Video of Democrat Rashida Tlaib dancing wearing the Palestinian flag at a victory party emerged Tuesday evening, after she won a largely uncontested race for the open seat in Michigan’s heavily Democratic 13th congressional district.
Tlaib is one of two Muslim women elected to Congress on Tuesday, along with Ilhan Omar, who replaced outgoing Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress. Both Tlaib and Omar have extreme anti-Israel views. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress.
In the video, Tlaib delivered a victory speech in which she acknowledged her family watching from abroad in the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank. She dedicated her victory, in part, to the Palestinian cause: “A lot of my strength comes from being Palestinian,” she said.
After Tlaib won her primary race in August, she published several anti-Israel tweets, and re-tweeted a fan who declared that Tlaib’s “first fight was for Palestine, always Palestine.”
Tlaib explicitly supports the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and its replacement of a unitary Palestinian state. That position caused her to lose the endorsement of the far-left group J Street — which, while often adopting anti-Israel positions, nominally supports a two-state solution.
One other Palestinian-American was on the ballot on Tuesday: Ammar Campa-Najjar, the grandson of a Palestinian terrorist who was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and was involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, lost in California’s 50th congressional district.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Correction: the video was apparently recorded at Tlaib’s primary victory party, but posted on Election Day. The article has been updated to reflect that information.
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