Anatomy of a Smear Campaign Against Rashida Tlaib

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Anatomy of a Smear Campaign Against Rashida Tlaib. A step-by-step breakdown of how a lie started, spread, and was picked up on by elected officials and high-profile journalists.
by Prem Thakker
zeteo
Sep 24, 2024
https://zeteo.com/p/anatomy-of-a-smear-campaign


STATE OF THE UNION: MICHIGAN AG NESSEL ACCUSES REP. TLAIB OF ANTI-SEMITIC REMARK AFTER TLAIB SUGGESTED PROTESTER CHARGES WERE BIASED

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) is being accused of antisemitism by elected officials and mainstream journalists for saying something she never said.

Here’s how it happened:

Sept. 12: Earlier this month, the Michigan lawmaker called out her state’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, for announcing charges against 11 pro-Palestine protesters at the University of Michigan.

“Instead of getting justice, not one criminal charge in the Flint Water Crisis, you're going to spend time in trying to use the power of your office to silence people's First Amendment right,” Tlaib said during a Black-Palestine solidarity panel, moderated by Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan.

Sept. 13: “This is a move that’s going to set a precedent, and it’s unfortunate that a Democrat made that move,” Tlaib elaborated in an interview with the Detroit Metro Times. “You would expect that from a Republican, but not a Democrat, and it’s really unfortunate.”

”We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” she added. “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.”

Nessel’s prosecutions were also criticized by groups including Michigan’s ACLU chapter.

Abraham Aiyash
@AbrahamAiyash

Shame on the @detroitnews for allowing this racist, xenophobic vile cartoon on their platform.
Pay attention to who condemns this. And then recognize the different standard Arab and Muslim politicians are held by.


Rashida Tlaib
[Rep. Tlaib] "Odd. My pager just exploded"

Sept. 20: Days later, Tlaib was the target of a racist editorial cartoon that implied she was part of Hezbollah. The cartoon depicted the only Palestinian member of Congress saying “Odd. My pager just exploded,” in reference to the Israeli military terrorist attacks on Lebanon.

Sept. 22: Nessel joined scores of Democrats in condemning the cartoon. “Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong,” Nessel wrote on X. “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.”

Sept. 22: Then, on Sunday, CNN anchor Jake Tapper questioned Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on the matter. “Do you think Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job? Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protestors are not — that’s quite an accusation, do you think it’s true?”

Whitmer said she didn’t want to get in the middle of the matter but expressed concern for Jewish communities and Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, as well as support for free speech rights.

Then, media outlet Jewish Insider reported on Whitmer’s remarks, writing that Whitmer didn’t “speak out against Rashida Tlaib’s insinuation that the AG charged campus demonstrators because she’s Jewish.”

“Tlaib has also claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish,” the outlet wrote, providing no quote to corroborate the claim and linking to the Metro Times story in which the lawmaker said no such thing.

Shortly after, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt condemned Whitmer for not speaking out against Tlaib. “When a congresswoman accuses the attorney general of prosecuting protestors simply because she’s Jewish, it’s bias,” Greenblatt posted on X, echoing the defamatory lie about Tlaib. (Greenblatt later deleted the post.)

Tapper then boosted Greenblatt’s statement on X, writing: “ADL response to Whitmer on SOTU today.”

Sept. 23: On Monday, CNN’s Dana Bash reinforced the lie further, summarizing Tapper’s interview with Whitmer: “…my co-anchor, Jake Tapper, asked about a Democratic congresswoman’s accusation that the state’s Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job.”

In conversation with Bash, CNN’s David Chalian reiterated the idea: “It’s not very hard to say that Rashida Tlaib saying that Dana Nessel is pursuing charges because she’s Jewish is an antisemitic thing to say — it is.”

Shortly after, Metro Times reporter Steve Neavling, author of the original story that spurred the cycle, published a new article: “Fact-check: Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish.”

Steve Neavling
@MCmuckraker

Fact-check: Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she's Jewish.


From Metrotimes.com
2:08 PM Sep 23, 2024

In it, Neavling writes: “Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.”

