Last week, CNN broke the story that North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson had posted racist, antisemitic, and overall gross comments on a pornographic site’s message board. Robinson is also the GOP’s nominee for governor, and prominent Republicans — including Donald Trump and JD Vance — have refused to outright denounce him. On CNN’s State of Union, Sen. Tom Cotton shamelessly compared Robinson — an elected official who maintains his party’s support — to pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses.
Monday, CNN anchor Dana Bash seemingly embraced Cotton’s false equivalence, declaring that “antisemitism is everywhere and it comes from both ends of the political spectrum.” One end contains the Republican nominee for president, who’s threatened Jews like he’s running an electoral protection racket, and the other involves college kids, who are slightly less powerful. Perhaps that’s why Bash amped up the stakes.
“But politicians sometimes sidestep calling [antisemitism] out when it comes from a member of their own party,” she said, and her example on the Democratic side was House Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s “accusation that [Michigan’s] Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job.”
However, Tlaib never said this, and although Bash later “clarified” her reporting, the question remains why did CNN push this smear without evidence? I discussed the larger issues at play with my fellow Public Notice contributor
, author of the newsletter. Download the podcast above and/or watch the YouTube video below.Transcribed excerpts have been edited for clarity:
SER: CNN broke this [Mark Robinson] story, but then it felt as if CNN, during the same weekend, muted the impact with a “both sides” narrative that it created, targeting Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Can you take us through what actually occurred and CNN’s part in this?
NOAH BERLATSKY: Rashida Tlaib criticized the Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for, she said, setting a dangerous precedent because Nessel had prosecuted University of Michigan students who were peacefully protesting against the Gaza War. And Nessel suggested that this criticism was antisemitic because Nessel is Jewish.
And then, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash both said that Tlaib had specifically said Nessel was prejudiced because she was Jewish. Tlaib never said. In fact, she said that it was the office that had a bias, that there was an anti-Palestinian bias. But she didn’t say anything about it being because Nessel was Jewish. She didn’t mention Nessel’s Judaism at all. I think there was a mention that Nessel was Jewish in the article.
[CNN] kind of walked it back, but nobody ever apologized to Tlaib. They sort of made it, well, she implied that, though she didn’t imply anything of the kind.
To me, it’s just this example of how these accusations of antisemitism are kind of weaponized against people who either criticize Israel's actions or criticize the attack on protesters. Any sort of criticism of Israel is sort of framed as antisemitic to the extent where, they’re making up things up to smear [Tlaib].
It’s even worse because there was just this really ugly racist cartoon targeting Tlaib [by Henry Payne in the Detroit News], and there was very little pushback, either in the mainstream media or among Democrats.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, joined in and claimed that Tlaib had said this antisemitic thing, which she absolutely did not say. And the ADL is supposed to be, traditionally has been, not only about fighting antisemitism but has been trying to fight white supremacy and other kinds of bigotry.
SER: [Tlaib’s the] only Palestinian member of the House. She was also censured, including by her own colleagues, for comments she had made [regarding the Israel/Gaza war]. In the larger context, what I found interesting, you’d mentioned the horrible cartoon not only sort of making light of what many would consider war crimes against people in Lebanon but smearing her as a terrorist and almost wishing violence upon her.
Nessel, as a Democrat and from her own state in Michigan, basically said, “Oh, it’s wrong to do that because she’s Palestinian or Muslim. But it’s also wrong that she [made an antisemitic comment] so essentially trying to do a both sides, punching her with the smear while sort of looking big about defending her from an actual horribly racist cartoon.
Put that in the context of CNN breaking the Mark Robinson story — someone who had referred to himself as a Black Nazi, someone who had talked about, even before he’d won the nomination for governor, had referred to Black Panther being some sort of Jewish plot to separate Black people from their shekels. Horrible stuff. Donald Trump and JD Vance have not denounced him. No [major elected] Republicans have actually denounced him. Tom Cotton danced around the issue. His spin was “well, forget about someone we actually want to be governor of a state — what about those college students!” So, to have CNN almost embrace that narrative and push a both sides situation that doesn’t exist, [that was] essentially keyed up with misinformation. It was like a Fox News ambush.
