Washington’s chickens come home to roost

The one thing Washington could agree on while supporting a genocide in Palestine was to publicly rebuke the one Palestinian in Congress

War is always a travesty. Its horrors have revealed themselves by the hour over the past month, yet continue to only escalate.

From maimed and mutilated bodies to entire neighborhoods being reduced to rubble, the scale of devastation in Gaza is difficult for observers to understand, particularly since Israel has periodically cut off Internet access in order to prevent Palestinians from exposing ongoing Israeli war crimes to the world.

While the Israeli genocide in Gaza might appear far away, its chickens have come home to roost…America is today falling victim to its own longstanding international belligerence.

Many Americans may think our country is immune from the chaos unfolding across the planet. After all, the oceans flanking the United States have long offered a strategic geopolitical buffer. They are a leading reason why the U.S. was able to establish global military predominance, since they kept the destruction during World War II on other shores. It was the oceans that gave government agencies and weapons companies building America’s military industrial complex a head start on other countries.

But while the Israeli genocide in Gaza might appear far away, its chickens have come home to roost. From mounting Islamophobia to constitutionally problematic restraints on speech, America is today falling victim to its own longstanding international belligerence.

Repressing dissent

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is the only Palestinian in Congress, and one of its few Muslims. Before she was elected and went to Washington, a viral video from 2016 showed her forcible ejection from a Trump rally and admirable defiance of epithets from the crowd.

Tlaib was called to stand her ground again this week—this time, against voices including those of fellow Democrats. 

Despite the constant partisan rancor that seemingly divides Democrats and Republicans, the parties in Congress found one thing on which they could find common cause this week: censuring Tlaib for the crime of speaking the truth in the face of their shameful deference to—and active approval of—a genocide sponsored by Washington and Tel Aviv.

In particular, Congress accused Tlaib of “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.”

In fact, she did no such thing.

False narratives about the October 7 attacks abound. Many of them have come from Israeli sources weaponizing tragedy to enable that country’s brutal violations of well-settled international law. And nowhere did Tlaib call for the destruction of anything—but misdirection is Washington’s stock in trade, so no one should be surprised.

Censure is not censorship

Perhaps due to the linguistic similarity between the words “censure” and “censor,” at least some voices have seemed confused about the impact of Congress censuring Rep. Tlaib. They might even include Tlaib, herself.

The New York Post quoted her comments on the House floor as follows: “I will not be silenced, and I will not let you distort my words. Trying to bully or censor me won’t work because this movement for a cease-fire is much bigger than one person. It’s growing every single day.”

Ironically, the Post may have done precisely what Tlaib cautioned them against: distorting her words. Journalists have certainly done that to mine more than I wish.

In any case, Congress did not censor Tlaib. That would have entailed silencing her.

Instead, the House approved a motion to censure her, which is an institutional form of public shaming usually reserved for serious offenses. A decade ago, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) was censured by the House for nearly a dozen ethics violations. In contrast, Rep. Tlaib was censured based on the content of her speech on the House floor.

Censure does carry some institutional impacts. For example, it would have forced Tlaib to give up any committee chairs that she held. 

But since she doesn’t chair any committees yet, the censure resolution carries limited impact. Tlaib has lost neither her office, nor authority to introduce legislation, nor power to vote on proposed bills.

Yet the symbolic moment remains monumental nonetheless.

Censuring a member is the last step available to Congress before expelling one, and taking that step towards the only Palestinian in Congress has exposed the deep bias that pervades it.

Islamophobia rising within—and well beyond—Congress

It is not only within Congress that Islamophobia is rising. 

Just yesterday, the White House warned schools and colleges across the United States about a rising tide of incidents including threats, harassment, and outright hate crimes. There have been more examples than one could possibly count.

The White House even launched a national strategy to counter Islamophobia this week, seemingly unaware of how frequently it has been and remains a source of it today.

Nor has bias been confined to educational institutions and the White House.

Less than a month ago, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year old Palestinian-American child, was murdered by a deranged landlord in Illinois who stabbed him over 25 times and also attacked and injured the child’s mother. Last Friday, Abdulwahab Omira, an Arab Muslim university student at Stanford (where I graduated from law school 20 years ago), was hospitalized after a hit & run attack by a driver who screamed “f*** you and your people” as he drove away.

These incidents point to broader patterns. Researchers have documented pervasive anti-Muslim bias in employment across workplaces, beginning at the interview stage and stretching well beyond it. I spent years documenting the Islamophobia of government agencies, only to watch every elected member of Congress ignore our findings when they were published.

History rhymes

In an earlier era, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lamented the role of (what he described as) “the white moderate” in enabling injustice.

He observed that it’s not just the acts of powerful institutional perpetrators that force marginalized people to bear the brunt of their actions, but crucially, the casual deference of well-meaning observers who decline to intervene. Some call for patience, others protect their positions of relative privilege, and others remain on an imaginary moral fence, all sharing a disappointing willingness to disregard pleas for solidarity from less fortunate voices reliant on their support.

The pattern observed by MLK continues today.

His observation explains everything from how racial marginalization persists in the United States today, to how presidents from both corporate political parties have overseen fraudulent wars for corporate profit lasting as long as decades.

They also apply to Democrats in Congress.

It’s not the right wing clowns in Congress—like Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) or Lauren Boebert (R-CO)—who are ultimately responsible for its worst legislative acts, but rather the legions of their seemingly more thoughtful colleagues who enable them. The mere fact that a censure petition originally launched by Marjorie Taylor Green was approved by Congress (albeit in a different form, after it was reintroduced by a different Republican) should be scandalous in itself.

The fact that 20 Democrats crossed the aisle to join their Republican colleagues in punching down and left at the one Palestinian in Congress—in the midst of a genocide in which they are nearly all complicit—is positively shameful. They today embody “the white moderate” whose complicity pained MLK.

La-Dee-Da

The people in Tlaib’s native country are enduring an ongoing genocide grotesquely enabled by American weapons. Meanwhile, the White House is reportedly obscuring its latest weapons shipments to Israel from public scrutiny, implausibly claiming that doing so would compromise security objectives.

Might it reflect a White House strategy to diminish Biden’s culpability in predictable—and preventable—Israeli war crimes using them?

Congress is the only body poised to oversee or investigate the executive branch, or impose meaningful limits on its otherwise unrestrained global authority.

But Congress would rather bury its head in the sand than tolerate a truth teller in its midst. This degradation of the constitutional design is one way that our country’s imperial chickens have come home to roost.

Paid subscribers can access a preview of my next post. It will expand my review of Islamophobia into further areas, including elections and political journalism.