An hour after the fact-check published, Tapper posted a new statement from Whitmer’s office: “The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decision based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic. Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes.”

Neavling responded to Tapper’s tweet saying: “I’m the reporter who interviewed Rashida Tlaib. She never said Nessel did this because she’s Jewish. Never. You’re spreading lies.”

On Monday evening, Nessel appeared on CNN, with Tapper, who partially walked back from his earlier peddling of the lie.

“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,” Tapper said. “What do you make of those today, noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said your bias was because of your religion, and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?”

“In 2022, when my opponent [Republican Matthew DePerno] accused me of being a groomer and a pedophile, everybody understood that those were homophobic remarks because I happen to be gay,” Nessel started. “Rashida Tlaib is an individual who is well-known for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are antisemitic in nature, so this isn’t the first time that we would’ve heard these words out of her mouth,” she continued, saying she thought it was “very clear” exactly what Tlaib was saying.

Sometime Tuesday, Jewish Insider edited the original story, without adding a correction or clarification. “Tlaib has also claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish” became “Tlaib has also suggested that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.”

Of course, this manufactured lie about Tlaib has wholly obscured that Tlaib was victim to a racist cartoon donning the pages of publications like the National Review; that she had actually begun garnering support and sympathy from her colleagues; and that Tlaib’s “original sin” was speaking out in defense of students protesting their tuition supporting a US-funded genocidal campaign in Palestine.

Tlaib’s original remarks criticizing Nessel focused on the prosecution of pro-Palestine protestors, critiques shared by advocacy groups, including the Michigan chapter of the ACLU. Most of the charges are against students, including Jewish students, who refused to vacate a campus encampment after police ordered them to leave as they demanded the school divest from “weapons manufacturers and war profiteers complicit in the genocide in Palestine.” The arrests came as police allegedly used batons, and “Deep Freeze,” self-described as the “most intense, incapacitating agent available today,” to arrest the students.

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How CNN, ADL & Others Amplified Smear Against Rep. Rashida Tlaib for Criticizing Campus Prosecutions
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 27, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/27/ ... transcript

-- "Anatomy of a Smear Campaign Against Rashida Tlaib"

"Fact-check: Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she's Jewish"

We look at the smear campaign faced by the only Palestinian American in Congress and a vocal critic of Israel, Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, after she defended the rights of student protesters. Tlaib recently criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel over charges Nessel filed against 11 mostly students and alumni who were involved in a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Michigan. Nessel then accused Tlaib of antisemitism despite the congressmember never mentioning Nessel’s religion. Key media figures like CNN’s Jake Tapper have parroted the claim that Tlaib said Nessel is biased because she is Jewish, despite the original article’s author fact-checking the narrative. “This is not at all what happened. She’s talking about an anti-Palestinian bias,” says Steve Neavling, an investigative reporter who first published Tlaib’s comments in the Detroit Metro Times. “It was a very unusual, surreal experience for me as a journalist to see so many lies being peddled about an interview that I witnessed.” We also speak with Prem Thakker, a political correspondent for Zeteo News who has documented the smear campaign, about his efforts to get an update on the U.S. investigation into the killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza. “I have not gotten an answer. It’s been over 240 days.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at how key members of the media have participated in a smear campaign against the only Palestinian American in Congress, a vocal critic of Israel, Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib. She recently criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, over charges Nessel filed against 11 mostly students and alumni who were involved in a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Michigan.

The Detroit Metro Times reported the comments by Tlaib from an exclusive interview Friday, September 13th, saying Nessel’s move was, quote, “going to set a precedent, and it’s unfortunate that a Democrat made that move. … We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. 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,” Tlaib told the Detroit Metro Times.

Well, the Michigan district attorney general — the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel responded in a post on X that also referred to a recent Detroit News cartoon that was widely condemned as racist and Islamophobic for showing Congressmember Tlaib next to an exploding pager, implying she was part of Hezbollah. Nessel wrote, quote, “Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong. 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,” unquote.

After this, the Metro Times published a fact-check Monday noting Tlaib, quote, “never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism,” even though the newspaper had pointed out in its own reporting that Nessel is Jewish.

