Netanyahu praises House lawmakers for censuring ‘absurd’ Rep. Rashida Tlaib: ‘I salute the Congress’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised House lawmakers on Thursday for censuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) over her calls for the eradication of the Jewish state.
The resolution to censure the Michigan Democrat, which was passed on Tuesday, called out Tlaib’s “false narratives” around the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and her Nov. 3 video post on X, which included the phrase “From the river to the sea.”
“‘From the river to the sea’ means there’s no Israel,” Netanyahu explained during an interview with Fox News “Special Report” host Bret Baier.
The Israeli prime minister denounced Tlaib’s comments, calling them “absurd.”
“What this congresswoman is calling for is policide and genocide. The elimination of the Jewish state. The one and only Jewish state of the Jewish people. So, that’s absurd,” Netanyahu said.
“And I salute the Congress for censuring her,” he added.
Netanyahu also decried protests in support of Hamas and against Israel taking place in the US and other parts of the world.
“They’re lining up with ISIS with al Qaeda, with these murderers, with these baby murderers, with these rapists and with these mutilators, these head choppers – this is what they’re aligning themselves with,” he said of Hamas supporters.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American elected to Congress, joined pro-Palestinian activists in a protest at the US Capitol complex last month calling for cease-fire in Israel’s war against Hamas.
“We need to watch people [who] think it’s okay to bomb a hospital where children [were],” she told demonstrators before bursting out in tears, dubiously imparting blame on Israel for a hospital bombing in Gaza that US and Israeli officials say was the result of a misfired Gazan terrorist group’s rocket.
“I think it’s very important that this was censured,” Netanyahu said.
The Israeli prime minister went on to argue that the rise of antisemitic protests in the West is an “indictment” of “higher education.”
“This is an indictment of, I suppose, of higher education in many places in the West, when people who are supposedly educated cannot distinguish right from wrong and good from evil,” Netanyahu told Baier. “Hamas is evil, and we have to defeat evil, not protest and demonstrate on behalf of evil.”
Tlaib is the 26th member of Congress to be censured by the House in the legislative body’s history.
“We are human beings just like anyone else,” Tlaib said Tuesday as she defended herself from censure. “My grandmother, like all Palestinians, just wants to live her life with freedom and human dignity we all deserve. Speaking up to save lives, Mr. Chair, no matter faith, no matter ethnicity, should not be controversial in this chamber.”