House votes to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for speaking about the Israel-Hamas war, November 7, 2023. Photo: AP
Both the House and the Senate have passed near-unanimous resolutions condemning anti-Israel protests as anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, November 7, the House of Representatives voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, with 22 Democrats joining in, piling on Tlaib. The resolution wildly distorts Tlaib’s position as defending “brutal rapes, murders, be-headings, and kidnapping—including of Americans—by Hamas...”
Tlaib responded, “It’s a shame my colleagues are more focused on silencing me than they are on saving lives, as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000. Many of them have shown me that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them...” And she said that she has "repeatedly denounced the horrific targeting and killing of civilians by Hamas and the Israeli government" and has "mourned the Israeli and Palestinian lives lost.”
In fact, the House statement censuring Tlaib quickly gets to the real issue in its second paragraph, which reads: “Israel is a critical ally to the American people and to our strategic national security interests in the Middle East.” [emphasis added] We could, ironically, thank these censors and repressors for being so brutally honest in the underlying reason for their attack on Tlaib. What must be understood by everyone who would argue from the standpoint of “American interests”—including those who mean well—is the following principle from Bob Avakian:
The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way.
BAsics 3:8