Meanwhile, the smear campaign was picked up over the weekend by CNN’s Jake Tapper. This is Tapper interviewing the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

JAKE TAPPER: Do you think Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job, because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not? That’s quite, quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER: Like I said, Jake, I’m not going to get in the middle of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Even as Governor Whitmer refused to take the bait, CNN correspondent Dana Bash also accused Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of antisemitism.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Washington, D.C., Prem Thakker is with us, political correspondent, columnist for Zeteo News, whose recent piece is headlined “Anatomy of a Smear Campaign Against Rashida Tlaib.” And in Detroit, we’re joined by Steve Neavling, investigative reporter at Detroit Metro Times, who wrote the story this week headlined “Fact-check: Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish.”

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Steve Neavling, let’s begin with you, since that’s where it started. Talk about your initial interview with Rashida Tlaib and then how it was characterized, and the fact-check you’ve tried to do since then.

STEVE NEAVLING: Well, yeah, I wanted to talk to Rashida Tlaib as the only Palestinian American in Congress, and I wanted to find out what she thought of Dana Nessel’s decision to arrest or to charge these 11 protesters, because it was so unusual. And we talked for about 20 minutes in a phone interview, and it was very clear to me during our discussion that she was talking about — when she was talking about a bias in the Attorney General’s Office, she was talking about an anti-Palestinian bias. What she pointed out was something that’s very common across many institutions in America, many of which aren’t led by Jewish people.

So, she wasn’t ever making this sort of issue of what Dana Nessel’s religion was. She was just saying that there’s this anti-Palestinian bias, and pointed out that in the six years that Dana Nessel has been attorney general, she has never once charged a protester for anything. And I’ve been to dozens of protests in the last six years. A lot of them had civil disobedience that was a lot more severe than what we saw at the University of Michigan. So it was very bizarre. And I wanted to find out what Rashida Tlaib thought about that. And we had the interview, and I thought it went well. I wrote the story. And then, the next thing we know, it ends up getting misinterpreted, and lies are peddled, and it gets out of control.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about how that happened. Talk about the interviews on CNN, and then what you tried to do with your tweets, with your articles.

STEVE NEAVLING: Yeah, I started seeing messages from Jewish groups, from ADL, from a state lawmaker, from people saying this was antisemitic. She’s saying — that Rashida Tlaib is saying that Dana Nessel is only doing this because she’s Jewish. And then CNN picked it up, and Jake Tapper was saying, you know, that this actually happened, this is what she said. And she never said it.

So, I felt an obligation, and I felt somewhat of a responsibility, because my story was being misinterpreted. And Rashida Tlaib, as a result, was getting labeled as an antisemite. So I thought it was my responsibility to let CNN know, to let all these other people know that this is not at all what happened. She’s talking about an anti-Palestinian bias. And I went on Twitter, on Jake Tapper’s page and on some of the other reporters’ pages and said, “This is what happened.” We wrote a fact-check saying this is not at all what happened.

And it took a good 24 hours after that before CNN decided to say, “OK, yeah, we made an error.” But by then, the damage had already been done. You have Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, getting accused of being an antisemite, which really diminishes what she says about this war. So, I mean, it was a very unusual, surreal experience for me as a journalist to see so many lies being peddled about an interview that I witnessed and people saying that something happened that I know didn’t happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Prem Thakker of Zeteo, can you take it from there on a national level, watching this story unfold, with the reporter himself trying to correct the record, saying that the congressmember who he interviewed never mentioned what CNN and others said she did, and then trying to bring the Governor Gretchen Whitmer into this?

PREM THAKKER: Thank you, Amy. And, Steve, it’s a pleasure to be here with you, too.

It’s — yeah, I mean, seeing it from the D.C. perspective, it was remarkable to watch the timeline and events unfold sequentially. This started out actually a day before Steve’s interview, when Representative Tlaib appeared at a Black-Palestine solidarity panel, when the charges by Nessel were announced minutes before this panel. So, during the panel, Representative Rashida Tlaib speaks out against them. She sort of criticizes Dana Nessel for not bringing to charges — charges against those involved with the Flint water crisis, but nevertheless choosing to do so here, as Steve mentions, also contrasting that with other civil disobedience and other civil actions where people were not charged. Notably, too, is that, as I believe Steve noted, too, that Representative Tlaib was also suggesting that perhaps there might have been pressure from the university. And so, over and over again, it seemed that Representative Tlaib was referring to broader, systematic forces that are, as Steve says, anti-Palestinian.

