Rashida Tlaib is under fire from CNN for something she demonstrably did not say

On September 13, the Detroit Metro Times ran a story based on an interview with Rashida Tlaib in which she denounced the filing of felony charges against pro-Palestinian protesters by Michigan AG Dana Nessel. Almost two weeks later, what she didn’t actually say in that interview – but was accused of saying anyway – remains a national story. (Short version of all this is here.)

She argued that Nessel was applying the law inconsistently, because demonstrably more violent demonstrations on other issues had not drawn charges from the AG. “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib said. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

She then explicitly named the source of that bias as pressure from the University of Michigan leadership. “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it,” Tlaib said. “I think President Ono and Board of Regent members were very much heavy-handed in this. It had to come from somewhere.”

She went on to say that a decade from now, the public would understand that the university had pushed for these unfair charges. “In 10 years, the University of Michigan itself is going to teach about this movement and say how wonderful it was, or how it moved our country toward a direction that it needed to, following international law and human rights laws and our own U.S. laws,” Tlaib said. “Yet people are going to write about how the University of Michigan decided to prosecute, criminalize, and vilify their students when they just did everything that they were taught to do.”

Now, you might disagree with that assessment from Tlaib. You might think the charges were fair, and the just consequences of the protesters’ actions. You might think Nessel wasn’t actually swayed by the university leadership’s pressure and would have charged them regardless, and perhaps there are distinctions we don’t understand between these protests and the more violent ones where she didn’t level charges. All of that is fair game to ponder. 

Yet what you can’t find anywhere in Tlaib’s comments is the thing she is now being accused of by CNN; Josh Kraushaar, the editor in chief of Jewish Insider; the Anti-Defamation League; and more than a dozen House Democrats. As Kraushaar wrote in JI: “Tlaib has also claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.” That was an assertion repeated by Dana Bash and Jake Tapper at CNN and by Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL. The Metro Times reporter quickly went public to correct the record. In response, Bash, Tapper, and Greenblatt variously said they needed to clarify their comments. Kraushaar edited his story to take out “claimed” and replace it with “suggested,” which – as you can read above in her comments – is still not true. All of them are standing by the thrust of their remarks, saying that Tlaib’s comments are vague enough that antisemitism can be read into them. Bash and Kraushaar said they had not heard back from Tlaib’s office when they asked her to clarify the remarks. But it appears none of them read the interview. She is clear about where the bias is coming from in this case: the University of Michigan. 

It’s been startling to see this five-day news cycle unfold based on a total fabrication or, at best, a refusal to read the entire article from September 13. 

There’s a petition going around urging CNN and Kraushaar to issue a correction and apologize and I think with enough pressure they might do it. 

If you can sign it, please do that here. 

Now, why did we start talking about this issue on September 20 when the article was published a week earlier? Well, on September 20, National Review ran a cartoon depicting Rashida Tlaib as a Hezbollah operative with a pager exploding on her desk. It was on that day that Nessel decided to launch her attack. “Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong,” she tweeted. “Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.”

Actually, it’s just plain wrong. It never happened. 

We covered the story on Counter Points today, link to the show is here. Tlaib segment starts at the 26:30 mark.