A wave of antisemitic attacks nationwide brought bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill about the growing nature of the problem, but lawmakers put forward different diagnoses on the causes and solutions.
The deadly shooting of two Israeli Embassy staffers in the District, the fiery attack on a pro-Israel marchers in Boulder, Colorado, and the arson at the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, were roundly condemned by Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary oversight subcommittee.
Representatives on both sides flagged the surge in antisemitism as a potential harbinger of more hate-related issues to come.
“Let me be crystal clear: antisemitism is not just a threat to one group. It is a warning sign of a greater societal breakdown,” said Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, the New Jersey Republican who chairs the subcommittee. “Persecution of the Jewish people is not a new phenomenon. It’s one of the oldest forms of hate prone to civilization.”
FBI statistics show antisemitic incidents shot up 63% from 2022 to 2023, the same year the Islamist terror group Hamas killed more than 1,200 civilians in southern Israel and took 250 hostage.
The suspect in the District of Columbia’s fatal double shooting last month shouted “Free Palestine” upon being arrested, according to police. The phrase is a common refrain among anti-Israel protesters who oppose the Jewish state’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Charging documents said the man accused of lighting the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on fire admitted to “harboring hatred” toward Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat, because of “what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”
And court filings said the suspect in the Colorado attack told authorities he “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.”
But pinpointing the source of this spike proved less simple.
GOP lawmakers assigned part of the blame on the Biden administration’s lax policing of illegal immigration, which they said allowed the Colorado attack suspect to overstay a visa and spend a year plotting his violent outburst.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, is accused of injuring a dozen people when he threw incendiary devices and used a makeshift flamethrower on the crowd.
He faces federal hate crime charges, as well as a bevy of felonies at the state level, in the incident.
Rep. Barry Moore, Alabama Republican, asked the witnesses whether former President Biden’s de facto open border contributed to allowing people with radical beliefs into the country, such as the Colorado suspect.
“We’ve had probably 20 million or more come into our country,” testified Debra Cooper, the chief of digital activism at the activist group End Jew Hatred. “We don’t know if they’re terrorists, we don’t know who they are. We don’t know if they’re bringing drugs. Don’t know if they’re trafficking children or women. An open border is probably, in large part, why we’re here today.”
Rep. Bob Onder, Missouri Republican, probed how the media’s reporting on the attackers’ motives also factored into the increase in antisemitism.
Dan Schneider, the vice president of free speech at the Media Research Center, said the Associated Press and its position as the standard for style and tone in the journalism industry have played a part.
Mr. Schneider used his opening testimony to discuss how the AP glosses over the harm being caused by allowing people to “throw around the term ‘genocide’ in inappropriate ways that smear both Jews in America and the Israeli government.”
When answering Mr. Onder’s questions, he further singled out journalists from the Washington Post and CNN who made dismissive remarks about antisemitic incidents, and said NPR and PBS — both news outlets that receive government funding — run stories with “antisemitic tropes.”
Democrats, meanwhile, singled out the Trump administration’s aggressive downsizing of the federal government for removing key anti-hate efforts.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Maryland Democrat, said President Trump “thoroughly destroyed the infrastructure within our government to detect, prevent and prosecute domestic extremism, hate crimes and antisemitic attacks.”
Rep. Hank Johnson further accused the president of “talking a big game” while cutting funding for anti-terrorism initiatives and pausing security grants for synagogues and other religious sites.
“The Trump administration and MAGA Republicans use these empty words because their focus on antisemitism is not actually about the safety of Jews,” the Georgia Democrat said. “Instead, they are cynically weaponizing antisemitism to justify anti-immigrant and anti-First Amendment actions that make Jews less safe.”
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, Florida Democrat, said the rise in antisemitism is not discriminating between left-wing and right-wing targets.
He shared how police averted an attempt on his life last fall when they arrested an armed man near his home who had a manifesto featuring antisemitic writings.
Mr. Moskowitz, who is Jewish, added that the president’s flouting of a law to shut down social media app TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese government, is helping spread antisemitic messaging that reaches the most impressionable Americans.
“We can talk about the legacy media all day long, but that’s not where we’re losing the youth of this country,” Mr. Moskowitz said.
“We’re losing them on TikTok, which is owned by a foreign country that the president now has extended beyond what the law has allowed. I don’t want TikTok to go away, but I want it to get out of the hands of the Chinese. They are doing the Nazi playbook. They are dividing us,” he said.
