One Democratic senator blocked a resolution on Thursday that aims to condemn antisemitic speech on college campuses amid the ongoing war in Israel.
The resolution, proposed by Republican Montana Sen. Josh Hawley, comes as pro-Palestinian protests have erupted across college campuses in the U.S. following the Iran-backed Hamas attack on Israel and invasion of towns along the Gaza border, killing at least 700 people.
“Students at Ohio State praised the heroic resistance in Gaza,” Hawley said. “Heroic — it’s now heroic — to massacre Jews in cold blood. It’s now heroic to try and carry out a genocide against Jewish people.
“Students at the University of North Carolina said it is our moral obligation to be in solidarity — no matter the pathway to liberation, their word that they choose. This includes violence,” he continued. “Calling for the death of Jewish people is not just another opinion. Calling for the genocide and celebrating the genocide of Jewish babies is not just another opinion.”
The Democrat in question, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, blocked the unanimous consent resolution, arguing that most of the protests were not violent, “as repugnant as some of them were in terms of the words.” He added that the resolution would “smear all of the students who engage in these protests,” potentially violating First Amendment rights.
“I would stand with my colleagues in standing up to hateful rhetoric, condemning antisemitism,” Van Hollen said. “But what this resolution does is not that.”
Hawley condemned the Democratic senator’s decision, calling it a “failure of moral nerve.”
“What’s happened today is one senator has blocked this body from condemning the attacks against Jewish people in Israel, Jewish Americans in this nation, and pretend that there’s some moral equivalency here between this and what the threat of the State of Israel is under,” the Republican senator said. “We have students in this country who are specifically calling for and celebrating the killing of Jews, and we can’t condemn that on the floor of the Senate.”
The attack has since prompted Israel to declare war against the terrorist group with a ruthless aerial campaign that has flattened homes, schools, medical institutions, and government buildings in the Gaza Strip.
According to IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the death toll so far has risen to 1,200 since the conflict between Israel and Hamas erupted.
