In recent days, President Donald Trump successfully got some more of his hate exported after Israel announced that they would be blocking U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) from entering for a planned trip to see Palestinian issues firsthand. Now, Tlaib has again been speaking out against the country following this development, declining their separately stated allowance for her to come visit her grandmother, who lives in the West Bank territories. On Twitter this Friday, she again insisted that she would not participate in the selective granting of basic liberties that she had been part of Israel displaying.
Without ever mentioning the current right-wing Israeli government and its allies by name, she denounced them with the share:
‘”I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.” Desmond Tutu’
Israel had tried to defend their denial of some of her rights by pointing to her support of the so-called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions or BDS protest movement that’s arisen over right-wing Israeli leaders’ steamrolling — sometimes literally, in the case of settlement demolitions — over Palestinian concerns. Current Israeli law gives authorities the green light to block supporters of that movement from entry, which is the same argument that Israeli authorities wielded against Omar.
Trump — and some Israeli right-wingers — have insisted that Tlaib and Omar “hate Israel” and represent some kind of deeply rooted anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party, but this is a blatantly false assessment of the situation. Opposition to Israeli government policy and support of the struggles for human rights on the part of Palestinians is not synonymous with some kind of secretive conspiracy to overthrow the Israeli government or attack the Jewish people.
Omar pointed this out in some of her own public comments on the situation, outlining what would have been the agenda she and Tlaib followed this weekend had they been allowed in. As she explained — contrary to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertions — they had plans to meet with Israeli government officials, but notably, they also planned to meet with interests with the United Nations and elsewhere representing Palestinian concerns like their struggle against U.S. plans to cut U.N. funding.
Check out Twitter’s response…
Featured Image via screenshot
