By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel –There is an expression that people can be identified by the company they keep.
Rashida Tlaib was elected to the House of Representatives in a district with a constituency whose culture and issues she shares and now projects within the United States Congress.
She celebrated her arrival into the American political stage by draping herself in a Palestinian flag. She says she wants to lead a Congressional delegation to Palestine to expose the human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
If that is correct she should take her fellow Congress representatives to visit Issam Akel who was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor – but not by an Israeli court. There is no such Israeli sentence as imprisonment with hard labor. That human rights crime is carried out by Palestinian courts on the orders of the Palestinian Authority.
Akel, like Tlaib, is a Palestinian-American. All the more reason for American congress representatives to visit him.
Akel’s crime was selling his Jerusalem property to an Israeli Jew.
This is the racist, anti-Semitic, Palestinian justice system that flies under the radar.
If Tlaib wants to show her fellow Democrats human rights abuses against her fellow Palestinians here it is, inflicted on Palestinian by their unelected leaders.
And if that is not enough, let Tlaib bring her colleagues to visit the 28 Palestinians languishing in Palestinian detention camps in Jericho where, according to Human Rights Watch, they are being tortured for the crime of peaceful protest not against Israel but against their own corrupt leadership.
But of course Rashida Tlaib will not address the blatant human rights abuses inflicted on their own people by the PA and Hamas. Better not to spoil a false propaganda narrative with gruesome facts.
Let’s instead examine the friends she keeps.
Standing to the left of the picture is Arab-American comedian, Amer Zahar, who made a not-so-funny video in 2012 in which he stopped by a Starbucks cafe and, pointing to the building, uttered, “You know he’s Jewish,” before going on to say, “The Holocaust? I didn’t do it,” and “I don’t hate Jewish people” giving a sign with his fingers over the words “Jewish people,” and following it up with “Get out of Palestine.”
On her election, Zahar celebrated with a map of the Middle East saying, “I saw there was something wrong with the map so I fixed it.” Zahar had covered Israel with a sticker saying ‘Palestine.’.
He tweeted on January 22, 2016 “Many American Jews are starting to realize that Israel might be their ISIS.”
And on February 26, 2016, “To understand Palestine, you must understand European white supremacy. It wasn’t Jews who stole our land, it was white people.”
What Amer Zahar doesn’t understand is that European Jews are a minority in the Jewish state, and they were the victims of real white supremacists in the Holocaust because they weren’t white enough.
The majority of Israelis are Jews who fled or were driven out of Arab and Muslim lands. Anti-Semitic Arabs like Zahar.
Rasha Mubarak is President of YDOC and CAIR. She led chants at an anti-Israel event in 2017 shouting “Free free Palestine!”
Mubarak said this is not about religiosity, but her uncle Lufti was there shouting at the camera, “You Jews are killers! In any language in the world they say ‘Damn Jew!’ You act like a damn Jew. You seem like a damn Jew. This is a fact. In every language in the world a damn Jew exists.”
This anti-Semitic Israel-bashing goes back further. At a Hezbollah rally, she told her uncle in Arabic, “Uncle don’t talk with them. They are Jews.”
But her uncle went back in front of the camera and said, “Are you a couple of Jews or something? What do you want to know?”
The cameraman asks, “I want to know why are you carrying a Hezbollah flag?”
“Why? Because they are freedom fighters.”
Linda Sarsour, standing between Tlaib and Mubarak, adores Louis Farrakhan of “the satanic Jew that controls everything and mostly everybody” notoriety. Farrakhan said that Adolf Hitler was a great man and that Jews are termites. Praising this Nation of Islam Jew-hater, Sarsour tweeted about him, “The brother does not age. God bless him.”
God bless him because she shares the Farrakhan anti-Semitism that says Jews are termites and satanic, and that Hitler was a good man.
Sarsour’s anti-Semitism is apparent when she says, “I want to make a distinction that white anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans [and] it’s different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic.”
Linda Sarsour sees evil when Jews celebrate Hanukkah. She tweeted on December 7, 2016, “The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations is co- hosting a Hanukkah party at Donald Trump’s hotel in DC?”
Did she think this was a covert pro-Trump covert KKK or white supremacist event?
Rashida Tlaib has written for Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam’s Final Call magazine.
Anri-racists they are not. They have spent a lifetime propagating anti-Semitic political fantasies and Islamic ideology.
Rashida Tlaib’s election to the US House of Representatives was not an accident. She represents the political, nationalistic and religious aspirations of a hefty part of her constituency. This comes with a smattering of anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism.
You recognize the people by the company they keep, and increasingly represent.
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Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism’ and is a researcher and expert on the anti-Semitism behind every aspect of the Palestinian cause.