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"At this point, there is virtually zero chance that CNN, Jake Tapper, and Dana Bash don't know that Rashida Tlaib never said what they are claiming," said one observer.
Calls grew on Monday for CNN and two of its top on-air personalities to apologize for claiming that U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib made an antisemitic remark during a recent interview after the journalist who interviewed the Michigan Democrat confirmed that the reporters were lying.
During the September 13 interview with Detroit Metro Times reporter Steve Neavling, Tlaib—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—condemned Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for setting a "dangerous precedent" by prosecuting University of Michigan students who peacefully protested against Israel's war on Gaza, for which the key U.S. ally is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Charges against the Michigan protesters include trespassing on their own campus and obstructing police.
"I'm the reporter who interviewed Rashida Tlaib. She never said Nessel did this because she's Jewish. Never. You're spreading lies."
"We've had the right to dissent, the right to protest," Tlaib said during the interview. "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, who is Jewish, accused Tlaib of antisemitism in a Friday social media post comparing the congresswoman's comments to a cartoon drawn by Detroit News automotive reporter Henry Payne and published in the right-wing National Review implying Tlaib is a member of Hezbollah, the Lebanese political and paramilitary group.
Enter Jake Tapper, CNN's lead Washington anchor, who critics have long accused of pro-Israel bias. On Monday, Tapper interviewed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, asking the Democrat to respond to Tlaib's purported assertion that Nessel is only prosecuting Palestine protesters "because she's Jewish."
"I'm not going to get in the middle of this argument that they're having," Whitmer said. "I can just say this. We do want to make sure that students are safe on our campuses, and we recognize that every person has the right to make their statement about how they feel about an issue, a right to speak out, and I'm going to use every lever of mine to ensure that both are true."
During a live broadcast on Monday, CNN anchor Dana Bash lamented what she called the "sad reality" that "antisemitism is everywhere and it comes from both ends of the political spectrum."
"But politicians sometimes sidestep calling it out when it comes from a member of their own party," she added, referring to "a Democratic congresswoman's accusation that the state's Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job."
There was no such "accusation."
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League—which has come under fire for conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews—slammed Whitmer,
posting Monday that "saying you want to 'make sure that students are safe on our campuses' is just words if you are not 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."
Whitmer then issued a new statement
saying: "The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic. We must all use our platforms and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes."
Neavling accused Whitmer of "adding to the lie."
"I'm the reporter who interviewed Rashida Tlaib," he
said in response to a social media post by Tapper. "She never said Nessel did this because she's Jewish. Never. You're spreading lies."
On Monday,
Detroit Metro Times also published a fact-check by Neavling underscoring that Tlaib never said what Nessel, Tapper, and Bash claim.
"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," Neavling wrote. "It should also be noted that the ACLU of Michigan criticized Nessel for charging peaceful protesters at the University of Michigan."
Margaret Zaknoen DeReus, executive director at the California-based Institute for Middle East Understanding, said Monday that "at this point, there is virtually zero chance that CNN, Jake Tapper, and Dana Bash don't know that Rashida Tlaib never said what they are claiming."
"Why are they doubling down instead of correcting themselves and apologizing?" she asked.
Isaac Bailey, a McClatchy columnist and professor of communications practices at Davidson College in North Carolina, asserted Tuesday that Bash and Tapper "owe Tlaib an apology."
Later on Monday, Tapper said during an interview with Nessel that he "misspoke yesterday" about Tlaib's comments.
Bash followed Tuesday by acknowledging that Tlaib "did not reference Nessel's Jewish identity," but added that Nessel believes the congresswoman's remarks were antisemitic.
Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement Tuesday that "CNN made a misstatement of fact that needs to be retracted if the network is to maintain its journalistic credibility."
"Congresswoman Tlaib should also be offered a public apology for falsely claiming she is antisemitic," Walid added.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted earlier this year, Bash and Tapper have "both infused their Jewish identity into their reporting."
