WaPo’s Dana Milbank Goes Insane with TDS, Blames Trump for Tlaib’s Anti-Semitism

That courageous titan of contemporary journalism, Dana Milbank, has an explosive scoop in Monday’s Washington Post: He has discovered that Rashida Tlaib, far from being the Squad firebrand and unhinged hard-Leftist that everyone takes her to be, is actually a Trump-supporting MAGA redneck who has imbibed anti-Semitism from the source and summit of Jew-hatred himself, Mr. Donald J. Trump. Yes, it sounds fanciful, and it is, but in Dana Milbank’s world, there is just no difference between “evil” and “Trump”; if there is something bad in the world, it must be the fault of the Bad Orange Man. What possible alternative explanation could there be?

In an opinion piece (of course, they’re all opinion pieces in the Post nowadays) entitled “Rashida Tlaib’s bigotry comes from the MAGA handbook, which really ought to be fitted out with a laugh track,” Milbank states: “It’s a classic Trump move: Blame a minority group for a sinister conspiracy, then deny responsibility when your supporters act on your baseless claim. Work ‘em into a lather, rinse and repeat.”

Milbank is just as surprised as everyone else at who is using this playbook: why, it’s one of the Satanic Trump’s most prominent victims! “Few,” he claims, and the laugh track should rise in volume here, “have been victimized by Donald Trump’s hateful tactics more than Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who with other members of ‘the Squad’ were told by Trump to ‘go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.’ So why is Tlaib now using the Trump playbook against others?”

Milbank notes that “Acts of antisemitism rose dramatically during the Trump presidency, reaching a high in 2019 and barely dropping in 2020,” without, of course, providing the slightest shred of evidence that this rise was due to anything said or done by the most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern state of Israel. “In May 2021,” Milbank continues, without bothering to note the fact that by then Biden’s handlers had supplanted Trump in the Oval Office, “during the fighting between Israel and Hamas (and anti-Israel protests by left-wing demonstrators in the United States), anti-Jewish violence and harassment surged to more than double the previous year’s level.”

As long as we’re assigning blame, which president is more likely to incite anti-Semitism? One who strongly defended and aided the right of Israel to defend itself from genocidal jihadist enemies, or one who has appointed a large number of fierce opponents of Israel to all levels of his administration, abetted the spread of Palestinian jihad propaganda demonizing Israel, and even praised an open anti-Semite and promised to defend her family from alleged Israeli aggression? The claim that Trump was anti-Semitic was one of the principal Big Lies of the Left over the last four years.

Now, true to common Leftist practice, Milbank is building a new lie atop the old one, and claiming that Rashida Tlaib, a devout Muslim who likely knows very well the Qur’an’s multiple anti-Semitic passages (2:63-5, 2:89, 5:82, 9:30, etc.) and the 1,400-year history of Islamic antisemitism, is really just emulating Milbank’s arch-villain. He ignores the fact that Tlaib shows every sign of being anti-Semitic because of her all-encompassing hatred for Israel, compounded by the anti-Jewish passages in the Qur’an and Hadith. Tlaib has been open about her support for the Palestinian jihad. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, she “was photographed with an avowed Hizballah supporter in January [2019] – just after being sworn in to the U.S. House of Representatives.” When this came to light, “she claimed she didn’t know the guy or what he stood for. But just two months later, Tlaib did it again. In a March photograph just discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Tlaib posed with Nader Jalajel, a Palestinian activist who last year mourned the death of a terrorist who led a shooting attack that murdered a rabbi.” Was Tlaib a Trumpist from the beginning? Horror of horrors!

Milbank invokes none other than the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, even as 1,500 rabbis have just declared that the ADL is no longer competent even to identify anti-Semitism, much less fight it, to support his blaming of Trump for Tlaib’s anti-Semitism. Greenblatt, says Milbank, “called Tlaib’s unwillingness to clarify antisemitic remarks ‘a lesson of the Trump era’ characterized by a refusal to apologize for anything. ‘Reckless words lead to reckless things,’ he told me.”

Yeah, and if anyone knows reckless words, it’s Dana Milbank. He concludes by scratching his head over how a victim of “Islamophobia” could possibly be anti-Semitic: “But more than dumb, it’s repugnant. Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent and a Muslim, knows what it’s like to be the target of bigotry. Practicing the same against Jews furthers nobody’s cause but Trump’s.”

This is Trump Derangement Syndrome at a seismic level. What’s next? Blaming Trump for Ilhan Omar marrying her brother? But if anyone ventured to inform Dana Milbank of the real roots of Tlaib’s anti-Semitism, he would likely charge his interlocutor with “Islamophobia.” When you’re this far gone into burning hatred of the 45^th president, no rational discussion will even be possible.