It seemed very clear that [Tlaib] was saying, “I think there’s a bias towards Palestinians,” and to leap from that to saying it’s because Nessel’s Jewish, seems absurd, considering anti-Palestinian bias is sort of an equal opportunity issue or problem in America.
NOAH: One big example of anti-Palestinian bias is this thing we’re talking about, right? I mean, Tapper and Nessel and Bash all felt completely empowered to just lie about what she’s said. They don’t feel they have to apologize to her. They obviously feel … if she didn’t actually say it, she’s still guilty, right? Which is how racism tends to work, the idea that you can lie about somebody because they’re bad anyway, just by nature of being who they are.
People who do identify very strongly with Israel and who feel like any criticism of Israel is antisemitic or lots of criticisms of Israel that I wouldn’t consider antisemitic is antisemitic. I think for a lot of people who are Jews on the Left … this is creating a situation where there’s this default that we assume left-wing people are antisemitic, we assume that anybody who’s pro-Palestinian is antisemitic, and that’s kind of the most important, version of antisemitism that we really need to police, more than [Republican House Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about [Jewish] space lasers, more than Donald Trump getting up in front of a Jewish audience and talking about antisemitism and saying, if I lose the election, it’s your fault — i.e. if I lose the election, you know, my Nazi fans should go after Jews.
Jonathan Greenblatt sort of had a wishy-washy statement on that: “Oh, we thank Donald Trump for all he’s done, but maybe he shouldn’t have said that one thing.”
What happens is that one form of validated antisemitism is coming after left Jews and deplatforming left Jews and claiming that they are the epitome of antisemitism.
Germany has been deplatforming a lot of Jewish people. You see when Jewish people try to speak on college campuses or protest, they get arrested; people say, “Oh, you know you can’t have them speak.” The main target of these kinds of smear campaigns are people like Tlaib — Palestinians who are speaking out against the occupation, Palestinians who are speaking out against the genocide. Obviously, they’re the ones who are mainly targeted and you see that with Tlaib who is just relentlessly demonized and attacked, but a major secondary target is progressive Jewish people.
There’s this idea that progressive Jewish people don’t really count as Jews, that they’re the main ones spreading antisemitism, and it’s super dangerous because, historically, the Nazis and Hitler conflated progressives and Jews. He considered all Jews to be leftists. And this idea that it’s fine if the right wing targets left Jews is really dangerous because that’s the main people they want to go after anyway.
When you’re talking about what has actually resulted in antisemitic violence against Jewish people in the U.S., the biggest antisemitic massacre in U.S. history was in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the guy who did that was inspired by these anti-George Soros conspiracy theories about Soros funding migrant caravans. Donald Trump pushed those conspiracy theories. He was on Fox News, and they asked him, “Is George Soros doing that?” He said, “Well, I’ve heard maybe.”
Tree of Life was targeted because they were pro-immigrant. They had programs to try and help asylum seekers and immigrants in the U.S. You don’t really hear about that. There’s not much recognition that this massacre happened because of right-wing smears against progressive Jews. That’s all forgotten. Instead, it’s all about, “Oh, the real problem is Jewish Voices For Peace saying that they don’t support Israel bombing children.
It’s just super dangerous in terms of antisemitism in the U.S. to present things as if there’s any question about which side is more dangerous. But support for Israel has become this way for people who are openly antisemitic to say, “Well, you can’t accuse me of being antisemitic.” That includes Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon. There are a lot of these people who are pro-Zionist because they’re ethnonationalists, because they’re involved in evangelical communities who have sort of millenarian ideas about Israel, or who also are just super Islamophobic. “I support Israel” has become this kind of get out of antisemitism free card, and on the other hand, people who criticize Israel and who haven’t said anything antisemitic, people, including the news media, will just make up quotes and just lie about it.
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Why It’s So Easy To Lie About Rashida Tlaib