“I tell my children there are two ways to lie. One is to tell me something that didn’t happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen.”

–Al Tompkins

“I’ve been a reporter for 20 years; the reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out.”

–Ta-Nehisi Coates

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have accused Congresswoman Rashida Talib of antisemitism. One would have thought after nearly a month of baseless Haitian smears that CNN’s star anchors would have exercised a modicum of journalistic due diligence before themselves smearing a pro-Palestinian congresswoman. But multi-millionaire media anchors and politicians are cut from the same jaded cloth. Whether in the newsroom or the hollow halls of government, plutocracy rules and plutocrats lie.

Or perhaps, they were attempting to compensate for failing to question Trump about his own unequivocal antisemitism during their moderation of the Biden-Trump presidential debate. After all, it was President Joe Biden – not CNN’s Dream Duo, who brought up the fact that Trump has said that “Hitler had done some good things.” Previously, Trump has claimed that Biden has “turned a blind eye to the greatest outbreak of antisemitism in American history, while simultaneously accusing him of being “a servant of globalists.” He has labeled Senator Chuck Schumer “a proud member of Hamas” and likened him to “a Palestinian.” Apparently, an antisemite who, like an incontinent chimpanzee diarrheatically, flings accusations that his political opponents are antisemitic does not warrant interrogation in the political theater of televised debates.

This latest game of defamatory telephone began on September 21, when Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel posted to X, formerly Twitter, a statement accusing Tlaib of antisemitism because she questioned Nessel’s decision to prosecute pro-Palestinian campus protesters.

Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.

The statement was in response to Tlaib’s September 13 Detroit Metro Times interview, in which she told the interviewer:

We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black[1] 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.

On September 23, Tapper, in his State of the Union interview[2] with Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, informed her that Nessel had lodged charges against pro-Palestinian protesters and that Tlaib had called those charges “shameful.” During his summation, he identified Nessel as Jewish.

Quoting directly from Tlaib’s Metro Times interview, Tapper continued:

And Tlaib said – quote – 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 –unquote.

Having greased the way for the smear, Tapper lunged, asking Whitmer, “Do you think that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased is antisemitic?” When Whitmer demurred, Tapper rephrased the question-veiled accusation:

But do you think that Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job? Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel said broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not? That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

Whitmer again evaded the question, visibly reluctant to enter the accusatory hearsay fray. However, facing mounting criticism over her evasion, she issued a statement a day later that served to perpetuate the lie:

The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic. Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes.

This would have been a reasonable criticism had Tlaib actually made the statement. Ironically, the fact that Whitmer’s own statement – which piggybacks off Tapper’s bogus assertion that Tlaib’s concern over Nessel’s charges was motivated by her religion and not because of legitimate concerns about the rule of law and Nessel’s objectivity – is patently anti-Palestinian – it assumes Tlaib’s criticism of Nessel is based on Tlaib’s religion – remained unquestioned.

So much for “the most trusted name in news.”

Equally questionable is that rather than familiarizing herself with the facts, Whitmer, who had at least a day to check out Tlaib’s interview before issuing her condemnatory statement, chose not to use her own “platform and voice to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes” but, caving to political pressure, to perpetuate them.

This is how smears metastasize. In this case, however, instead of malignant slanders against Haitians spread by a hapless Ohioan who misplaced her cat (later found in her basement), third-hand hearsay Facebook posts, and neo-Nazi thugs obsessed with American racial purity, we have a smear against a congresswoman spread by trained journalists and a local government official who perhaps let her guard down to avoid being herself potentially smeared as antisemitic.

Later, on Inside Politics, Bash, Tapper’s tag-team partner in calumny, poured more fuel on the conflagration when, in a conversation with CNN Political Director David Chalian, she opined:

And now to a sad reality, and that is 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. We saw two examples on State of the Union yesterday. First, with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, when my co-anchor Jake Tapper asked about a Democratic congresswoman’s accusation that the state’s Jewish Attorney General was letting her religion influence her job.

