Credit to Stephen Miller who saw this before I did. Today Rep. Rashida Tlaib posted a video whose main message was that progressives are not with President Biden and will remember his decision to side with Israel in 2024. Included in the video are a bunch of clips of pro-Palestinian protests from different places around the US. At protests in Michigan, people are seen chanting “From the river to the sea!” (1:05 below)

.@POTUS, the majority of the American people are not with you on this one. #CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/rV97zrMkad

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) November 3, 2023

This slogan is widely interpreted as a call for the eradication of Israel since the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is primarily Israel as Sen. Kyrsten Sinema just pointed out:

We hear “from the river to the sea” chanted at US protests. It’s on posters, even projected on university buildings

Here’s a map

See what “from the river to the sea” means

It means eradicating the state of Israel
It’s about eliminating Jews

It’s hate speech

It’s antisemitism pic.twitter.com/8d55SAom2F

— Kyrsten Sinema (@kyrstensinema) November 3, 2023

This phrase is also a direct reference to terrorist group Hamas which uses this phrase in its constitution.

Hamas, whose gunmen killed 1,400 people on 7 October, claim the slogan in their rejection of Israel.

“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” says the organisation’s 2017 constitution.

Liberation of Palestine in this context means the eradication of Israel. A Labour Party MP was just suspended from the party for paraphrasing the statement:

“We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty,” said Andy McDonald, a Labour MP, at a protest in London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign at the weekend.

Three days later, McDonald was suspended from the party pending an investigation, leaving the former shadow cabinet minister sitting as an independent for now.

This isn’t the only problem with the video. The clip includes a montage of Israeli airstrikes and with those is video of an explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza (0:07 seconds in the clip). As you probably know, independent experts and US intelligence officials concluded that explosion was not caused by an Israeli airstrike but was almost certainly the result of a misfired Hamas rocket:

Speaking to reporters by phone, the intelligence officials said they had “high confidence” in their assessment that it was not Israel that fired the rocket, but they were less certain which Palestinian militants fired the projectile on the evening of Oct. 17.

“We assess with high confidence that Israel was not responsible for the explosion at the hospital and that Palestinian militants were responsible,” an intelligence official said. “We assess with low confidence that Palestine Islamic Jihad was responsible for launching the rocket that landed on the hospital.”…

The evidence pointing to PIJ was based on intercepted conversations between suspected “Hamas affiliated militants” who appeared to be speculating about who was behind the rocket launch, the officials said…

The audio was not the same as that released publicly by Israel’s military previously, and it was vetted and deemed authentic, the official said.

In the context of the clip, Rep. Tlaib is clearly insinuating that Israel was responsible for the explosion at the hospital, ignoring the evidence that’s not what happened.

As for her central claim that Americans don’t support Biden’s handling of this, that may be true but Americans do support Israel.

…most Americans side with Israel in the conflict, according to the polls. The exact numbers vary widely, but across five recent polls, between three and five times as many Americans said they sympathized with Israelis than said they sympathized with Palestinians…

Not only do Americans support the Israeli government’s response, but they also want their own government to come to Israel’s aid. Seventy-one percent of Americans told YouGov/The Economist that protecting Israel was a very or somewhat important U.S. policy goal. And Quinnipiac University’s Oct. 12-16 survey found that 76 percent of registered voters thought supporting Israel was in the U.S. national interest.

All in all, a pretty incendiary and inaccurate post from Rep. Tlaib.

Update: A few hours after posting the video above, Rep. Tlaib added this explanation (2nd tweet below).

From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate. My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) November 3, 2023

Even if you take her at her word about what she means, that isn’t necessarily what the people chanting in the video mean and it’s definitely not what Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. mean. Jonah Goldberg made this point today in a tweet.

I find the debate over the meaning of “from the river to the sea” to be exhausting. I’m sure some people mean it as a call for a peaceful multiethnic state or whatever. Fine.

But they all know that isn’t what Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and literally millions of others mean by it. It’s a slogan of people who murder babies in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.

The gaslighters want to pretend it’s outrageous and “dangerous” to use the obvious genocidal interpretation.

But this is a standard that is only used for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sloganeering. Any other phrase, word, or term that gives offense or threatens violence to any other group is deemed unacceptable by social Justice types. But here we’re supposed to ignore what the mass murderers and terrorists mean by the phrase and act as if it’s unfair to not give Rashida Tlaib et al every benefit of the doubt when they’re clearly using it as a dog whistle.

It’s shameful bullshit and they know exactly what they’re doing.

And finally, we don’t really have to take her word here.

An absolute lie, as she knows. This is what she did to the map in her office: https://t.co/jcixR6Jl6s pic.twitter.com/NPWkNbldcr

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) November 4, 2023