Rashida Tlaib set to become first Muslim woman in US Congress
Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib comfortably won her Democratic primary election in the US state of Michigan.
Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat, is photographed outside the Michigan Capitol in Lansing in 2008. The Michigan primary victory of Tlaib, who is expected to become the first Muslim woman and Palestinian-American to serve in the U.S Congress, is rippling across the Middle East. In the West Bank village where Tlaib's mother was born, residents are greeting the news with a mixture of pride and hope that she will take on a US administration widely seen as hostile to the Palestinian cause.
Rashida Tlaib, a mother of two and daughter of Palestinian immigrants once detained for disrupting a Donald Trump speech, made history on Wednesday after setting herself up to become the first Muslim woman in US Congress.
The 42-year-old former social worker won a Democratic primary in Detroit safe seat.
With no Republican or third-party candidates, she is positioned to enter the House of Representatives after November midterm elections.
Her defeat of five other candidates tees her up to become the first Muslim woman in Congress, 12 years after Minnesota's Keith Ellison became the first Muslim in the US House of Representatives.
She would also be the first Palestinian-American woman elected to the House. Representative Andre Carson, elected in 2008 and from Indiana, is the only other Muslim currently in Congress.
TRT World's Leone Lakhani reports from Washington.
The oldest of 14 children born to a family of Palestinian immigrants, Tlaib is a Detroit native. Her father worked at a Ford Motor Company plant in the city, home of the US car industry.
Tlaib was also the first Muslim woman elected to the Michigan state assembly, serving from 2009-14. She has a law degree and has worked as an attorney for social justice.
Sally Howell, director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has known her for 25 years, described Tlaib is "tough, capable and hard-working" and "very charismatic."
'Bat signal'
She has called Trump's election a "bat signal" for all women and described her run as very personal, motivated by her sons' anxiety about being Muslims amid increased Islamophobia in America.
In August 2016, Tlaib interrupted a Trump address in Detroit, telling him "our children deserve better" and imploring him to read the US constitution, before being grabbed by security guards and ejected from the hall.
Three other Muslim women, in Arizona, Massachusetts and Minnesota, still in congressional races of their own, will now be hoping that a Tlaib bounce will also help blaze a way for them.
Family celebrates her victory
Sharing smiles and hugs, the extended family of Tlaib celebrated her election victory on Wednesday in the courtyard of their West Bank house.
Tlaib's grandmother, aunts and uncles welcomed neighbours in the village of Beit Ur al Fauqa in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, who gathered near their single-story stone house beside a grove of olive trees to cong ratulate them on the historic win.
"This makes us proud – as the Tlaib family, residents of Beit Ur, as Palestinians, as Arabs and as Muslims, that a simple girl reaches such a position," said her uncle, Bassam Tlaib.
Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 Middle East War in a move never recognised by the international community.
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