After playing segments from Tapper’s interview with Whitmer and Senator Tom Cotton, who, when asked about Trump’s rant in which he preemptively blamed American Jews for his election loss, not only failed to criticize the GOP fuehrer but praised him as “the most pro-Israel President we’ve ever seen,” if not necessarily an ally of American Jewry.[3] Cotton also ducked questions about North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s antisemitic statements. Despite his failure to denounce the statements of Trump and self-avowed “Black Nazi” Robinson, Bash expressed her gratitude toward Cotton, who she said had spoken out against antisemitism when pro-Palestinian protesters, disrupted her book event in Washington, D.C. to accuse her of bias and complicity in the Gazan genocide. Her gratitude, she tells Chalian, is shared by “anybody who is the subject and the victim of antisemitism … hate … or any other hate. And the key is, which we have learned the hard way, you’ve got to call it out wherever it comes from. What does it tell you about the inability or unwillingness to do so when it comes from a prominent person in your own party?” Unfortunately, calling out guests who fail to call out prominent antisemites on one’s own show does not seem to count. Nor does calling out Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism, overt and implied, when it comes from prominent government officials and co-hosts.

Here, Bash and Tapper wallow in the shallow waters of false equivalency and bogus bothsidesism. Let’s be clear: Donald Trump unequivocally declared that if he loses the election, the Jews are to blame, a bone-chilling statement reminiscent of Germany’s blaming Jews for its defeat in WWI. He has made countless antisemitic statements before and will, no doubt, continue to do so. It was not Tlaib but Steve Neavling, the reporter who conducted the interview, who brought up Nessel’s faith. Despite her critics, unlike Trump, Tlaib does not have a history of antisemitism, unless one defines opposition to genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a desire for a free Palestine as antisemitic. Neavling has called out the statement attributed to her as a lie, noting that Tlaib’s issue with Nessel was not her religion but that she allegedly caved to pressure from “university authorities.” Or are we to assume that she is insinuating that they are Jews, too?

After facing a backlash, Bash issued a “clarification” – not an apology or a retraction – stating: “Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity. Her office has not responded to our requests for clarity. Her allies insist that’s not what she meant, but Nessel still says she believes it is antisemitic and repeated on CNN yesterday that quote – clearly she’s referencing my religion.”

Bash’s putative “clarification” is misleading on several levels. First, it sanitizes their original accusation. Tapper and Bash did not simply accuse Tlaib of suggesting Nessel was biased; they repeated Nessel’s assertion that those biases were based on Nessel’s being a Jew. Second, she attempts to deflect criticism by mischaracterizing objection to the misrepresentation of Tlaib’s statement as coming from Tlaib’s “allies, whom she conveniently fails to name. Again, Neavling has denied Tlaib referred to Nessel’s Jewishness, a fact easily confirmed by reading the interview itself.

Second, why does CNN have to reach out to Tlaib’s office for clarification when they can presumably read the original interview and the subsequent articles, interviews, and X postings by the Neavling that show she did not make the statement? Is it because he is　[cue ominous music] an “ally” and, presumably, an antisemite by association?

Finally, it ignores the fact that Nessel responded to Tlaib’s criticism with a false equivalency when she posted the statement that ignited the smear campaign that appeared to defend Tlaib against a vicious Islamophobic National Review cartoon that implied that Tlaib is a Hezbollah operative.

But here’s the rub: That cartoon is an actual artifact; it exists; it can be Googled and viewed in all its vile, unambiguous, racist infamy. Did CNN call out The National Review? Were the editors of The National Review and the artist called in to “clarify” their intent? Were they suspended or fired? Did the publication of the cartoon spark panel punditry on Islamophobia in general and in the media in particular? The fact is the cartoon exploits all too familiar and normalized tropes that paint Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. Nor is it the first to portray Tlaib as such. Why else would the caricatured congresswoman have a Mossad booby-trapped pager? The cartoonist’s intent is obvious to anyone save the most obtuse, which Nessel clearly is not. Then why does she equate criticism with racism? Sure, one can immediately jump to the conclusion that Tlaib’s criticism is motivated by antisemitism. However, that says more about the accuser and the state of America’s toxic anti-Palestinian political discourse that reductively labels any criticism of Israeli policies inherently antisemitic. But sometimes Occam’s scalpel cuts its wielder: In imputing an antisemitic motive to Tlaib, Nessel is guilty of precisely what she accuses Tlaib of, if only in reverse, that is, of having antisemitic intentions because she is Muslim. In all fairness, Nessel does not say this, but if we want to play the game of impute the motive, this is where we end up. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Ultimately, none of this serves the fight against anti-Palestinian hate and indifference, which is as pervasive and pernicious as antisemitism. The protesters at Bash’s D.C. book event were attacking those, including Bash, whom they perceived as complicit in the genocide in Gaza that is taking the lives of their families and loved ones. One of the women shouted at Bash that the carnage in Gaza is not a “war,” not an unreasonable assertion given the fact that, unlike Israel, Hamas has no standing army, no air force, no navy, and no nuclear weapons. Its cheap, homemade Qassam rockets are no match against 2,000-pound U.S.-manufactured bombs; U.S. navy destroyers do not shoot down Israeli missiles that rain down on Gaza; the $2.9 billion U.S.-supplied Iron Dome and U.S.-based RTX Corp. (formerly Raytheon)-co-developed David’s Sling do not protect the people of Gaza. The gross disproportionality of the conflict in terms of both military power and civilian casualties makes calling it a “war,” as we conventionally apply the term, obscenely problematic.

