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Gaza, Hamas, Ilham Omar, Israel, Mogadishu West, Nancy Pelosi, Nazis, Palestinians, Rashida Tlaib, revisionist history, Steny Hoyer, The Holocaust
Rashida Tlaib (R)
Rep. Rashida Talib (D, Hamas)–I most recently wrote about her here–is at it again, as Legal Insurrection explains:
There’s always kind of a calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact 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, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports. And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways. [emphasis LI] But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.
Those that have been paying attention know that Tlaib, and her Islamist soul mate Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu West)–I’ve recently written about her here and here–-are freshmen members of Congress, and intent on representing the interests of Islamists, not Americans. Both are virulently anti-Semitic, so Tlaib’s comments, while not specifically anti-Semitic this time, are ahistorical at best:
One of the first to report on Tlaib’s comments, Phillip Klein of The Washington Examiner observed, ‘Tlaib’s claims that her Arab ancestors provided a ‘safe haven’ to Jews after the Holocaust 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.”
That the Arabs living in pre-state Israel (who would have called themselves ‘Arabs,’ not ‘Palestinians,’) welcomed Jews is an inversion of the historical record. The Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi sympathizer, organized pogroms against the Jews and brought pressure on the British to prohibit Jewish immigration to what was then called Palestine, which condemned millions to death.
Tlaib’s blatant historical inversion is an attempt to not just to deny the history, but to cast Palestinians as victims of not just the Europeans, but of the Jews too. It is common for the Palestinians to engage in Holocaust denial. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received his PhD for a paper alleging collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis.
Mahmoud Abbas, as the leader of the PA, is just one in a succession of Palestinian “leaders,” who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. Let’s consider a bit more reality from Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
The first point, portraying Palestinians as the true victims of the Holocaust, is a historically perverse and malicious claim. Six millions Jews died, Jewish communities throughout Europe were wiped out, yet it is the Palestinians — who backed the Nazi effort — who are portrayed as the victims. It is fair to consider this an offshoot of Holocaust Inversion, the attempt to portray the Jewish victims of the Nazis as the Nazis. It’s also a historical theft, an attempt to deprive Jews of their history and to repurpose that history to attack Jews.
The second point, that Palestinians supposedly helped provide safe haven to Jews during and after the Holocaust, is a historical falsehood of immense magnitude. We explored this falsehood in our prior post, pointing out that the Arabs of the British Mandate (who did not refer to themselves at that time as Palestinians, a more recent term), boycotted, slaughtered, and discriminated against Jews throughout the time period, and did everything they could to prevent Jews from finding a safe haven. The Grand Mufti was a strong supporter of Hitler and the extermination of the Jews.
Dominic Green at The Spectator:
Tlaib’s words were merely inaccurate, deceptive, and entirely in accord with her campaign to delegitimize American support for Israel, demonize the Jewish state, isolate American Jews through allegations of ‘dual loyalty’, whitewash Palestinian terrorism, and generally distract our attention from the facts.
These are present facts, like Tlaib’s fondness for the company of Islamists and apologists for terrorism, or her dubious uniqueness as the only member of Congress who wishes to destroy the Jewish state. They are also historical facts about the Palestinian Arab alliance with Nazi Germany, about pre-1939 Palestinian Arab attempts to nullify the Israeli state-in-the-making by murdering Jewish civilians, about the unceasing Palestinian Arab campaign of murder since 1945 — and about the related propaganda effort, in which Tlaib clearly shares, to erase the Jewish people from history, even though they were ‘Palestinian’ when Christianity was just starting out.
