Here’s a handy tip: before you comment on an article, read the whole damn thing. Don’t just read the headline, don’t just read a paragraph someone screenshot and put on social media – read the whole thing. This one weird trick is very helpful when it comes to ensuring you’re not taking something dangerously out of context or just making up facts entirely.

This advice isn’t addressed to you, dear reader. I’m sure that you don’t need to be told something so basic. Rather it is addressed to everyone – including some very prominent cable news anchors – who has spent the last few days spreading inflammatory misinformation about the Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. It’s addressed to everyone who has falsely and dangerously claimed that Tlaib said that the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, only filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she is Jewish. Which, if this is what Tlaib actually said, would obviously be an outrageous statement.

But here’s what actually happened: on 13 September Tlaib had an interview with Steve Neavling from the Detroit Metro Times where she talked about crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests. In this interview Tlaib criticized Nessel for filing charges against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan when her office hadn’t done the same in relation to other protests. Tlaib said the following:

“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest … We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

Nowhere in the interview did Tlaib mention anything about Nessel’s personal identity, but Neavling’s article frames Tlaib’s quote with a........

© The Guardian