“My friends have been dying in Gaza,” another protester shouted at Bash, “but you have not been reporting it.” Accusing her of taking “millions from Zionists, “millions from AIPAC… to spew lies about the Palestinian people,” she voiced her frustration that pro-Palestinian protesters “have tried to sit with politicians day after day and they don’t listen to us” as their “family and friends are dying. What else are we supposed to do if this was happening to your family?” The deafness to their pleas might be because AIPAC has spent millions to deafen politicians by defeating those who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, creating a disincentive for politicians to meet with those families. Nor is it simply a matter of “deafness”: the DNC silenced the voices of pro-Palestinians when it ejected pro-Palestinian protesters after they unfurled a “Stop arming Israel” banner inside the convention hall (but allowed a Joe Biden supporter who repeatedly struck one of the protesters on the head with a “We love Joe” sign to remain) and deniedPalestinian American delegates a stage to address the convention.

Media reports, including Bash’s, have shown bias in framing these events. Bash has likened pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazis and April 30 clashes at UCLA between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters to 1930s Europe, even thoughmasked pro-Israel counter-protesters initiated the violence, physically assaulted pro-Palestinian protesters while policeidly stood by, an incident which CNN itself has described as “erupt[ing] into the worst violence stemming from the ongoing college protests around the country over Israel’s war in Gaza.” Although some of the protesters were not UCLA students, it is clear that some in the mob were, in the words of Hillel UCLA, “fringe members of the off-campus Jewish community.” Tellingly, law “enforcement” did not record the injuries, although encampment organizers state that 150 pro-Palestinian protesters were pepper sprayed and at least 25 were sent to emergency rooms with serious injuries.

In the same Inside Politics broadcast, Bash showed a clip in which a UCLA student accused protesters of barring him from entering the campus because he is Jewish. Pro-Palestinian protesters reportedly barred campus students who “would not denounce Israel” from portions of the campus, an act described as designed to discriminate against Jewish students. However, these reports fail to elucidate whether the protesters also denied entry to non-Jewish students who support Israel or admitted Jewish students who denounce Israel for its actions in Gaza. While it may be unconscionable for students to bar access to the university based on ideology, it is not necessarily an antisemitic act since Jewishness is not determined by unconditional support of Israel. Were this so, it would effectively make Jews who reject Israel or who are critical of its policies Jewish apostates, even as they identify as Jews, which itself would constitute an egregious act of antisemitism.[4]

The tactic, however, is not unique to pro-Palestinian protesters. It is part and parcel of the calculus of Israeli occupation and oppression. As Ta-Nehisi Coates told CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil, who essentially accused him of writing a “backpack extremist” manifesto for providing a voice to Palestinians in his book The Message:

I walk over there, and I walk through the occupied territories, and I walk down the street in Hebron, and a guy says to me, I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my religion… I’m working with – the person that is guiding me is a Palestinian whose father, grandfather, and grandmother was born in this town, and I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can’t ride on certain roads, he can’t get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can. Why is that okay?

Forget about the aforementioned geese and ganders; in this light, when it comes to restricting access, the chickens have come home to roost.

Flaming Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment, however, is nothing new for Bash. Previously, she went after Rep. Ilhan Omar, bizarrely twisting her statement against antisemitism into its opposite. During an April 28 interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Bash played a video of Omar in which she says she found it “extremely regrettable that individuals do not care about the fact that all Jewish children should be kept safe, and we should not have to tolerate bigotry or antisemitism for all Jewish students, regardless of their pro- or anti-genocide views,” Bash apparently objecting to the implication that Jews who support Israel’s actions in Gaza are “pro-genocide.” Sanders, to his credit, did not take the bait, instead, stressing that Omar’s “essential point” was that “we do not want to see antisemitism in this country.” But Sanders went a step further, adding he would leave it to the International Court of Justice to decide whether Israel’s actions constitute genocide, even though he did not doubt they constitute “ethnic cleansing,” a charge also made by one of the demonstrators at Bash’s book event.

