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Rashida Tlaib's Passover Message Fails Spectacularly After Posting Food Jews Can't Eat on the Holiday

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I don’t know about the holiday of Passover exhaustively. I do know a bit — specifically, for the purposes of this article, that only unleavened bread is eaten.

“The Passover custom of eating only unleavened products commemorates the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, which, according to the Bible, took place so quickly that they did not have time for their bread to rise,” according to The Times of Israel.

I also don’t have a congressional staff that vets what I put out. Granted, I have editors — and darned good ones at that — but I don’t have a phalanx of people standing between me and making a fool of myself.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the controversial Michigan Democrat (“we’re gonna go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherf——!”) has the latter but not the knowledge about the former, apparently.

Surely, then, what she would do is consult team b) about issue a) when she was issuing her pro forma Passover greeting.

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Or she could just post this:

As you may note, those are two loaves of bread on the bottom.

Two loaves that are clearly leavened bread.

This didn’t go unnoticed:

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Several commenters on the thread also noted that the image was one of the first ones that came up on Google if a user searched “happy Passover,” as if this were somehow exculpatory.

Do you think Tlaib's post should have been more carefully vetted?

If your research into the holiday consists of taking the third or fourth thing that comes up when you Google it, your constituents and other Jewish-Americans must feel so happy you took the time. The only thing that could have made this worse was a picture of a pork chop.

Also mentioned was that the British Labour Party had made the same mistake and posted a similar image with leavened bread. Given the state of the British Labour Party — which has faced its own accusations of anti-Semitism in recent years — that’s also hardly exculpatory.

Then again, it probably doesn’t help that Tlaib has often faced the same accusations.

One of two Muslim women in Congress, she’s a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that seeks to treat Israel like an apartheid state. She has been alleged to have used the same kind of dual loyalties smear for Jewish-Americans that Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar got in trouble for using, albeit in a more ambiguous form.

There was also the minor-league controversy Tlaid caused when, on her first day in Congress, a reporter found a sticky-note attempting to cover the state of Israel in her office and labeling it as “Palestine.” (I say “attempting,” because it looked a lot more like it was covering Egypt, Libya and the Mediterranean, meaning whoever did it cared about as much about geography as Rashida Tlaib apparently does about Passover.)

I suppose one could ask how many slow news cycles this would dominate if it were a Republican who did this. I suppose I could ask whether this sort of ignorance of Judaism is connected to weightier sorts of ignorance. However, I’m left with this one question:

Doesn’t anyone on your social media staff vet this sort of thing, Rep. Tlaib?

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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