Rashida Tlaib’s latest excuse for not tackling anti-Semitism is both sinister and dangerous

Rashida Tlaib
The idea that Rashida Tlaib is concerned about ending Jew-hatred is laughable - JIM WATSON/AFP

The post-October 7 era has been dominated by the notion that America is awash in an epidemic of Islamophobia. Muslim-American politicians such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – along with the lobby group CAIR – contend that Muslims are fundamentally imperilled across the United States.

Rep Omar blamed “Islamophobia” for the firestorm that erupted following a speech she made in her native Somali earlier this year, a speech that left some of her Republican rivals questioning her loyalty to the United States. Meanwhile, CAIR – the Council on American-Islamic Relations – has released report after report detailing “staggering” levels of “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian” hate. It noted a 69 per cent increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate incidents from January to June 2024.

This is a despicable rise. What is unacceptable – and dangerous – is the attempt by the parts of the Left to use it as an excuse not to directly confront anti-Semitic hate.

This week, Omar and Tlaib were among a trio of Democratic legislators who voted against a resolution supporting US State Department global guidelines on combating anti-Semitism. (Fellow “Squad”-member Cori Bush was the third). While Omar bafflingly insisted that the guidelines do “nothing to combat anti-Semitism”, Tlaib went one step further, explaining that she withheld her support because the guidelines do “not recognise that the fight against anti-Semitism is connected to our fight against Islamophobia, racism, white nationalism, and all other forms of hate”.

The idea that Tlaib – crowned by StopAntisemitism as “anti-Semite of the year” in 2023 and a woman who once posted on X “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence” – is concerned about ending Jew-hatred is laughable. But her argument has gained traction. Since the first spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes in the weeks following Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel, progressives – both activists and politicians, including the Biden-Harris administration itself – have sought to link efforts to combat anti-Semitism with efforts to end Islamophobia. Inevitably, they end up downplaying the sheer scale of the increase in the former.

Even as late as May of this year – more than six months into the massive college protests that shut down campuses roiled by pro-Palestinian encampments, protests that were notable for shocking attacks on Jews – Biden still felt the need to declare “there is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or discrimination against Arab-Americans or Palestinian-Americans” during his first-ever comments condemning the university chaos.

Obviously, he is right that there is no place for any of these forms of hate. What it ignores is that the number of attacks against Jews has increased particularly sharply. It also downplays the specific reasons why anti-Semitism has surged.

Much of this has to do with “intersectionality,” the voguish belief that all social-justice and identity causes must be tethered to every other social-justice and identity cause. The problem is that even though Jews and Judaism literally intersect with everything and everyone – there are black Jews, feminist Jews, LGBT Jews, you get the idea – the gatekeepers of intersectionality like to exclude them.

You see this most cravenly in far-Left ideologies such as DEI and Critical Race Theory, which although intended to elevate and strengthen the position of marginalised minorities, typically fail to even consider Jews as possible victims. Instead Jews are “white” or “privileged” – colonial “oppressors”. Never mind the record 1,832 anti-Jewish hate crimes reported by the FBI between September 2023 and 2024 – 68 per cent of all reported religion-based hate crimes, when Jews comprise barely 2 per cent of the US population. According to the intersectionalists, Jews are doing just fine.

The other reason to deny anti-Semitism a chance to stand on its own is, well, anti-Semitism. What could be more hateful towards Jews than effectively erasing the epidemic of Jew-hate?

The good news, as the recent presidential election reveals, is that Americans appear to have had enough of intersectional fabulism. Kamala Harris may have won the majority of the Jewish vote but Donald Trump — much like with African-Americans — scored record numbers among Jewish voters. Many black Americans, it seems, were much more concerned with inflation than electing a fellow African-American. And many Jews voted out of fear of the rising anti-Semitic tide.

What the Trump triumph makes clear is that voters of all backgrounds have had enough of the identity-babble favoured by extremists like Omar and Tlaib. Instead, they’re focused on facts and data – whether a spike in the cost of milk or the surge in violence against Jews.

David Christopher Kaufman is a columnist for the New York Post