Ilhan Omar may also reasonably be categorized as one who wishes to destroy Israel. And John Hinderaker at Powerline:
I don’t think Rashida Tlaib has any illusions about what happened in the Middle East in the 1940s. I’m sure her grandmother could have explained it to her. Despite her self-description as a flower child devoted to love, Tlaib’s hatreds shine through. She obviously hates Benjamin Netanyahu, who represents the Jewish majority in Israel. She wants to bring about a single state of Arabs and Jews that encompasses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, along with countless Arabs from surrounding countries who claim a ‘right of return.’ The obvious intent behind that policy preference is to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Tlaib doesn’t deny this, but assures us that she ‘comes from a place of love.’ That can’t negate the fact that if her policy preferences were effectuated, the Jewish State of Israel would cease to exist. And, of course, her bete noir, Benjamin Netanyahu, would be long gone, if not murdered along with his fellow Israeli Jews.
That is why I think Rashida Tlaib is not as ignorant of history as some have suggested, while at the same time, is more hostile to Jews than others have claimed. There is one Jewish-majority country in the world, and Tlaib wants it to be submerged by an Islamic majority assembled from nearby territories. You can judge for yourself whether that constitutes anti-Semitism.
There is no doubt Arabs and Nazis were allies. There is likewise no doubt Nazis and Jews were not collaborators. There was just no time for that as Nazis were busy murdering every Jew they could find, something about a “Final Solution,” or something like that…
President Trump, who has restored the relationship with Israel Barack Obama did so much to destroy, was not amused:
Democrats, already socialists, and fast becoming the party of Islam, have chosen to support Tlaib, as The New York Post reports:
Democratic leaders were rushing to the defense of freshman Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Monday after she got blasted by Republicans — including President Trump — for comments she madeabout Jews moving into Palestine after the Holocaust.
‘Republicans’ desperate attempts to smear @RepRashida & misrepresent her comments are outrageous,’ tweetedHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi. ‘President @realDonaldTrump & House GOP should apologize to Rep. Tlaib & the American people for their gross misrepresentations.’
Speaking to The Hill in an email, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said: ‘If you read Rep. Tlaib’s comments, it is clear that President Trump and Congressional Republicans are taking them out of context. They must stop, and they owe her an apology.
Not quite. Mr. Trump and other Republicans are guilty of accurately categorizing Tlaib’s comments, which has Dems riled: how dare he tell the truth about a Democrat?!
Numerous Dems rallied behind Tlaib after Trump fired off his tweet. Her supporters included Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Tlaib and Omar are the only two Muslim women in Congress.
‘This is another transparent attempt to sow division b/t minority communities and distract from your own criminal behavior by smearing a Muslim woman,’ Omar tweeted, referencing her own GOP criticism. ‘No one should fall for it this time.
It is no coincidence socialists ally themselves with genocidal Islamists:
Mr. President: Stop dividing the American people up by their religion, their race or their country of origin–and stop your ugly attacks against Muslim women in Congress,’ tweeted Sen. Bernie Sanders. ‘You are taking Rep. @RashidaTlaib’s comments out of context and should apologize.
Readers may take the Powerline link where most of Tlaib’s comments may be found, and a link for the rest resides. As always, I encourage everyone to read the original sources and decide whether Tlaib has been taken out of context, or whether she is an Islamist determined to exterminate Israel. This is why I always provide source links.
Democrats are always claiming they are on the right side of history. In this case, the “right side” would seem to be the side of revisionist history, where genocidal Arabs aligned with Adolf Hitler were the protectors of Jews rather than their exterminators. This right side continues today as the Palestinians Tlaib champions teach their children to murder Jews, and let them out of school to rush the border fence and engage in other acts of war and terror in the hope they’ll be injured or killed. Dead terrorist’s families are bankrolled by the PA, and the international media is always anxious to call dead terrorists innocent victims of Israeli oppression. In fact, they often lie about it.
Much remains to be done in sorting out the corruption of our intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies, but we must retain necessary and non-political counterintelligence capabilities, if for no reason other than keeping an eye on people like Omar and Tlaib, whose loyalty is clearly not to America or her allies.
Note: Go here for the indispensable Victor Davis Hanson’s explanation of the debilitating, Jew-hating insanity of the Democrats/socialists.
