“Screenshots are forever,” declared Jewish watchdog site StopAntisemitism.org Monday night, and offered a screenshot of Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s retweet of a jarring statement from a bandana-masked user calling herself Rasha (how apt, seeing as Rasha in Hebrew means wicked) who posted a cheerful poster celebrating “International day of solidarity with the Palestinian people” above which she noted: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Screenshots are forever. https://t.co/tCfluFxnCB pic.twitter.com/SPR3z5VGAT
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites)
Which flies in the face of repeated statements from Tlaib claiming that she’s not supporting the destruction of Israel, only two states for two ever-loving, equal and happy peoples, side by side. How do you do the side by side thing if one side is swimming in the sea?
Or, as user Aaron Bandler put it: “Rashida Tlaib retweeted the infamous ‘from the river to the sea’ call for the destruction of Israel. She may have undone the retweet but the Internet is forever.”
Yes, she is. Bandler was referring to Tlaib’s lame attempt to destroy the damning evidence by deleting her retweet and posting instead a vegetarian version of the lovely poster with the comment: “Thinking of my sity Muftieh and family in Palestine today. From Detroit to Gaza, we will always fight against oppression and inequality.”
Claire Voltaire responded: “Tell me again how Rashida Tlaib is not a raving anti-Semite,” retweeting a screenshot of the offending retweet.
In November 2018, CNN fired its political commentator Marc Lamont Hill after he used the same slogan, “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” in a speech at the United Nations. Hill, a professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University, hosted a syndicated TV show called “Our World with Black Enterprise.” He spoke at the UN at an event marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Apparently, you can’t have urban education these days without advocating more swimming lessons for the Jews of Tel Aviv – a considerable urban center, come to think of it.
In an apologia for Hill’s needless call for genocide, the Forward ran an op-ed titled “‘From The River To The Sea’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means,” in which Maha Nassar, Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, explained “it was part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine. Palestinians hoped their state would be free from oppression of all sorts, from Israeli as well as from Arab regimes.”
Nice Palestinians.
Micha Danzig set the record straight in an op-ed in the Jewish Journal titled “‘Palestine From the River to the Sea’ Has Always Been a Call for Annihilation Not Liberation,” arguing:
In fact, if anything puts the lie to Hill’s “blame the Jews for everything” narrative, as well as his claim that the call to “free Palestine from the river to the sea” is not about destroying Israel and Jewish sovereignty in every inch of the Jews’ indigenous, historical and religious homeland, it is the fact that the 1964 PLO Charter — and the 1968 PLO Charter — are identical with the exception of only one thing. Article 24 of the 1964 Charter defined the territory the PLO sought to “liberate” as only those under Jewish sovereignty at that time. After the Six-Day War, Article 24 was amended to include the West Bank and Gaza Strip as suddenly new parts of the “Palestinian homeland” needing “liberation.”
Tlaib is one of the speakers in a sham event with strong Theater of the Absurd values on December 15 co-sponsored by IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, called, I kid you not, “Dismantling anti-Semitism, Winning Justice,” featuring herself, Peter Beinart, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, and Dr. Barbara Ransby (Israel Haters, BDS Promoters in Webinar on ‘Dismantling Anti-Semitism’).
I argued that “this JVP webinar with these four participants is a leftist Wannsee Conference. And coming as it does on the eve of a Democrat taking over the White House, one can’t help worrying that this Monty Python sketch might not at some point become US foreign policy.”
I was rewarded with a stern letter to the editor from one Ross Vachon from San Clemente, CA, saying: “The bilious hatred you spew at the panelists for the upcoming webinar ‘Dismantling Anti-Semitism’ perfectly exemplifies the new, coherent, all-encompassing definition of anti-Semitism: *An anti-Semite used to be someone who hated Jews. Now, it’s someone whom Jews hate.”
Comrade Ross concluded with: “Nothing’s creepier than Zionism.”
Oh, I could think of a few things.