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.
I am not arguing in bad faith. The fact that you think my claims are unbelievable is part of the problem, you’re clearly uneducated on the situation along with the vast majority of Palestinians supporters. Here’s the sources.
71% support for the Oct 7th attack as of March 2024 both in Gaza and the West bank https://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Poll 91 English press release 20 March 2024.pdf
PCPSR is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an entirely Palestinian organization.
Support for the attack has deteriorated since then, but they were very happy with it until the real consequences started.
As for the funding…
Everyone should take FDD with a MASSIVE grain of salt. It’s a far-right neoconservative think-tank.
Edit: polling looks legit. I’ll review more closely.
Edit 2: Turns out, Hamas falsified its support in polling conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
The October 7th attack was seen as a retaliation for a wave of settler attacks all summer on multiple Palestinian towns and the invasion of Al Aqsa. It doesn’t necessarily mean support for Hamas. Same way Israelis may support bombing Gaza but not necessarily supporting Netanyahu.
They still support an act of mass violence against civilians, so it makes them hypocritical when they condemn the current mass violence against their own civilians.
No, and you’re making a helluva lot of assumptions.
Roughly 1/3 of the deaths on October 7 were of soldiers. Many of the rest were friendly fire. Israel claims that such a ratio of civilian deaths is “acceptable” in wartime. The Israeli government frequently claims that there are no civilians in Gaza, and many Palestinians say the same about Israelis. What’s galling is that Israelis have been pushing these excuses for violence for years and are outraged that they’re now being used against them.
If you can’t see the parallels then you’re hopeless. For the record, it’s unacceptable that either side is doing this.
Outraged that they’re now being used against them? Israel spent literally tens of billions of dollars on a missile defence system to reduce the effect of rocket attacks. They’ve been pissed off at Palestinians and other terrorist groups for attacking them for a very long time, in fact literally since the day after they declared independence and got invaded by 5 of the neighboring countries.
Your logic in no way helps your argument. If it’s actually a war that both sides want, then what the fuck are we doing complaining about civilian deaths on one side being lopsided? Should bigger countries always have to deal with smaller groups with kid gloves on? That’s just stupid, wars aren’t about being fair.
You can want them to stop fighting, but both of them want to be fighting right now. You aren’t going to pull them apart like in a bar fight, there’s no way to physically separate these two groups.
And there you go, going back to the mindless false narrative.
Israel went to war against neighboring countries because those countries were upset by the active ethnic cleansing that Israel was engaging in. Ever heard of Deir Yassin massacre and Ben Gurion’s orders to the military to evict all Arabs from the cities? And yet Israel still takes their frustrations over the war out on Palestinians who didn’t take part in it.
Your clinging to false ahistorical narratives in no way helps your argument. Like I said, you’re hopeless since you can’t seem to learn from history and instead look for excuses.
This fight wasn’t inevitable, the Israeli extremists made it happen; killing Rabin and rejecting multiple peace deals for the last 30 years. Netanyahu and Likud wanted this fight.
Israel went to war because they were invaded by 5 other countries who weren’t happy with the lines the UN agreed upon.
This fight wasn’t just inevitable, it’s been an ongoing fight for thousands of years, Arabs have been attacking Jewish people for literally thousands of years in that region.
When the Ottoman empire collapsed because they supported the wrong side in the war, the victors got to decide what happened with it. You don’t get to lose a war, then just go back to peaceful enjoyment of your land like nothing happened. Wars have consequences. Maybe Palestinians should have done something about that before allowing their country to join world war one.
Even Germany lost land to it’s neighbors during the wars. I don’t see anyone here complaining about that land being colonized.
False and propaganda. The reality is that Arabs and Jews coexisted in Jerusalem for thousands of years, its only recently within the last century that there was any great animosity. The “Golden Age of Judaism” happened under Arab rule, as they were protected and flourished compared to being driven out of the rest of Europe during their dark ages. That’s where scholars like Maimonides came from.
I’m not going to waste time debunking every facet of your false narrative. If you genuinely want to learn about it ask any history professor; because you’re telling solely the Zionist narrative despite its historical inaccuracies.
Not false, not propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1517_Safed_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1834_looting_of_Safed
Interesting, do you have any support numbers that is more recent? 6 months ago is a long time
I looked into this a bit more and two points:
Does it really matter? They supported it for at least a few months after it happened. They were happy that Hamas killed a thousand Israeli civilians and took hostages.
That being said, I mentioned it has dropped because of the consequences they faced, the latest numbers came out yesterday or the day before. It’s now down to 39% support for the attack.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-poll-finds-big-drop-support-oct-7-attack-2024-09-17/
Even the IDF disagrees with you, those numbers were faked by Hamas to make themselves look more popular than they were.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/seized-hamas-documents-show-terror-group-inflated-its-support-rates-idf-says/
The IDF can’t be trusted to tell you the sky is blue. Even if I support Israel’s right to fight I’m well aware of how they operate from a propaganda standpoint.
They even say they don’t think the Pollsters were working with Hamas, but that Hamas was somehow clandestinely changing the results anyways. Suuure they are. The group that can barely function is somehow tampering with the results of the polls without the pollster noticing.
“The IDF said the documents do not prove that PCPSR was cooperating with Hamas, but rather that the terror group was conducting clandestine actions to fraudulently influence the results of the polls.”
All the IDF says is “we found confidential documents that show they changed the numbers,” do you know how easy that would be to fake?
About as easy as it is to fake poll entries. The IDF also has a reason to want people to believe Hamas is very popular. It is a lot better of a look that all the civilians dying are super pro Hamas, than if Hamas only had a minority support.