Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., repeatedly suggested a leading Arab American activist is a Hamas supporter when she testified Tuesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes, and he told her she should hide her “head in a bag.”
The activist, Maya Berry, said repeatedly that she did not support Hamas and was “disappointed” by the minuteslong exchange toward the end of a hearing called “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America.”
“You are the executive director of the Arab American Institute, are you not?” Kennedy said at the beginning of the exchange. She said she was and agreed with Kennedy that she is a Democratic activist.
“You support Hamas, do you not?” Kennedy asked, referring to the militant group behind the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. The question prompted gasps and surprised laughs from the audience.
“Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question, because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today in a very effective way,” Berry responded. Kennedy then cut her off and insisted he needed a yes-or-no answer.
Uh… Sorry Palestinians don’t want to be occupied and ethnically cleansed from their land?
Palestinians support attacking civilians in Israel. That makes it a war.
Yes, because Israel insists on colonizing Palestine. Zionism has always been a settler colonialist project.
How exactly do you “colonize” a region that your ancestors been on for 2000+ years?
Remember, the first massive waves of Jewish people moving to Israel literally came there from concentration camps, refugee camps, and other displaced locations because of what happened around the world wars.
Of course it was a settler project, around 6 million Jewish people were killed in the holocaust, you think they all wanted to move back in next to the neighbors that had ratted them out to the government? They got absolutely fucked, and the UN had given them their ancestral homeland back when it broke up the country that had been in that region and lost in the great war.