But again, the timeline itself is also quite striking. So, there’s the panel on the 12th, where Representative Tlaib makes these comments condemning the charges. On the 13th is when Steve’s story comes out with Representative Tlaib. On the 20th, a week later, is when the cartoon is out, when Dana Nessel tweets condemning the cartoon, but also condemning the possibility that — or, suggestion that she is only making these actions against these pro-Palestine protesters because of her Jewish identity. A few days after — actually, that same day is when Jake Tapper then asks Governor Whitmer about the situation and starts peddling this false accusation against Representative Rashida Tlaib. And then you see Jewish Insider report on that exchange. And then the Anti-Defamation League peddled the defamatory claim about Representative Tlaib. Then you see Steve putting out his fact-check as more and more anchors and reporters continue to peddle this lie. And you just see this sort of unfold and evolve in real time, as I can only imagine Steve’s experience as someone who witnessed this, seeing the story be misappropriated and taken out of his own hands as someone who wrote the story. It’s very remarkable.

And though some reporters have backtracked, some others, including the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, have sort of continued on with sort of pushing the suggestion that somehow Rashida Tlaib was criticizing these charges on the basis of Dana Nessel’s identity and not the anti-Palestinian bias that Steve speaks to, not potential broad or systematic forces that are anti-Palestinian in nature.

AMY GOODMAN: Prem, before we end the show, I wanted to ask you about a story you’ve been following closely. Last month, your story was headlined “200 Days and Still No Justice for Hind.” It featured a video of the many times you’ve tried to ask the State Department for an update on the status of the Hind Rajab investigation. That’s 6-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, killed on January 29th in an Israeli attack along with six members of her family. They were in a car. They were desperately calling to the Red Crescent and saying that they were under attack in a car. Two paramedics got permission to go to try to help them. They also were killed in the Israeli second strike, what the experts say may amount to a war crime. This is you questioning State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel.

PREM THAKKER: So, has the Biden-Harris administration followed up on this
alleged — alleged lie by the Israel government or sought to confirm any of Israel’s claims on the half-year-old killing now of this girl and her family?

VEDANT PATEL: So, we are in touch with our partners in Israel around the clock on a variety of issues. I don’t have any specifics to read out as it relates to this conversation. I’m happy to check if there have been any additional updates. But to my understanding, this investigation is still ongoing. And I will leave it to them to speak to the details of it.

PREM THAKKER: So, I have reached out to the Israeli government, as well, and while I was reaching out to the Red Crescent, they said they would get back to me with an answer. And they did not, after we reported the Red Crescent said that the Israeli government [inaudible] —

VEDANT PATEL: Well, it’s really —

PREM THAKKER: I’m just wondering —

VEDANT PATEL: I’m not a spokesperson —

PREM THAKKER: No, right, of course.

VEDANT PATEL: — for the responsiveness of another foreign ministry.

PREM THAKKER: Just given that, you know, this government gives them billions of dollars in aid, I imagine that such claims want to be fact-checked.

VEDANT PATEL: So, we will continue to engage with our partners in Israel. We ask them for additional information. We ask questions when we see incidents unfold. And we’ll continue to do that. As it relates to this incident, I’m not aware of any updates, and I believe this investigation is ongoing.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel being continually questioned many times, over weeks, months, about the investigation into Hind Rajab. You have 15 seconds, Prem. Have you gotten an answer yet?

PREM THAKKER: I have not gotten an answer. It’s been over 240 days of me and other press colleagues continuing to ask about the killing of Hind Rajab, her family members, the medics sent to save her, as well as several other human rights violations. And we have not yet gotten an answer.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Prem Thakker of Zeteo News and Steve Neavling of the Detroit Metro Times. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.