Fox has come up with a new excuse to gin up its poutrage against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Muslim) while pretending to oppose bigotry – in this case by twisting Tlaib’s comment that was actually in support of Jews as a pretext to attack her as anti-Semitic.
In case you missed it, Salon has the quote in full:
“There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out. All of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time,” she said.
Clearly, Tlaib’s “calming feeling” was that her anger at the suffering of her ancestors was assuaged by the fact it alleviated the persecution of the Jews. But Fox News won’t stop telling its viewers that Tlaib was at the least suggesting she gets a “calming feeling” about the Holocaust.
Fox’s Harris Faulkner, who divides her time between being an opinion host on Outnumbered and pretending to be a “straight news anchor” on Outnumbered Overtime, led off the discussion that was clearly designed to be another round of attacks on Tlaib on Outnumbered yesterday:
FAULKNER: You know, sometimes when you continue talking and you continue making mistakes and you don’t acknowledge that maybe you could have done something differently, it causes you to make more.
To his credit, guest-cohost Juan Williams said, “I don’t think she made a mistake, I think she’s being smeared.” However, cohost Dagen McDowell suggested Tlaib represented an anti-Semitism problem among the Democrats.\
But while making a mountain out of a fake Tlaib molehill, Faulkner (along with Fox) forgives and defends Donald Trump’s far-more serious mountains, and turns them into - well, not even molehills. In fact, when Trump failed to acknowledge he made any mistakes with his hideous Charlottesville comments, Faulkner attacked his critics as anti-American. When Trump smeared Sen. John McCain’s war-hero status, she blamed McCain. She claimed Democratic criticism of Trump’s secret meeting with Vladimir Putin was jealousy at Trump’s phenomenal deal-making skills.
Faulkner had saw no need to say anything differently when a guest accused then-President Obama of having “blood on his hands” after the shooting of a Baton Rouge police officer, merely because Obama has supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
As for anti-Semitism and bigotry, Faulkner dismissed a liberal cohost's complaint about Roseanne Barr publishing a photo of herself in a Hitler mustache by admonishing her to “stay on topic.”
I can just imagine what Faulkner would have said if Tlaib had published such a photo of herself.
Watch the phony poutrage below, from the May 14, 2019 Outnumbered.
Forget Fox News. When CNN’s John King accuses you of being a revisionist of Nazi history during WWII you damn well need to admit you’ve f—ked up:
https://news.yahoo.com/cnn-fact-checks-tlaib-holocaust-181943318.html
Granted the Anti-Defamation League is trying to cool down the predictable partisan ‘Tlaib is an anti-Semite’ Republican backlash:
https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1128035724224335873
However, the ADL at the same time points out Tlaib’s revising history too.
Even if you defend Tlaib – as Juan does – by claiming Tlaib’s comments are more focused so forget the Hitler stuff, her statement, IMHO, is as ambiguous as it is naively backhanded.
It might not be popular in liberal circles to admit they have a Tlaib and an Omar problem but, IMHO, the have a huge one. I believe I’ve said it here before and I fear I’ll be forced to say it again. Omar and Tlaib lack any self-restraint in spewing personal resentments that are clearly way out of the mainstream of American political thought. Ironically, in bringing attention to their cause they’re undermining it terribly.
The problem for the Democrats is Omar and Tlaib are lightening rods garnering far more attention than the pair of freshmen deserve but all the embarrassing attention is making them a face of the Democratic Party.