Firstly, those lands were never the arabs. They aren’t even Palestinians as the etymology of the term proves. Duplicity is their tactic as it ever has been.
On the U.S. domestic front, why are those mahommeden not expelled from the Congress? By their very nature, their beliefs and behaviors, they are unable to affirm allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. Censure, while a weighty rebuke is insufficient; the person must be impeached or a ‘motion to dismiss’ be filed against them. Apparently, there is no one in Congress with the sand to begin the proceedings.
For clarification, please add a comma between the words, ‘rebuke’ and ‘is’.
“Palastinian Arab” is an oxymoron. Arabs are called “Arab” because they are indigeneous to Arabia, and Jews are “Jews” because they are indegenous to Judea. Duh.
Islam is inherently incompatible with Western civilization. A basic principle of the American system is separation of church and state. But even moderate Muslims want a theocracy, with civil law based on religion. “You can’t separate the heart from the head.”
Jewish culture seems to include a strong work ethic, which may be anathema to both Islamists and Leftists.
The Israelis took a wasteland and built a modern, stable, democratic country with a relatively high standard of living. If it were the opposite (that is, if so-called “Palestine” had been a paradise, and the Jews had moved in and turned it into a slum), then every coffee shop intellectual in New York and every limousine liberal in Los Angeles would be a militant Zionist.
In that young people read this blog, it is important to ensure the truth is revealed. To wit; ‘separation of church and state’ is not a basic principal. I offer some arguments to support that.
In the months (June-September 1789) of debates over the 1st Amendment, not once did the Founders utter that phrase nor did they allude to it. If it is such a ‘basic principal’, don’t you think the Founders would have made it central to their debates? The phrase, ‘separation of church and state’ is nowhere found in the founding documents or the Amendments thereof.
The most referenced source by the signers of the Constitution is the Holy Bible. Even Thomas Jefferson, who many today say was a ‘deist’, proffered that the Bible is that most favored instrument of learning.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Constitution, among his many achievements is noted as the ‘father of education’. He proposed the Bible as the text for students.
I will stop here as I do not wish to be a distraction to the subject of SMM’s post.
Dear Rick:
You’re quite right that the phrase does not appear in our foundational documents. It does, however, appear in Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists on January 2, 1802:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ʺmake no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,ʺ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Jefferson, the author of American religious liberty, was explaining the intent of the Founders in writing the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. Since then, the phrase has been widely quoted, not only in the law, but in verbal and written discourse.
Dear Mike:
In leaving the phrase from Jefferson’s letter as ‘widely quoted’, am I to think you are simply being pragmatic and wish to avoid the issue?. (‘widely quoted’ should mean nothing more but the majority are misinformed. It certainly should not establish precedence in jurisprudence in whatsoever manner.)
The misunderstanding is too important to leave it stand as it is today; widely quoted but severely misunderstood and used to foment a socio-political stance which is contrary to the original intent. Jefferson borrowed the phrase from Roger Williams, theologian.
The context was the American colonies were of different religious denominations and there was little tolerance for one to follow a different denomination from the ‘official’ denomination. Williams, a Pastor, himself was exiled from Massachusetts Bay for his religious beliefs. It was not an isolated example.
The Danbury Baptists expressed their concern that a new government would coerce them to follow a specific denomination. Months later, Jefferson quelled their concerns in the form of his famous letter. The state will not adopt an official religion (as in all of the various states in Europe and especially England at that time). Neither will the state require allegiance to a particular denomination, or any religion. The state will ensure and guarantee every individual’s freedom to practice their religion as they so choose. Imagine the great sigh of relief.
The phrase which originally meant to practice religion free FROM interference (and persecution) has these past few years become to practice of religion as according to the prohibitions enforced by the state.
I apologize for the history lesson yet this is far too important to let this remain obscure.
By the way, Jefferson’s letter was something like 117 words yet most know it only for that one phrase, misunderstood at that. That it is now perceived as exactly the opposite as originally suggests duplicity.
Thank you for your time.
