If you ask Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — and Detroit Metro Times, the progressive weekly magazine in Detroit, did — the protests staged by students at the University of Michigan were peaceful. In fact, they were the ideal kind of peaceful protest. A number of students simply decided to turn the campus into their own personal camping ground while learning about prior genocides, like the one that occurred in Armenia in 1915, and calling for the university to sever its ties with Israel. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — who is a Democrat and Jewish, a fact that seems pertinent in this particular instance — sees the whole incident quite differently. Early this month she filed charges against 11 people involved in the protests. Not only were the students disturbing the peace, the encampment was not up to code (the price of running a sit-in protest in 2024) and students had refused to comply with safety directives. Masked students had shown up by the dozens to chant slogans and bang drums outside board members’ homes, and one can hardly blame those board members for feeling a bit threatened. All of this happened back in May. Now, four months later, Nessel is doing that thing the law should do with people who disobey it: she’s charging them for the crimes they committed. The charges are against nine alumni and students who had run-ins with the police while being removed from the encampment and against two counterprotestors for separate incidents that included allegedly destroying protesters’ flags and “ethnic intimidation.” Appropriately, Nessel pointed out that free speech does not excuse bad behavior. “Conviction in your ideals is not an excuse for violations of the law,” she said. One could hardly call Nessel’s actions biased or excessively punitive. Most of us would probably have liked to see a more heavy-handed approach. But not Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Tlaib called out her Democratic colleague for treating students protesting the war in Gaza on an American campus differently than students (likely the same students) protesting other leftist causes: “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” she told the Detroit Metro Times. “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.” Tlaib has a point. If students are being prosecuted for unruly and illegal behavior related to protests calling on the University of Michigan to sever the very few financial ties it has with Israel, they should also be prosecuted for unruly and illegal behavior related to protests against climate change. In fact, perhaps students should always be prosecuted for unruly and illegal behavior. What Tlaib is really frustrated about is that, because most Americans don’t want college students camping out and chanting antisemitic (and genocidal) slogans, the Democrat Party is trying to distance itself from these anti-Israel protests — at least in the lead-up to the election. It simply doesn’t do to have the activists on the ground spewing antisemitic slurs while you’re asking your Jewish donors to fund a presidential election campaign. But Tlaib is a true radical. She, unlike many in the Democrat Party, actually believes what she says. I can have a certain amount of respect for that. Nessel, of course, fired back over X. “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.” Of course, Nessel is hardly the person who should bring up fairness when it comes to being attorney general, as she’s also an ideologue. She just happens to realize, unlike Tlaib, that being anti-Semitic isn’t exactly in vogue right now. Other Democrats in Michigan agree. When Jake Tapper asked Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to weigh in, she — in a response that might as well have been the official statement of the Democrat Party —  said that she had no intention of getting “in the middle of this argument that they’re having.” Why? Because it isn’t useful at the moment. READ MORE: Don’t Blame Trump For Amber Thurman’s Death. Blame the Abortion Pill. Witches Are Always Queer The post Rashida Tlaib and Dana Nessel Are Duking It Out. Democrats Shrug. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.