The Washington Post managed to score an interview with Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s grandmother, Muftiyah Tlaib.
Rashida Tlaib’s grandmother does not understand why her granddaughter, a sitting U.S. congresswoman, could not visit her as originally planned. [...]
“She’s in a big position, and she cannot visit her grandmother,” she laughed, seated in her living room on Friday. “So what good is the position?” — www.washingtonpost.com/...
That is surely familiar to every kid and grand-kid who hasn’t called home in a while and tries to pass it off with a “I’ve been busy at work”.
But there’s more:
“I am proud of her,” the grandmother said of her granddaughter. “Who wouldn’t be proud of a granddaughter like that? I love her and am so proud of her.” [...]
When asked about Trump and his repeated attacks on her granddaughter, she brushed off the question. “I don’t know him,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“America is for the people who work hard. America is for people who take care of themselves. For me, I’m happy to sit there under my tree. It’s worth the whole world to me,” Muftiyah Tlaib said, noting she had spent significant time in Michigan helping raise Rashida and her siblings while their parents worked. — www.washingtonpost.com/...
Rafael Shimunov has a remarkable remembrance in the Independent, as he asks why the Israeli government has welcomed actual far-right anti-semites in recent years, while turning away people like Rep. Tlaib.
I’m no stranger to trumped-up antisemitism charges placed on Muslims. As a Jewish refugee from Soviet-dominated Uzbekistan, I lived as a minority among majority Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs and other Muslims for generations. Of course, no melting pot is free from conflict, but under Soviet dominance, which disguised white supremacy as communism, our families were in it together. At home in Queens, New York, we were the first of our family and among the first Bukharian Jews to settle in the US as HIAS refugees. With our success came opportunities to receive other families fleeing as hosts.
My childhood became a reality show, where each season, a new family would arrive and its elders and its children would share with me all of their stories. They arrived in Muslim or Jewish garb from Iran, Mongolia, China, North Africa and Eastern Europe, with the same instruments and traditions we recognised. And the stories they told made two things very clear to me.
When Central Asian Jews and Muslims found themselves under the boot of Moscow’s white supremacy, our rabbis and our imams found interfaith solidarity.
As Soviets banned synagogues, it was the imam who opened his mosque for our bar mitzvahs. As Soviets made the bribes Muslims needed to prepare food under halal dietary requirements unsustainable, it was the rabbi who worked with kosher preparation to make it work for Muslims. It was stories like these from elders that convinced me solidarity is possible under any scenario. — www.independent.co.uk/...
The events of the past two days are forcing a lot of people to finally confront realities that have been clear to those of us who’ve followed Palestine-Israel closely for years.
Here’s Yousef Munayyer talking about what this moment means:
“Congresswoman Tlaib has forced people to think about Palestinians as human beings for the first time in a space like Congress, where that very idea was taboo.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar ran a virtual clinic earlier today, educating her Twitter followers on Palestinian issues. The whole thread is worth a read, but here are a couple of gems:
She was scheduled to visit Hebron along with Rep. Tlaib. Hebron is a segregated city (as is much of the West Bank), with separate streets for Palestinians.
and the NY Times enumerated the ways in which Israel’s military occupation impacts Rep. Tlaib’s extended family in the village of Beit Ur-Al Fauqa:
The Tlaib family’s single-story, flat-roofed home is one of the simpler houses in the area, with a small olive grove and a few fig trees standing in its otherwise bare yard.
A few yards outside the front gate stands an Israeli military checkpoint that leads to an Israeli-built road running through the West Bank and linking Jerusalem to the city of Modiin. From the Tlaibs’ modest reception room, where small tapestries and a Quranic verse hung on the wall, traffic could be heard whizzing by.
The road, known as Highway 443, is in theory partially open to Palestinian traffic. But because most Palestinians need special permits to enter Israel, for the villagers it largely remains a road to nowhere. — www.nytimes.com/...
Also in the NY Times, you can practically smell the panic in Thomas Friedman’s column. He just wants things to go back to the way things were before, when American politicians of both parties studiously averted their eyes from the pervasive infringement of Palestinians’ rights by Israel. He seems to have identified the problem:
Few things are more dangerous to Israel’s long-term interests than its becoming a partisan matter in America, which is Israel’s vital political, military and economic backer in the world.
and he says he’s found the change vector as well:
I am particularly unhappy with Representative Omar. I know a lot about her home district in Minnesota, because I grew up in it, in St. Louis Park. Omar represents the biggest concentration of Jews and Muslims living together in one district in the Upper Midwest. She was perfectly placed to be a bridge builder between Muslims and Jews. Instead, sadly, she has been a bridge destroyer between the two since she came to Washington. But anytime she is legitimately criticized, Democrats automatically scream “Islamophobia’’ and defend her. That’s as disturbing as Trump.
I know that more than a few Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, who face so many challenges — from gang violence to unemployment — are asking why is Omar spending time on the West Bank of the Jordan and not on the West Bank of the Mississippi? — www.nytimes.com/...
“gang violence” and “unemployment”? What’s next, MS-13, “black on black crime” and “welfare moms”? This is just Trump-ism dressed up for the grey lady. Can you imagine the uproar if a columnist suggested that a Jewish member of Congress shouldn’t spend time in Israel.
Perhaps the reason Tom Friedman is so upset with Rep Omar is the fact that she’s identified the only meaningful action her colleagues in Congress can take if they are serious about accountability.
It’s also worth noting that Rep. Tlaib’s experience with the Israeli government is what millions of Palestinian-Americans face daily:
and as if the close parallels between apartheid South Africa (a close military ally of Israel’s at the time) weren’t abundantly clear already, here you go:
— @subirgrewal