Tlaib has faced repeated unfounded allegations of antisemitism from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, especially for calling Israel's war on Gaza a "genocide"—an assessment with which many experts concur—and for using the phrase, "From the river to the sea."
The congresswoman has explained that, to her and to many Palestinians, the phrase—which is also a core component of the original platform of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party—"is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate."
Last November, Tlaib's House colleagues voted 234-188, with 22 Democrats joining almost all Republicans present, in approving a resolution to censure the congresswoman over her defense of Palestine and criticism of Israel's annihilation of Gaza, which has now left more than 147,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing.
On Tuesday, 21 House Democrats led by Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) published a statement contending that "casting doubt on Attorney General Nessel's impartiality or implying these cases are being handled unfairly due to her religious background is antisemitic, deeply disturbing, and unacceptable."
The dead in Gaza include at least 100 journalists, the vast majority of whom are Palestinian.
In May, the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) filed a third complaint at the International Criminal Court alleging "war crimes against journalists in Gaza."
RSF said it had "reasonable grounds for thinking that some of these journalists were deliberately killed and that the others were the victims of deliberate IDF attacks against civilians" and accused Israel of "an eradication of the Palestinian media."
There has been little reporting on the subject by the U.S. corporate media, even as American journalists are killed or wounded in what journalistic investigations have concluded are deliberate targetings by Israeli forces.
"A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate is about to nix this judicial nominee because he's Muslim," one advocate said.
Progressive and Muslim rights organizations spoke out in support of federal appellate court nominee Adeel Mangi on Friday after news broke that enough U.S. Senate Democrats might vote with Republicans to scupper his appointment.
President Joe Biden nominated Mangi, a well-respected New York-based trial lawyer, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit on November 15. If confirmed, he would be the first Muslim to serve as a federal appeals judge. However, CNN reported on Thursday that several Senate Democrats and their staff had told the White House that there seemed to be insufficient votes to confirm him.
The news followed a controversial hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in December, in which Mangi, who was born in Pakistan, was asked to comment on both the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel. While the committee voted to advance him along party lines, the outcome of a full Senate vote is now in question.
"Someone as qualified as Adeel Mangi should have broad and enthusiastic support from the whole Senate."
"A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate is about to nix this judicial nominee because he's Muslim," Jameel Jaffer, the director of Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, posted on social media in response to the news.
Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid said on social media that the move to vote against him was "insufferable Islamophobia and cowardice."
Rashid pointed out that seven of the judges nominated by former President Donald Trump were rated as "not qualified" by the American Bar Association (ABA), yet the Senate still voted to confirm them. Mangi, on the other hand, is "highly qualified" and "highly rated" and "instead even Senate Democrats are running away from him."
The ABA rates Mangi as "well-qualified," and Benchmark Litigation placed him on its 2024 and 2023 lists of the "Top 100 Trial Lawyers" in the country. He earned law degrees from both Oxford and Harvard and has had a successful career both representing corporate clients at the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb, and Tyler and taking on pro bono cases.
One of his prominent pro bono victories involved Muslim communities who had been barred from building a mosque in two New Jersey towns. In another, he secured a settlement for the family of Karl Taylor, who died in a New York prison after being attacked by guards.
"Someone as qualified as Adeel Mangi should have broad and enthusiastic support from the whole Senate," People for the American Way posted in response to the CNN story. "Mangi has spent his career working pro bono for people who couldn't afford a lawyer and would be the first Muslim judge on the 3rd Circuit."
Muslim advocacy group Emgage Action urged the public to support Mangi's nomination and criticized the "overtly Islamophobic questioning" at his confirmation hearings.
"Call on your senators to swiftly move forward with his confirmation and advocate for Adeel Mangi's suitability for the federal bench!" the group said on social media.
One of the most vocal Republican opponents of Mangi's nomination is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Cruz was the one to ask him if he condemned "the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists," to which Mangi responded that the events of October 7 were "a horror." When Cruz then asked if he thought the attacks could be justified, Mangi answered, "I have no patience, none, for any attempts to justify or defend those events."
