A Senate hearing on hate-related incidents was capped off on Tuesday by a male Republican lawmaker yelling at a witness and falsely accusing her of supporting terrorism.
The strange scene played out in front of the cameras at a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which met to discuss rising rates of incidents motivated by antisemitic and Islamophobic hatreds around the United States, which have risen sharply since the conflict in Gaza began last October.
Senator John Kennedy, the committee’s top-ranking Republican, was questioning Maya Berry of the Arab American Institute when he began shouting at her that she “support[ed]” Hamas and Hezbollah.
Berry unequivocally denied both of those accusations individually, but Kennedy clearly wasn’t listening, as he repeated the Hamas accusation seconds later.
“You can’t condemn UNRWA, and you can’t condemn Hamas!” the Louisiana Republican yelled, referring to the UN-led organization bound to supply aid to the Palestinian territories; a report from the organization suggested that some of its employees may have had knowledge or involvement in the October 7 attack on Israel last year.
.@SenJohnKennedy: You support Hamas, do you not?@AAIUSA‘s Maya Berry: Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support…You asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country? pic.twitter.com/h7WU3ePLOu
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 17, 2024
Adding to the confusion of the moment: a male protester in the back of the room began shouting at the senator while he was interrogating the panel’s invited guest, and committee chair Dick Durbin banged the gavel several times in response.
Kennedy is no stranger to such moments and has sought to turn committee hearings into spectacles before. In one hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022, he utilized his question time to attempt to bait Garland into describing what percentage of US police officers he thought harbored racist beliefs. He has also displayed a tendency towards personal insults, and has labeled Vice President Kamala Harris a “ding-dong” and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “dumb.”
But his latest remarks come as his party is already under fire for ginning up conspiracies about legal migrants from Haiti residing in Springfield, Ohio, and after a six-year-old child was stabbed dozens of times in an apparent crazed anti-Muslim attack in Illinois last year.
His antics have earned him criticism before; just last year he was denounced as “vulgar” and “racist” by the government of Mexico after he suggested that, “figuratively speaking,” the people of Mexico would be “eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback [Steakhouse]” were it not for US foreign aid.
Those comments earned him a tough line of questioning from Fox’s Neil Cavuto, who questioned if he had gone over to the so-called “loon” wing of the Republican Party — a term which Kennedy himself had coined.
The Louisiana senator’s tirade on Tuesday was denounced by Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, as well as others on social media such as journalist and Zeteo founder Medhi Hasan, who labeled Kennedy a bigot.
“The racist, Islamophobic tropes used by many Members of Congress are intended to suppress our voices and incite violence against us. It’s disgusting how many of my colleagues are silent when hate is directed like this against Arabs and Muslims,” wrote Tlaib in a post.