Anti-Israel Protester Interrupts Ted Cruz At Committee Hearing on Hate Crimes

An angry anti-Israel demonstrator on Tuesday interrupted Senator Ted Cruz during a committee hearing on hate crimes and profanely questioned why the Texas Republican was spending his speaking time on antisemitism.

Cruz spoke at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on hate crimes and was criticizing Democratic committee members for refusing to hold a hearing solely focused on antisemitism when a protester began shouting over him.

“Every Republican member of this committee asked the chairman to hold a hearing on antisemitism in February, and yet, we don’t get a hearing on antisemitism. We get a hearing generically on hate, because this administration — and this is the kind of anger and hate that is encouraged,” Cruz said, as the man began shouting.

“F**king Jews and the Israelis, talk about the 40,000. Talk about all these people. Why is it about antisemitism?” the man appeared to shout as police escorted him out of the hearing room. The disruption took place roughly two hours into the committee hearing.

The 40,000 number the demonstrator mentioned appears to be a reference to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry’s unverified statistics on the number of Palestinians who have been killed in the terror group’s ongoing war with Israel. Anti-Israel critics often point to those statistics, despite their unreliability and statistically improbable linear pattern.

The health ministry’s death toll also fails to distinguish between the deaths of civilians that Hamas places in the crossfire and the deaths of Hamas fighters and operatives during the war.

“So we now have a demonstration of antisemitism. We have a demonstration of the hate” Cruz said of the protester, resuming his round of questioning. He pointed out the Biden administration’s refusal to cut off  federal funding to universities where antisemitism is rampant and noted that nobody has been indicted for funding anti-Israel tent encampments on college campuses nationwide.

Anti-Israel encampments sprang up at college campuses last spring after Columbia University’s high-profile encampment inspired left-wing students nationwide to protest their school’s financial relationship with companies that do business in Israel. Students also protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel and some expressed outright support for eliminating the Jewish state.

Over the past year, antisemitic incidents and alleged hate crimes have surged following Hamas’s mass slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7.

Hamas continues to hold hostages taken captive during the massacre, and recently killed six of them as Israeli forces were closing in. One of the dead hostages was Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was captured at the Nova music festival and had his arm blown off by a grenade explosion.