CNN slammed Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Monday after she issued multiple false statements over the weekend about the Jews and the creation of the modern State of Israel following World War II.
“There’s always kind of a calming feeling when I think of the tragedy of the Holocaust, that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, has been wiped out … in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust, post-tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time,” Tlaib said during an interview on the “Skullduggery” podcast. “And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that in many ways.”
CNN’s John King highlighted on Monday that the remarks that Tlaib made were false, noting that she “ignored the fact that Palestinian leaders at the time allied themselves with Hitler,” adding that “total war was how the Arab world reacted to the declaration of Israeli independence.”
“She can’t rewrite that history, and you can’t project revisionist history, so why?” King asked CNN global affairs analyst and former State Department negotiator Aaron David Miller.
“First of all, you know I think there would be a ban on the deployment or employment of Holocaust imagery in metaphor in Washington politics,” Miller responded. “Every time it’s used and deployed and has been by Republicans, Democrats, it’s wrong. Genocide is not a unique event but the willful murder, systematic organized murder, of six out of every seven million European Jews is a unique event and every time it’s done it leads to misunderstanding [and] antagonism.”
“She also has her history wrong on two points,” Miller continued. “Number one … even had there been no Holocaust, most of the institutions of the current State of Israel were in place before Hitler started killing Jews, so the Holocaust added urgency and international support, but I suspect with or without it the State of Israel would have come into being.”
“And finally on this notion that Palestinians either negatively or positively helped to create a safe haven for Jews, the reality is that the Arabs of Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini the Grand Mufti, [were] in Nazi Germany collaborating, coordinating with the Nazis [… and] considering extermination of the entire Jewish community there as well. So this was ill-timed, ill-advised, and I think it clearly is simply going to antagonize and polarize the already polarized debate in Washington.”
The Washington Examiner, which noted that Tlaib made the remarks while arguing for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that necessarily entails destruction of the State of Israel, reported that Tlaib “ignores the Jewish presence in the region and efforts to establish a Jewish state that predated the Holocaust, ignores that her ancestors allied with Hitler at the time of the Holocaust, and ignores decades of violence and terrorism directed at Israel both before, during, and after the Holocaust.”
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