Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) recently met with members of the terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Israel group Palestine Youth Movement, according to a picture on social media featuring the lawmaker with supporters of the organization.
The Washington Free Beacon first reported on Tlaib’s visit with members of the group. It reportedly took place at the Arab Texas Festival of Dallas, according to social media posts.
“Yesterday, we tabled at the Arab Texas Festival of Dallas! While doing community outreach, Palestinian congresswoman @RashidaTlaib stopped by our table,” a tweet from the group’s Twitter account read.
“Thank you Rashida for continuing to stand by your bold stances on Palestine despite unrelenting Zionist backlash!” it added:
The organization describes itself as a “transnational, independent, grassroots movement of young Palestinians dedicated to the liberation of our homeland and people” and has been under fire due to its documented support of terrorist groups – like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)– and antisemitic vitriol.
The group openly calls to “stop the Zionist occupation and colonization of all Palestine” and requires “full support for the Palestinian resistance,” which includes emphatically supporting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions against Israel (BDS) movement– something Tlaib openly supports.
As Free Beacon reported:
PYM has a history of anti-Israel activity that has spilled into outright hostility toward the Jewish state. This includes a 2018 event held in San Francisco in which attendees called for Israeli soldiers to be kidnapped, according to a video of that event captured by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or CAMERA.
In Facebook postings PYM has memorialized so-called Palestinian martyrs, or those killed or imprisoned while carrying out terrorist attacks on Israel. At least three of those honored by the organization were known operatives of the Hamas terror group.
PYM USA also sponsors the Ghassan Kanafani Scholarship, named after a leader of the terrorist group PFLP. In an email to supporters in April 2017, PYM USA praised the PFLP terrorist and framed the scholarship as a way to “honor the work and legacy of Ghasan Kanafani as part of the larger history of our ongoing liberation struggle.”
“Born on this day in 1936 in Acre, Kanafani dedicated his life to the Palestinian struggle both through his work with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as well as his writing,” the email states.
“The fire and brilliance of Kanafani’s works stems in large part from their ability to illuminate and to inspire,” it continues.
PYM’s support of Kanafani caused Trinity St.-Paul’s United Church in Toronto to cancel the planned “celebration of the PYM’s annual Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship,” which was supposed to take place over the summer. PYM decried the decision, calling it a “smear” launched by a “Zionist organization.”
That is not the only instance of the PYM openly expressing antisemitic positions.
As the Jewish Press reported:
An extensive report by a monitoring group on PYM’s activities in the US found that in July 2018, the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, supported by the University of California, awarded a grant to PYM to help fund a three-day conference in San Francisco commemorating “70 years since the Nakba.”
While PYM claimed that the goal of the conference was “to formalize ties between our collective of transnational, politically-active Palestinian youth and the wider Palestine solidarity community within the US through a gathering themed around the revitalization of the Palestinian struggle at an important historical juncture,” the conference endorsed violence and hate toward Israelis.
On July 29, the last day of the Nakba conference, PYM uploaded a video to its official Facebook page featuring a gathering of dozens of people chanting various slogans in Arabic. The slogans included those calling for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and violent uprising.
One of them was “Son of Gaza, kidnap a soldier and free our prisoners. No siege and no hunger – no trading with the blood of the martyrs.” This appears to be a direct promotion of acts of terrorism.
Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) recently made waves after Israel denied their entry into the country due to their ongoing support of the BDS movement. Tlaib penned a letter to Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, begging to see her aging grandmother, and he ultimately granted her permission to do so. However, she ultimately refused to go, arguing that she would not visit unless she could go as a “free American United States congresswoman”:
As Breitbart News reported, Tlaib and Omar’s original trip was co-sponsored by the anti-Israel organization Miftah, led by Hanan Ashrawi, who is “a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee and supporter of BDS.”
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