Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib continued their attack against President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by posting a cartoon drawn by an artist who has created anti-Semitic imagery and mocked victims of the Holocaust.
The freshman Democrats, who were barred from visiting Israel because of their support of a boycott movement, posted on Instagram a cartoon that depicts Bibi and Trump silencing them by covering their mouths, Fox News reported.
“The more they try to silence us, our voices rise. The more they try to weaken us, the stronger we become. The more they try to discredit us, the truth prevails,” read a statement in Tlaib’s post.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor at The Forward, called attention to the congresswomen’s post on Twitter — noting that the cartoon was drawn by Brazilian-Lebanese artist Carlos Latuff.
“Oof. Looks like both Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib shared this awful Carlos Latuff cartoon in Instagram stories yesterday,” Ungar-Sargon said.
“In 2006, Latuff came in second in Iran’s International Holocaust Cartoon Contest, which is a thing that exists, in case you thought the TL couldn’t get any worse.”
Latuff defended his use of the Holocaust to assail Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, even while acknowledging that the two are not exactly the same.
“Of course Israel isn’t building gas chambers in the West Bank, but surely we can find some similarities between the treatment given to Palestinians by the [Israel Defense Forces] and the Jews under Nazi rule,” Latuff said, according to Fox News.
“My cartoons have no focus on the Jews or on Judaism. My focus is Israel as a political entity,” he said without explaining why it was necessary to use anti-Jewish tropes to attack the Jewish state.
“It happens to be Israeli Jews that are the oppressors of Palestinians,” he said.
Latuff denied that being anti-Zionist is anti-Semitic, saying: “No doubt about real anti-Semitism. Of course, you’ll have people hijacking the Palestinian struggle as a chance for bashing the Jews, like European neo-Nazis who demonstrate against the occupation of Palestinian territories or the Iraq War.
“It’s important for the left to keep them apart from the legitimate struggle for the rights of the Palestinians,” he added.
Tlaib appealed to Israel to allow her to see her 90-year-old grandmother in the West Bank and vowed to not vocalize her support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement during her visit.
Her request was granted — but she rejected it because of what she called “oppressive conditions” set for her trip.