Palestinian American US lawmaker Rashida Tlaib condemns racist cartoon showing her with exploding pager
Palestinian American U.S. lawmaker Rashida Tlaib condemned on Friday a “racist” cartoon published in the conservative magazine National Review depicting her with an exploding pager, following a surge of detonated pager explosions in Lebanon, which killed dozens of civilians, including children.
“Our community is already in so much pain right now. This racism will incite more hate + violence against our Arab & Muslim communities, and it makes everyone less safe. It’s disgraceful that the media continues to normalize this racism,” Tlaib wrote on X.
Tlaib, a Democrat who represents a district from Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives, is the only Palestinian American lawmaker in the U.S. Congress and has long stood against the U.S. support to the Zionist occupation, particularly amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The cartoon was published on Thursday by Henry Payne, showing a woman sitting next to an exploding pager. The woman’s desk in the cartoon had a name card saying “Rep. Tlaib,” while the woman herself is shown saying, “ODD. MY PAGER JUST EXPLODED.”
The Zionist occupation’s Mossad spy agency planted a precise amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
At least 37 people were martyred and nearly 3,000 injured in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday, following a flurry of pagers and walkie-talkie radios’ explosions across Lebanon.
On Friday, the Zionist occupation launched an airstrike on a residential building in the southern suburb of Beirut, claiming the lives of 12 people, among which were children, in addition to 66 wounded, nine of them in critical condition, according to the Lebanese News Agency.
