Tuesday on Democracy Now!, Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib doubled down on her history of anti-Semitic remarks, claiming that Israel has not yet included the roughly 4.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in its coronavirus vaccines program because it is a “racist state.”
Talib said, “I mean, I think it’s really important to understand Israel is a racist state and that they would deny Palestinians like my grandmother access to a vaccine, that they don’t believe that she’s an equal human being that deserves to live, deserves to be able to be protected by this global pandemic. And it’s really hard to watch as this apartheid state continues to deny their own neighbors, the people that breathe the same air that they breathe, that live in the same communities — you could put a settlement wherever you want, but on the other side of that wall is a farm community village where my grandmother lives and many of our, you know, various family members and others that I know are trying to get to live a good life, a free life, free from these oppressive policies, these racist policies that deny them access to public health, deny them access to freedom of travel, deny them access to academic opportunities.”
To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s famous put-down, every word of that paragraph is a lie, including “the” and “and.”
Tlaib continued lying about Israel: “They have the power to distribute that vaccine to the Palestinian people, their own neighbors, again, feet away from where they live, many of which again could expose them and their family, and it doesn’t — if anything, it just reiterates what the Palestinian people and human rights groups have been telling us, is that this is an apartheid state.”
This false comparison between the Jewish state and the former apartheid state South Africa is a tired, debunked smear that Israel-haters push relentlessly. It’s not working anymore. Even the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is losing momentum and supporters. Your propaganda war is failing, Ms. Tlaib.