“Squad” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is taking friendly fire from her state’s Democratic governor after the latter accused her progressive colleague of some seriously antisemitic remarks during a recent rally.
The Western Journal reported that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is not exactly a moderate Democrat herself, blasted the Detroit-area lawmaker in a statement after what she characterized as “antisemitic” remarks directed at the state’s Jewish attorney general. Gov. Whitmer submitted her comment to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes,” Whitmer’s statement read, an about face from Sunday when she refused to get between Tlaib and Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel. “I’m not going to get in the middle of this argument that they’re having,” Whitmer said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
The dispute stems from criticism of Nessel after the prosecutor brought charges against anti-Israel protestors at the University of Michigan on September 12th. Responding to their arrest, Rep. Tlaib suggested that Nessel’s Jewish heritage and affinity for Israel played a role in his prosecution of Palestinian sympathizers. “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” the Palestinian-born congresswoman told a local news outlet. “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 was among the first to respond, condemning cartoon drawings of Tlaib as well as the congresswoman’s accusation that Nessel’s faith interfered with her ability to enforce the law. “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,” she wrote on X.
Michigan Senate President Pro Tempore Jeremy Moss, a Democrat, piled on, saying Tlaib’s comments were a “disgusting charge of dual loyalty.”
“Rep. Tlaib continues to divide us into ‘good’ Jews she accepts & bad Jews,” he wrote in response.
Left-leaning organizations like the Anti-Defamation League have turned up the heat on Michigan officials, urging them to denounce Tlaib’s growing comfortability with making antisemitic statements. The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in a now-deleted post that Gov. Whitmer is guilty of empty rhetoric unless she is “willing to use your bully pulpit to speak out unequivocally on antisemitism and support holding people accountable for violating the law when it affects Jews.”
Despite its left-leaning hue, Michigan is in play at the presidential level as polls show a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Republicans have sought to capitalize on the growing unease among the left as handwringing continues over the Israel-Hamas war. Earlier this month, a Republican political action committee was seen running digital ads in the state’s majority Arab district suggesting Harris would be more sympathetic to Israel if elected, ostensibly hoping to suppress turnout among progressive Muslims.