Claim:
During a 2025 speech in Detroit, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib publicly called for Hamas supporters to mobilize and take over America.
Rating:
Context
The claim was spread by pro-Israel users on social media, who often equate support for Palestine with support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organization in the U.S.
Between Aug. 29 and 31, 2025, a group of Palestinian organizations hosted the “2025 People’s Conference for Palestine” in Detroit. According to the conference’s website, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Detroit Democrat who is herself the daughter of Palestinian immigrants to the U.S., delivered a speech toward the end of the conference.
Throughout the following months, with an uptick of posts in late November 2025, accounts of Tlaib’s speech spread across social media. The posts claimed that Tlaib had called on supporters of Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization, to “mobilize and take over America.”
That claim was false. Snopes viewed Tlaib’s speech on YouTube. Nowhere in her speech did Tlaib call on supporters of Hamas to “mobilize and take over America.” Instead, Tlaib’s speech called for members of the public who oppose the acts of the Israeli military in Gaza to “mobilize.” She and many experts — including the United Nations and Amnesty International — have described those acts as a genocide.
The claim relies on rhetoric that commonly pops up in discussions about the war in Gaza. Supporters of Israel sometimes equate support for the civilian population in Palestine and opposition to genocide with support for Hamas. Some critics describe that as a false equivalence.
Many clips of Tlaib’s speech contained watermarks for Canary Mission, an anonymously run website that The New York Times described as doxing (sharing someone’s personal details for the purpose of public shaming and ridicule) people and organizations it considers to “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” The article noted that many of the people targeted on the Canary site are students and university professors who have been “active in campus protests against Israeli government policies.”
Below is a transcript of the two most relevant excerpts from Tlaib’s speech:
They will never truly comprehend, even after seven decades, that we aren’t going anywhere. We are just getting started. I want to say to all of them — every genocide enabler — look at this room, motherf*****s, we ain’t going anywhere!
We are just growing and growing and growing. We are bringing siblings from other movements with us. Every corner of this city that raised me has shown me how to fight for civil rights and justice and against oppression.
It’ll show you, because I want you to be truly present in this city that gave me strength, it’s not not just “dammi falastiniyah” [Arabic for “my blood is Palestinian“], it’s that as an American, this city taught me, taught me that the political structures that I have to work in, that we all are surrounded by, was built on slavery and genocide and rape and oppression. Detroit taught me that these institutions will never save us. Detroit will remind me constantly that community mothers, that it’s not the genocide-enabling Congress or the White House that will free our people; it is only us, it can only be us.
So thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your incredible courage. This is the least we can do — is show up. The least we can do to try and save lives. Enabling the genocide in Gaza and dismantling the apartheid system that oppresses Palestinians unifies so many different struggles, you’ve all seen it. For freedom and justice at home and abroad.
[…]
I know it can feel overwhelmingly bleak some times — you feel helpless — imagine me in Congress. We have watched for the very first time all of us, in our lifetimes, a live-streamed genocide on our phones for nearly two years. We have been lied to — gaslit by a Democratic president and now a Republican president. Both parties vote time and time again to fund one of the worst crimes in history.
But I need you to understand this — and believe it, because I’m there in the front seat watching — outside of the decaying halls of the empire in Washington, D.C., we are winning. They [Congress] are scared. They are scared! They send me videos and messages of people protesting in front of their district offices, people showing up at their town halls, and I was like, “We’re not all related, I don’t know why you’re sending it to me. Those are fellow Americans that may not share my faith or ethnicity showing up. Maybe you should meet with them and listen to them and not AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group]. They elected you.”
Real change doesn’t come from the cowards and warmongers in Congress. It comes from the streets, it comes from all of us mobilizing and seizing the power to resist and fight back. Every town hall they hold, somebody is showing up, asking, “Why is the United States funding a genocide? Why haven’t you, my representative in Congress, done anything to stop it?”
Sources
About Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. https://tlaib.house.gov/about. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
Canary Mission. https://canarymission.org/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
“Details & FAQs.” People’s Conference for Palestine • 2025, https://peoplesconferenceforpalestine.org/about-conference. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
“Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” United States Department of State, https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
“Israel Has Committed Genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission Finds.” United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 16 Sept. 2025, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds.
“Israel’s Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Continues Unabated despite Ceasefire.” Amnesty International, 27 Nov. 2025, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/11/israels-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza-continues-unabated-despite-ceasefire/.
Press. https://tlaib.house.gov/press?utm_source. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
“Program.” People’s Conference for Palestine • 2025, https://peoplesconferenceforpalestine.org/scheduledescription. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
Saul, Stephanie. “A Mysterious Group Says Its Mission Is to Expose Antisemitic Students.” The New York Times, 1 Apr. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/israel-gaza-student-protests-canary-mission.html.
“Why Was Palestinian Pride Song Removed from Spotify?” Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/24/why-was-a-palestinian-song-removed-from-spotify. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.