Cruz and other Republicans also questioned Mangi on his membership of the advisory board for the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, which they claimed supported antisemitism because of speakers it had hosted, as NorthJersey.com reported. In response, Mangi said the advisory board only met once annually and discussed the center's academic research, not its programming.
At the time, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats denounced the Republicans' line of questioning on social media.
"Senate Judiciary Republicans reached a new low, hurling unfounded accusations of antisemitism at an historic Muslim American judicial nominee today. In fact, Adeel Mangi is a longtime advocate for religious liberty," the Democratic committee members wrote.
Several Jewish American groups have backed Mangi's nomination, and even the Anti-Defamation League, which has been criticized for adopting an overly broad definition of antisemitism that stigmatizes legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies, defended him against the Republican line of questioning.
"Just as associating Jewish Americans with certain views or beliefs regarding Israeli government actions would be deemed antisemitic, berating the first American Muslim federal appellate judicial nominee with endless questions that appear to have been motivated by bias toward his religion is profoundly wrong," the group wrote in a January statement.
In a social media post on Friday, Cruz seemed to steer his opposition to Mangi away from anything that could be construed as Islamophobic to instead paint him as a radical. Cruz shared a letter opposing his confirmation from the National Troopers Coalition over Mangi's role as an advisory board member of the Alliance of Families for Justice, which supports the family members of incarcerated individuals. However, the coalition argued Mangi's role on the board showed an anti-law enforcement bias.
"He is so far left that even some Democrats are opposing his nomination," Cruz wrote.
In response to the news that Democrats might vote against Mangi, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told CNN that the administration "continues to fight for his confirmation and to repudiate the vicious hate and bigotry with which he has been targeted because of his Muslim faith."
Bates called Mangi an "extraordinarily qualified nominee who is devoted to the rule of law, lived the American dream through hard work, proven his integrity, and would make history on the bench."
"The American Muslim community is running out of words to describe our feelings about the Biden administration's support for the Gaza genocide," said one advocate.
Hours after his ambassador to the United Nations vetoed the third cease-fire resolution to be proposed at the U.N. Security Council since Israel began its U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza in October, President Joe Biden was scheduled to attend a high-dollar fundraiser at the home of an influential pro-Israel billionaire on Tuesday.
Tickets for the event hosted in Los Angeles by media mogul Haim Saban started at $3,300 and cost as much as $250,000. Other exclusive fundraising events for Biden, who is seeking reelection in November, have been disrupted in recent months by protesters demanding that the U.S. end its support for Israel, which has killed more than 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October.
Co-hosts of the fundraiser include attorney Cliff and Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, whose own event in November was marked by demands for a cease-fire from people in a crowd as Vice President Kamala Harris spoke. Demonstrators also displayed fake blood at the Gilbert-Luries' home.
Nicole Mutchnik, a vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League, is also a co-host of Tuesday's event. Mutchnik's staunchly pro-Israel organization has frequently accused pro-Palestinian rights groups of anti-Jewish sentiment, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
Jewish-led Palestinian rights group IfNotNow pointed out that Saban has been quoted as suggesting the U.S. should "scrutinize" Muslims "to get them to admit they are or they're not terrorists."
On Monday, the group led a vigil outside the Los Angeles residence of the vice president.
"We are sitting shiva with grief for all those who've been killed, Palestinian and Israeli, and begging the Biden-Harris administration to end it," said IfNotNow.
Ahead of Saban's fundraiser, fresh outrage erupted among Palestinian rights advocates after U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed Algeria's resolution for a cease-fire.
"The American Muslim community is running out of words to describe our feelings about the Biden administration's support for the Gaza genocide," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "The latest U.S. veto of a U.N. cease-fire resolution is shameful. President Biden should stop acting like [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu's defense lawyer and start acting like the president of the United States."
"We call on the American people to continue expressing their opposition to the Biden administration's support for the Israeli government's war crimes by contacting the White House and their elected officials and calling on them to demand a cease-fire, access to humanitarian aid, and the pursuit of a just, lasting peace," Awad added.