Dear Rick:
I’m doing no more than providing the origin of the phrase.
A more succinct summary is:
Jefferson informed the Baptists that the state would ensure freedom OF religion (to practice as one wills) but not enforce a freedom FROM religion. The wall of separation was meant that the state shall be kept outside of all to do with religion. Since the founding unto this day, the state has not held any true standing to interfere in whatever capacity.
Dear Rick:
Quite.
Dear Tom:
Yes.
No, it’s the other way around. Both places are named after their natives, and Arabs are named after, or at any rate with and alongside, their language. But there are Arabs in many other parts of the world, just as there are native English speakers outside England. In North Africa, they are mostly descended from immigrants like the Banu Hillal that were ejected from Egypt over a thousand years ago, but the Palestinian ones – who were Palestinian before they were Arab – became Arabs by assimilation and acculturation, like going native in reverse.
That first sentence is a widespread misunderstanding. The whole area was flourishing before they got there, even though it had not regained its 18th century prosperity because the Palestinians were still rebuilding after the damage caused by wars fought up and down the Levant by outsiders (Egyptians against Turks, then British and French against Turks several decades later). That was how Jaffa oranges became a well known brand in the U.K. in the ’30s, for instance.
The second sentence is a counterfactual. The Jews did move in and turn it into a slum – for others. Do you recall an incident a few years ago, where an athletic event took Jewish runners over a bridge that collapsed and dropped them into a creek that was heavily polluted with industrial waste, so that their health risks were widely reported in all the countries they were visiting from, including here in Australia? It was not so widely reported that all along that creek had been the only water source for a Palestinian community that was confined to the area by movement restrictions.
I recently found a very bright potty-mouthed sarcastic 14-
year-old girl from the SF Bay area. She has had videos
pulled, been de platformed, de-monetized, investigated
by Marin law enforcement agencies, and has become a
target of the left. Meet Soph, and the video that started
it all:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/OdaUDeAGIck/
I am a sixty year old non boomer and I like this kid, I was here at 14.
There is no doubt some Arabs and Nazis were allies. There is likewise no doubt Nazis and some Jews were collaborators (see the celebrated case of an Israeli who got found out in the ’50s as having done just that). There was just no time for not using Jewish collaborators to find Jews as Nazis were busy murdering every Jew they could find*, something about a “Final Solution,” or something like that… (And, of course, the Stern Gang were objectively pro-Nazi by being anti-British in the ways they were during the war.)
* Not quite; they actually kept some around to use as propaganda, e.g. the elderly Jewish cemetery keepers in Berlin that the Russians were surprised to find when they arrived.
Definitely the former, though that does not preclude the latter as well even though these remarks of hers do not show that themselves.
I suspect that Tlaib was choosing her phrasing very carefully to be technically correct, and that these rebuttals have over-zealously aimed at what they thought she was saying instead. For instance, she never claimed that the Palestinians freely offered safe haven, if anything that it was done to them and at their expense rather than by them**, and it is actually historically inaccurate to assert that the Palestinians were directly active against Jews during the war in any material way (the Mufti et al were trying to get post war assistance from the Germans, which is indirect, and the Arab Revolt of 1936-9 had just been stopped, so Palestinian anti-Jewish action fell in the Mandate just then – though that should not be read as calling that a change of heart, just as a more accurate telling of the background).
** Actually, during the events of 1936 some Arabs did shelter Jews at risk from other Arabs. Later, they too got marginalised.
Dear P.M. Lawrence:
Thanks for the update. You are correct, but I know SMM readers understand every rule–so to speak–has exceptions, so I don’t always make those qualifications. But again, your points are well taken and appreciated.
From a British perspective, what you think of as the rule and the exceptions are the other way around: it was the Zionists who more consistently and materially opposed the British Mandate and the main war effort, and the Palestinians who were more often helpful or at least not actively harming those with strikes, sabotage and overt violence up to and including assassination.
Dear P.M.Lawrence:
Interesting perspective, as always.