In sports and politics, the past year has brought a few surprising results from the Motor City. The Detroit Lions are good this season, and a freshman Democratic congressman has been bucking a large faction of his party over some aspects of identity politics and support for Israel.
The Lions are enjoying their first truly great season in quite a few years. The team used to battle for the worst place in the NFL. In the 2008-09 season, the team went 0-16. In the 2021-22 season, they only won three games. Now, they appear to have turned a corner.
The Lions had a winning season in the 2022-23 season, but just barely, notching up nine wins and eight losses. In the 2023-24 season, they had 12 wins to five losses, and they aren’t done yet. Quarterbacked by Jared Goff, the team closed out the regular season with a 30-20 win over the Minnesota Vikings. The Lions won their division, now the NFC North, for the first time since 1993 and could go as far as the Super Bowl.
Another unlikely Detroit player of sorts is Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), an Indian immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen who looks much younger than his 68 years because of a surprisingly robust head of hair. His career before politics was as a successful pharmaceutical testing entrepreneur.
Thanedar ran in a crowded field for the Democratic nomination for Michigan governor in 2018, making little headway. He scaled back his ambitions and served one term in the Michigan legislature before running for the House in 2022, from a district covering much of Detroit and the city’s southwestern suburbs.
In Thanedar’s bid for Congress, he again contended in a crowded Democratic primary. Thanedar emerged with the nomination from the 13th Congressional District and won the seat with just over 71% of the vote. That seat has historically gone to black candidates, which appears to have engendered some resentment among fellow Democrats in the region.
So far, Thanedar’s politics have been those of a typical progressive Democrat. He pushed for a $15 minimum wage, co-sponsored the Medicare for All Act, and wants an assault weapons ban and federal laws to support abortion. There is one issue that has set him at odds with many progressives, especially those in Michigan, however: his solid support for Israel following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
“I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Israeli people in condemning this recent attack by Hamas,” he posted on the day it happened in an X post and hasn’t backed down since. A few days later, Thanedar was filmed as one link in a chain of Michigan officials holding hands and dancing at a synagogue in a Detroit suburb. The congressman also announced that he was breaking ties with the Democratic Socialists of America over the organization’s support for Hamas.
Thanedar’s support for Israel’s military action in Gaza has been controversial among many Michigan activists. Protesters showed up on his lawn in the wee hours one morning. A party that he attended in December dissolved into fisticuffs.
“[Protesters] created a situation of violence where innocent party goers, including elderly people, were injured. Some seriously,” he posted on X on Dec. 17, adding, “I love and value the First Amendment, and encourage civil disagreement, but violence of any kind is unacceptable. And if these protestors think hurting senior citizens at a Christmas party is going to win people over to their side, they are very mistaken.”
Against Thanedar’s steadfast support for Israel, fellow Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan’s neighboring Detroit and western suburbs 12th Congressional District makes quite the contrast. While Thanedar’s moral fortitude and strategic thinking in support of Israel in trying times has made him like the winning Lions of pro football, Tlaib, to keep the sports analogy going, is more like the NBA’s moribund Detroit Pistons.
The once-storied franchise won NBA championships in 1989, 1990, and 2004, but has had mostly losing seasons from the 2008-09 season on. This season, the basketball team is 3-35, and endured a 28-game losing streak, tied for the worst in NBA history.
Tlaib, for her part, has been censured by the House of Representatives in a vote that included 212 Republicans and 22 Democrats “for promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the State of Israel.”
Whether people think the censure vote was just may hinge on what they think of the protest chant “from the river to the sea,” which Tlaib, the House’s only Palestinian American member, has parroted. The American Jewish Committee explains the phrase’s origin and teases out its maximally antisemitic interpretation.
“‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free’ is a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers … [including] Hamas, which called for Israel’s destruction in its original governing charter in 1988 and was responsible for the October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israeli civilians, murdering over 1,200 people in the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” the AJC writes on its website.
The AJC adds that the phrase “is also a common call-to-arms for pro-Palestinian activists, especially student activists on college campuses. It calls for the establishment of a State of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the State of Israel and its people.”
A few observers have questioned whether many of the young protesters who employ that phrase really understand its full implications. Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were asked whether calls for “genocide” were against their schools’ codes of conduct and should therefore be punished in a Dec. 5 congressional hearing, and they tried to duck the question.
Rather than explain that many of their students were too dull to understand what they were chanting, these heads of university said that discipline should be based on the “context” in which one called for genocide. Many donors were furious. Two of those three school presidents are now ex-presidents.
In addition to her unfortunate water-based sloganeering, Tlaib also blamed Israel for shelling a hospital in the Gaza Strip. She refused to apologize when it became clear this hadn’t happened. She also accused President Joe Biden’s administration of perpetuating “genocide” itself by not demanding an Israel ceasefire in Gaza. She has taken jabs at Thanedar in the Detroit News for “posting memes” and “leaving his working-class communities across his district with no real advocate.”
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The divide between Thanedar and Tlaib is not an ideological one, or at least not ideology as it has functioned for much of the last century. If anything, Thanedar has a more progressive voting record than Tlaib. The conservative Heritage Action report card gives Tlaib a “session score” of 28% and a “lifetime score” of 16% versus Thanedar’s current session score of 0%.
But Israel is emerging as a wedge issue in American politics. And it is far from certain how it will play out in Michigan, the U.S. state with the highest Arab American population. Like Thanedar, President Joe Biden has taken a reasonably stout pro-Israel line since the Hamas attacks in October. He has also taken a beating in Michigan polling. This fluctuation could be a coincidence, or it could be a portent of a less-than-winning political season to come.