“Take off your mask,” Bash calmly told one of her detractors during the event. Bash might have admonished the masked April 30 UCLA pro-Israel counter-protesters to do the same. Or better still, someone might have told Bash to take off her blinders, which, in effect, was what the impassioned protesters were chiding her to do before they were ejected from the venue.

In the end, Bash’s Manichean worldview only recognizes pro-genocide Palestinians. It refuses to acknowledge the existence of pro-genocide Jews since in the comfortable binary black-and-white world she inhabits, victims, particularly Jewish ones, can never be victimizers because it can never recognize Palestinians as victims.

Bash has shown a pattern of minimizing Israeli brutality and the reality of Palestinian suffering. In an interview in December with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Jayapal points out that 15,000 Palestinians, most of them children, had been killed in Israeli airstrikes. Not missing a beat, Bash counters, “You don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.”[5] No, we don’t, largely because the mainstream media ignores such incidents, whether they involve IDF soldiers raping Palestinian woman and girls in Gaza and the West Bank or Palestinian men in detention camps, though it appears that in Israel whether it is “legitimate? to plunge broom handles up rectums is a matter of heated debates. Perhaps, one day CNN will cover them or, like MSNBC, “uncancel” hosts that would.

It is little facts like these that corporate media and corporate politicians (after Citizens United, are there any other kind?) tend to elide, perhaps because they fear sharing the same fate as Al Jazeera and other journalists. Significantly, complaints of biased coverage of the slaughter in Gaza come from CNN’s own staff, which has accused the network of stenographing Israeli propaganda and silencing Palestinian voices.

For his part, Tapper now says he “misspoke,” although he used Whitmer’s statement to back the smear they amplified. How is this any different from Trump defending anti-Haitian smears because he “saw people on television” say that their pets had been eaten or JD Vance saying he was merely repeating what his constituents allegedly told him? In the case of Tapper, it appears he just read it on X. How can you expect CNN to credibly fact-check serial liars when it fails to check itself and refuses to retract those lies and offer a sincere apology?

This is not the only time corporate media has worn its pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian bias on its sleeve. Those who support peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters are asked repeatedly, even after they have answered the question, if they denounce Hamas, its October 7 terrorist attack, and its use of rape as a weapon of war. In contrast, those who support Israel are seldom asked if they denounce the genocide in Gaza, the IDF’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians, or the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees. Rather, corporate media prefers to argue that those who draw attention to its bias are themselves engaging in false equivalency since everyone knows that Hamas engages in terrorism. They will not even entertain the thought that Israel engages in terrorism and genocide if only because they would have to accept the cognitively dissonant reality that the victims of atrocity can become its future perpetrators. To recognize this reality would be to admit that Jews can support white nationalists, invite self-avowed “racial realists” to university campuses, or pal around with neo-Nazi influencers, and that Afro Cubans can head white supremacist groups, and black lieutenant governors can be Nazis.

Terrorism, however, is an equal-opportunity exterminator. Although he later retracted it, Ted Turner, the creator of CNN, made this point way back in 2002. “The Palestinians,” he said, “are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have. The Israelis… they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.”

However, like the plight of Palestinians, this is a chapter in the network’s history it would apparently like to erase, to banish to the corn field.

Significantly, while Tapper and Bash have both taken hits from the right for fact-checking Trump during the presidential debate, neither took the opportunity to question him about his antisemitism, to go after his proven record of antisemitism, in which he quotes Hitler and accuses American Jews of disloyalty when he isn’t repeatedly telling them that Israel is “your country” and Netanyahu “your prime minister” and characterizing Jews who criticize Israel as traitors to both the United States and Israel. Instead, they took the easy path and targeted a Muslim American congresswoman. Not only that, Trump’s most recent statements, questioning the sanity of Jews who vote for Harris and blaming them if he loses the election, have set the stage for an escalation of antisemitism should he in fact lose the election. Following the first assassination attempt, antisemitic incidents rose as rumors spread that the would-be assassin was Jewish.

