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Michigan governor accuses Rashida Tlaib of antisemitism for attack on state prosecutor

After first ducking the question, Gretchen Whitmer condemned Tlaib for saying the state’s Jewish AG charged anti-Israel protestors due to religious bias.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer condemned her local Congressional Representative, Rashida Tlaib, for antisemitism Monday after ducking the question the day before.

“The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic,” Whitmer wrote in a statement. “Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes.”

Tlaib had accused the state’s top prosecutor, Dana Nessel, of deciding to bring charges earlier this month against eleven anti-Israel protestors at the University of Michigan because she was biased, but without using the word “Jewish.”

She told the Detroit Metro Times that while people have had the right to protest all sorts of causes, “It seems that the Attorney General decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

On X, Tlaib, one of the leading members of the Democratic party’s anti-Israel “Squad,” had called the charges “frivolous” and a “shameful attack on students’ rights.”

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After hearing Tlaib’s condemnation, Nessel had posted to X in return, “Rashida Tlaib should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.”

When announcing her intent to prosecute the eleven, Nessel had called their actions at a pro-Hamas school encampment during the spring semester “violent and criminal behavior.”

Most of the group was charged with trespassing and resisting or obstructing arrest when ordered by police to leave the illegally built protest site, while two were accused of attempted ethnic intimidation and malicious destruction of personal property.

Whitmer had originally not wanted to get involved.

When asked forthrightly on Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper if she thought that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office was biased was antisemitic, Whitmer had not answered, saying instead, “All I know is that our Jewish community is in pain, as is our Palestinian and Muslim and Arab communities in Michigan.”

When he pressed her to say if Tlaib’s charge was true, that Nessel was only “prosecuting these individuals…because she is Jewish and the protestors are not,” Whitmer had responded that she “would not get in the middle of this argument they’re having,” and simply defended the right of students to feel safe on campuses as well as everyone’s right speak out freely on the issue.