Fox News Contributor: Rashida Tlaib ‘Doesn’t Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt’ on Antisemitism

Reacting to conservative outrage after Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) invoked the Holocaust during an appearance on Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast, Fox News contributor Lisa Marie Boothe said that the Muslim congresswoman didn’t deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding the full context of her remarks.

During the opening segment on Fox News gabfest The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld rightly noted that Tlaib was falsely being accused of antisemitism over her remarks but should still be criticized for getting her history wrong. Tlaib said that she had a “calming feeling” over her belief that Palestinians had opened up their homeland to Jews following the Holocaust, adding that was why she believed in a one-state solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“First of all, the outrage over the Holocaust phrasing is distracting from her actual legitimate mistake about history,” Gutfeld stated. “She did not find the Holocaust calming, she found the idea of Palestinians providing safe haven to be calming.”

The libertarian Fox News personality added that Republicans are “misinterpreting her and taking it out of context,” claiming the same thing happens all the time to the hosts of The Five.

“But her claim that the Palestinians were open arms about that, that is a troubling part,” Gutfeld continued. “I’m not a historian. I don’t know enough about this, but I read up on it. The Palestinian leaders were collaborating with Hitler. They prevented safe haven for a lot of people who ended up dead. So her history is what is the outrage, the Republicans should focus on that and not about pulling it out of context, the calming word — that is kind of cheap.”

Co-host Dana Perino responded that this gave Tlaib the opportunity to say that her words were taken out of context, prompting Boothe to jump in and essentially say the Democratic lawmaker deserved to be smeared.

“Part of the reason is that she does not deserve the benefit of the doubt,” the conservative commentator declared. “And the reason she doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt it is not just the words that she chooses to use are under scrutiny, but it’s also the policies that she chooses to support.”

Boothe added that Tlaib’s support of the one-state solution and the BDS movement have led to members of her own party calling her out, claiming that Tlaib and other progressive members of the Democratic Party are seen by many as antisemitic.

Later in the segment, co-host Jesse Watters went on to say that Tlaib was “more clumsy than antisemitic” but there was “a little strain of antisemitism in there” because she was “revising history about the Holocaust.”

Lone liberal co-host Juan Williams, meanwhile, tried to point out that Tlaib wasn’t responsible for this controversy but rather President Trump and Republicans were for taking them out of context and tweeting about them. As the panel continued to argue, Watters got in the last word.

“She was sloppy and she got taken to the woodshed for it. That’s all it is,” he exclaimed.

Watch the clip above, via Fox News.