Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) recently slammed a cartoon depiction of her published in the National Review last week. According to Tlaib, the cartoon, which referenced the recent attacks against Hezbollah where exploding pagers killed and injured many, was racist and offensive.
The cartoon shows an exaggerated depiction of the congresswoman sitting at her desk, stating, “Odd,” My pager just exploded,” as she looks at the smoking remnants of the device in front of her. Subsequently, Tlaib blasted the cartoon, claiming it was racially offensive and would incite more violence against her community.
“Our community is already in so much pain right now,” Tlaib wrote on social media. “This racism will incite more hate + violence against our Arab & Muslim communities, and it makes everyone less safe. It’s disgraceful that the media continues to normalize this racism.”
However, amid attacks from the left against the cartoon that allege the cartoon is “racist” and “Islamophobic,” Hussain Abdul-Hussain, Research Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, defended the sketch, maintaining there is “nothing racist about the cartoon.”
In a lengthy commentary about the cartoon on X, Abdul-Hussain said, “Let’s discuss the @detroitnewscartoon and how everyone who attacked it was racist. Had the woman behind the desk been depicted as a generic Arab or Muslim man or woman — for example with a hijab or a male headdress — and without her name in front of her, while showing a blown up pager, the cartoon would have been racist for stereotyping Arabs and Muslims and considering all of them supporters of terrorist Hezbollah (whose pagers were blown up).”
He continued, “But this cartoon has nothing racist in it. It makes it certain that this is US Congresswoman Tlaib, without any visible Arab or Muslim signs (even the Kufiyah that she now wears all the time is not in the drawing). This cartoon is against Tlaib for her support of Hezbollah and Hamas. Tlaib represents some Arabs and Muslims in America and her own opinion, but NOT all Arabs and Muslims in America, many of whom vehemently oppose her views.”
However, Abdul-Hussain maintained, “To lump all Arabs and Muslims in American into one person — Tlaib — is racism. We, Arabs and Muslims, are — like all other races and religions — diverse and have clashing views, and no one person embodies or symbolizes all of us, unless you think we all look and think the same.”
Others on social media echoed this same sentiment, where one person wrote, “This cartoon is lampooning her policies and it is the opposite of racist because it’s not taking her ethnicity into consideration. The subject could have been Bush, Sanders, Bowman, Ocasio-Cortez, Lee, Presley, or Omar and each one would have been. bulls-eye.”
Commenting on Abdul-Hussain’s post, another said, “You’re missing the problem in US politics. “Racist” a particular party uses as a political weapon. They never fail to use it regardless of the lack of substance. What you said is correct but needs explaining. The average US voter responds to simple concepts… like Racist. It’s meant to get votes from a particular voting ‘bloc’, in this case PoC. It works. They keep using it for everything, every issue to the very ends of absurdity.”
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