However, Bash was only partially right: antisemitism is indeed everywhere and comes from both ends of the political spectrum. The same is true of Islamophobia.

In the wake of October 7, nationwide attacks on Palestinian Americans and Muslims have increased dramatically. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), it received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023, up 178% from the same period during the previous year. A week following the Hamas attack, in Illinois, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy was fatally stabbed 26 times, and his mother, who survived, 12. A month later, in Vermont, 3 Palestinian college students were shot, leaving one permanently paralyzed. That same month in California, an Arab student was the victim of a hit-and-run, the driver reportedly shouting, “fuck you and your people,” before accelerating. This year, in Texas, a Palestinian man protesting the genocide in Gaza was dragged out of his car and stabbed in the chest. (Interestingly, the grand jury did not file hate crime charges, even though the assailant reportedly repeatedly shouted “nigger” at the victim.) A woman in Texas attempted to drown a 3-year-old Palestinian girl. This is not to mention Palestinian Americans who have been arrested, detained, and killed in Gaza and the West Bank. It is not that the media has not covered these incidents; it is that they have not been covered with the same intensity or met with the same degree of outrage that has greeted antisemitic attacks. Nor is the price exacted for the expression of Islamophobia the same. Antisemites, real or imagined (including “tenured” and nontenured Jewish professors), lose their jobs. Islamophobes rarely face such consequences. They may even serve on senate committees ostensibly designed to investigate hate crimes.

Case in point: Louisiana senator John Kennedy. Kennedy proudly demonstrated his Islamophobic bono fides during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes. On September 17, when Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, along with two other experts, testified, Kennedy couldn’t help but spin some GOP, good ole boy, home-spun bigotry.

Off the bat, Kennedy used his time to engage in a series of performatively provocative questions designed to bait Berry and paint her as an antisemitic, terrorist supporter.

Kennedy: You support Hamas, do you not?

Maya Berry: Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today, in a very—

Kennedy: Let’s start first with a yes or no.

Berry: Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization, which I do not support. But you asking the executive of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.

Kennedy was not done; racists never are.

Kennedy: You support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?

Berry: Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing, senator.

Kennedy: Is that a no or a yes?

Berry: You have Arab American constituents that you represent in your grand state—

Kennedy: I understand that, but my time’s limited, and I apologize, but is that a yes or a no?

Kennedy cuts her off, demanding a yes or no answer.

Berry: A yes or no answer to do I support Hezbollah? The answer is I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that invokes it, so, no, sir.

Kennedy: You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?

Berry: No, I can say no; I can say yes. What I can say is –

Kennedy: Do you support or oppose Iran?

Berry: [Sighs]

Fortunately, the hearing was not about pet-eating. If it had been, and White House Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had been called to testify, Kennedy would have probably begun his line of questioning with “How do you like your dogs and cats? Baked or broiled?”

And following the hearing, Tapper and Bash would have asked her for the recipe.

Notes.

1. Unless used in a direct quote, I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

2. A full transcript of the broadcast can be viewed at https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/sotu/date/2024-09-22/segment/01

3. Cotton’s evasions are revealing. Not only does he not denounce Trump and Robinson, but he also seems to have persistent difficulty distinguishing American Jewish voters from the state of Israel. Although Tapper presses Cotton four times to respond to American antisemitism, the senator repeatedly conflates the two, focusing on Israel and ignoring American Jews entirely. Then again, this is the same good ole boy who can’t distinguish Singaporean CEOs from communist Chinese. Unlike Whitmer, however, Cotton has received little if any backlash for his evasions.

4. If Jewishness is contingent on supporting Israel, then what is one to make of anti-Zionist Jews and Jews who protest the genocide in Gaza and demand that the U.S. stop arming Israel? Do they somehow, magically, cease to be Jews?

5. For a discussion of the problematic nature of such statements, see Revital Madar’s “Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War: Israeli State Sexual Violence Against Palestinians,” Conflict and Society 9 (2023): 72–88. Madar notes that reports of such incidents are generally limited to Israeli soldiers and do not include police, prison guards, military court officials, Shin Bet, and other security forces. “Spatially,” she writes, “as much as Palestinian women are subject to sexual harassment and assaults at checkpoints and during house raids, their vulnerability exceeds these spaces and includes interrogation rooms, courts, and prisons.” Madar is among several Israeli scholars listed on Israel Academic Monitor, a blog that tracks “anti-Israel activities of Israeli academics and other academic-related issues.”

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