She really should be clearer. People might be get the wrong idea about her very good intentions when she invokes a Farrakhan disciple for support in a dispute about Jews and Israel.

👊 We can't allow the GOP to silence us. https://t.co/lmBmBa33ab — Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) May 13, 2019

That’s the same Tamika Mallory who whiffed on a question about whether Israel has a right to exist in an interview in January. Here’s Tlaib showing how silenced she is on American national television last night:

On @LateNightSeth, @RashidaTlaib: “I got a text message from a friend who’s like, ‘Hey, next time, you know, really clarify. Maybe talk like a fourth grader because maybe the racist idiots would understand you better.’” #LNSM pic.twitter.com/XxAlzluR52 — NewsBusters (@newsbusters) May 14, 2019

Among the many “racist idiots” yesterday who had no idea what she meant when she described Palestinians as offering a “safe haven” to the Jews of Europe were eminent historians of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:

“Rashida Tlaib is either completely ignorant of the history or is a deliberate liar,” charged Prof. Benny Morris, one of the leading scholars of British Mandatory Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the War of Independence in 1948-1949. Morris said Tlaib’s ancestors, meaning Palestinians, “did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Jews at Nazi hands. Rather, the opposite: The Arabs of [British Mandatory] Palestine, during the whole period — and supported by the neighboring Arab states — did all they could to prevent Jews trying to escape Nazi hands from reaching the (relatively safe) shores of Palestine.”… [Tom] Segev, author of “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” said it was vital for both Tlaib and her critics to remember that the Shoah should not be credited as the reason for the creation of the State of Israel. It was, he noted, the result of a 30-year effort by “the Zionist movement with the assistance and support of the British.” He added: “By 1948, all of the infrastructure was ready … the only thing that was missing was the population that would be able to run a modern state. And that’s the mistake many people are making. The Holocaust was, in fact, the worst blow to the Zionist movement in the history of that movement. … The millions of Jews who were supposed to come and create a modern state in Palestine — the ones for whom it would have been a ‘safe haven’ — were, for the most part, gone.”

A Palestinian historian who spoke to Haaretz ended up criticizing her from the left: Why would the Palestinians offer “safe haven” to members of a “colonial settler project,” he wondered? They perceived Jewish migration to the Holy Land as a threat to their dominion. Of course they “resisted.”

As for the grand mufti’s infamous partnership with the Nazis, he allowed that it was “unfortunate.”

The game Tlaib’s playing here is aimed at maximizing Palestinian victimhood, in two steps. One: Take for granted that the land rightly belongs to the Palestinians and suggest that it was magnanimously shared with the Jews in a moment of existential crisis, the Holocaust. The history of Zionism predates World War II by many decades (millennia, actually), as Segev notes, but implying that the entire Jewish population is there essentially as refugees, at the moral sufferance of their Palestinian “hosts,” makes the birth of Israel a sort of grand betrayal of hospitality in the Tlaib narrative. You know how those Jews are — always starting wars and stabbing people in the back.

Two: Whitewash Arab eliminationism towards the Jewish population in the region, especially as practiced by Palestinians. The point of the “safe haven” comment, of course, is to make it seem as though Palestinians offered arriving Jews an open hand only to be met with a closed fist. To the extent that violence ensued, naturally it was the fault of the imperialist Jews. Tlaib could have gone the same route as the Palestinian historian and implied that the Arab war to liquidate Israel after its independence was merely “self-defense” or “resistance,” but that’s not how you sell maximum victimhood to an audience. Maximum victimhood requires one-sided violence. Believing that the Arabs were gracious landlords who suddenly found themselves evicted by their violent Jewish “guests” gets you that.

The only mystery is whether she believes her own nonsense or if this is how she packages her views of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for mass audiences. I’m guessing the “calming feeling” she gets when she thinks about Jews supposedly stripping her ancestors of their “dignity” isn’t always so calm. So add disingenuousness to the list of objections too.