Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democratic state lawmaker, and some news agencies are falsely claiming that U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Nessel’s office only filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she’s Jewish.
The spurious claims stem from an interview that Tlaib did with Metro Times on Sept. 13. Tlaib, who was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrants and is the only Palestinian American member of Congress, argued the charges were an unjust and heavy-handed response to peaceful civil disobedience.
Tlaib pointed out that Nessel, who has been in office since January 2019, has not filed charges against protesters opposed to racism, police brutality, water shutoffs, and environmental contamination.
Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.
It should also be noted that the ACLU of Michigan criticized Nessel for charging peaceful protesters at the University of Michigan.
Shortly after the article was published, state Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat who is Jewish, posted a screenshot of the story on X and claimed that Tlaib’s response was an attempt “to divide us into ‘good’ Jews she accepts & bad Jews.”
“This is a disgusting charge of dual loyalty – Jews in America cannot fully uphold American ideals because we are fundamentally biased in favor of our religion over our citizenship,” Moss wrote.
What Tlaib actually said was, “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.”
Tlaib was referring to anti-Palestinian attitudes.
Institutions throughout the U.S. have disproportionately sided with Israel, and many of them are not run by Jewish people.
On Friday, after a Detroit News reporter drew up a political cartoon that appeared to depict Tlaib as a member of Hezbollah, Nessel repeated the false narrative.
“Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong,” Nessel wrote on X. “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.”
On Sunday, CNN host Jake Tapper followed up with a segment in which he falsely claimed that Tlaib said Nessel only filed the charges “because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not.” Tapper made the statement while interviewing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and tried to get her to weigh in on his false claim.
Whitmer didn’t take the bait.
“I’m not going to get in the middle of this argument that they’re having,” Whitmer said.
Whitmer took a more diplomatic approach: “I know that our Jewish community is in pain, as is our Palestinian and Muslim and Arab communities in Michigan. I know that seeing the incredible toll that this war has taken on both communities has been really, really challenging and difficult, and my heart breaks for so many.”
Jewish Insider followed up with an article on Sunday that repeated the false claims, saying “Tlaib claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.”
On Monday, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI), a Muslim advocacy group, condemned the false statements as a “blatant and hateful hoax perpetrated by the rightwing outlet Jewish Insider and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.”
“It is shameful that Attorney General Nessel has joined a blatantly false and hateful smear campaign against Congresswoman Tlaib because she dared to criticize her politically charged prosecutions of anti-genocide protesters, which includes members of the Jewish community,” CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid said in a statement. “Mischaracterizing dissent as ‘antisemitic’ in order to stifle concerns of biased prosecutions is not only undemocratic but also takes attention away from real antisemitism that takes place in society.”
It should also be noted that Tlaib has been a consistent supporter of equality and an outspoken advocate for racial justice. She has opposed facial recognition technology, for example, because of its racial biases, and Tlaib called on the Detroit Police Department in 2019 to hire Black analysts to work with facial recognition technology since a majority of Detroit’s population is Black.
Then-DPD Chief James Craig, who is Black and later came out as a Donald Trump supporter, called Tlaib’s statement “racist” and “insulting.”
The charges Nessel’s office filed on Sept. 12 stem from a University of Michigan student protest encampment that was established in April. It grew to include about 60 tents and was intended to draw attention to Israel’s ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The attacks started after Oct. 7, when Hamas in Gaza killed more than 1,000 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostages. Israel’s U.S.-backed retaliation has killed more than 40,000 people, many of them women and children.
The students called for a ceasefire truce and also demanded the university divest from corporations linked to Israel. Despite multiple meetings between student liaisons and the university, the encampment remained in place, leading to police action on May 21.
Most of those charged are alumni and students who refused to vacate the encampment after police ordered them to leave.
Two people were charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail, for refusing to leave the encampment after repeated orders to vacate. An additional seven were charged with trespassing and resisting or obstructing a police officer, a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. These charges are reserved for those who allegedly made physical contact with officers or obstructed arrests, Nessel said.
In addition, two people, including a U-M alumnus, have been charged for separate incidents during a counter-protest on April 25. One is charged with disturbing the peace and attempted ethnic intimidation, while the other faces charges of malicious destruction of personal property for allegedly breaking and discarding protestors’ flags.
Of those charged, only three were Muslim, and some were Jewish, according to CAIR-MI.
