
Republicans’ desperate attempts to smear @RepRashida & misrepresent her comments are outrageous. President @realDonaldTrump & House GOP should apologize to Rep. Tlaib & the American people for their gross misrepresentations.
Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer echoed Pelosi’s defense of Tlaib and demand for an apology:
If you read Rep. @RashidaTlaib’s comments, it is clear that President Trump and Congressional Republicans are taking them out of context. They must stop, and they owe her an apology.
Pelosi and Hoyer are not alone. “Progressive” Democrats are rallying to Tlaib’s defense, while the mainstream media focuses on the Republican reaction as a means of diverting serious consideration of the pernicious nature of Tlaib’s comments.
Pelosi and Hoyer should hang their heads in shame for enabling and protecting Holocaust inversion and revisionism. The beast they have unleashed will come back to haunt them, and us all.
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