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President Trump took to Twitter this morning to renew his bigoted attacks on Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who has been at the center of a bizarre controversy over the past week for over her support for the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel.
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Israel recently took the unprecedented and outrageous step of blocking Tlaib and fellow Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from visiting Israel over their criticism of Israel’s appalling human rights record — after Donald Trump told them to do so.
Since then, Trump and the rest of the right-wing media machine have been relentlessly pounding Rashida Tlaib and her colleagues Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) falsely smearing them as anti-Semites and propping them up as the “face of the Democratic Party” in a transparent and largely ineffective bid to paint the entire party as anti-Semitic.
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He continued to do so today in response to yesterday’s Tlaib press conference in which the representative held back tears while discussing the way her grandmother was treated by Israelis when she visited Jerusalem as a small child.
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Sorry, I don’t buy Rep. Tlaib’s tears. I have watched her violence, craziness and, most importantly, WORDS, for far too long. Now tears? She hates Israel and all Jewish people. She is an anti-Semite. She and her 3 friends are the new face of the Democrat Party. Live with it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019
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It is truly distressful to see how easily this kind of talk is being normalized by his constant repetition and the refusal of the media to truly engage with it. Bigotry against Muslims and especially Palestinians is one of the few prejudices still openly tolerated in the United States and by the mainstream media, which has its own problem with flagrant Islamophobia (see Tapper, Jake.)
The weaponization of anti-Semitism to delegitimize leftist politicians is by now a very common tactic that not only serves to obfuscate the right-wing’s cozy relationship with actual anti-Semites but puts the Democratic Party’s close relationship with the Israel lobby into sharp perspective, as they are now forced to uncomfortably pick a side between their donors and their own colleagues.
But we would wager that the tactic of making four young women of color the “face of the Democratic Party” is going to come back to haunt him. He’s betting that the people of America are just as racist and misogynist as he is — and we’re going to prove him dead wrong come November 2020.
