Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called out anti-Semitism and the anti-Israel BDS movement, in addition to accusing a think tank for supporting hatred against Jews.
In a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Cotton recalled the anti-Semitic attacks last month in New York, including the Dec. 28 machete attack on the seventh night of Hanukkah at a home and prayer hall known as Rabbi Rottenberg’s Shul in Monsey, where five people were injured.
“These heinous attacks are part of a growing storm of anti-Semitism that has made Jewish Americans fearful to worship and walk the streets in their own communities,” he said.
He also mentioned the attack at the Jersey City kosher supermarket where three people, two of them Chassidic Jews, were killed on Dec. 10; and noted the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 worshippers were killed—the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
“Anti-Semitism is the ancient hatred, but today can appear in new disguises,” said Cotton. “It festers on the Internet message boards and social media.”
The senator went on to call out a think tank called the Quincy Institute, backed by the unlikely billionaire duo of George Soros and Charles Koch.
“It festers on Internet message boards and social media. It festers in Washington think tanks like the Quincy Institute, an isolationist blame America first money pit for so-called ‘scholars’ who’ve written that American foreign policy could be fixed if only it were rid of the malign influence of Jewish money,” said Cotton. “It festers even on elite college campuses, which incubate the radical Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement—a movement to wage economic warfare against the Jewish state.”
The Quincy Institute was founded in 2019 to call for an end to U.S. military intervention. Academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, deemed by many to be anti-Israel, are non-resident scholars there.
Cotton also criticized New York’s new bail-reform law that took effect on Jan. 1, calling it “a gift to criminals just in time for the holidays.”
“How enraging must it be for New York’s Jews to suffer constant anti-Semitic attacks and know the perpetrators will slide through a revolving door from the lockup back into their communities,” he said.
The Democratic-controlled New York state legislature is reportedly considering changing the new measure.
“We stand with cops, not criminals,” said Cotton. “And we stand with the Jewish people against the ancient hatred that stalks them even to this day.”
“America liberated Nazi death camps in World War II, and we’ve served as a haven for persecuted Jews for longer than that. We must not allow the bigotry so common in Europe and the middle east to spread here to our free shores,” he continued. “And we must not allow our city streets to be plunged into the lawlessness of the not-so-distant past.”