WASHINGTON — A month after he was the lone senator to oppose a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is blaming Democratic lawmakers’ rhetoric about Israel for attacks on Jewish Americans.
After a string of anti-Semitic assaults in New York and other cities, Hawley has promised to offer a Senate resolution “to condemn the poisonous rhetoric by the Left and the media about Israel that has helped inspire violence against Jewish people across the world.”
In an interview on Fox News Monday morning, Hawley blamed rhetoric by Democratic members of Congress for violence against Jewish Americans.
“When you say things like calling Benjamin Netanyahu an ethnonationalist on the floor of the United States Congress, when you call Israel an apartheid state, which Democrat members of Congress have done on the floor of the United States Congress, that’s incendiary rhetoric … and we’ve had almost 200 incidents of violence reported now against Jewish Americans — again that’s just reported,” Hawley told host Brian Kilmeade, citing a figure from the Anti-Defamation League.
“We don’t know what else is out there. That’s too many, that’s too much and this rhetoric is contributing to it,” said Hawley, who called on President Joe Biden to urge members of his party to refrain from such comments.
Israel has faced international criticism, including from some of the most left-leaning members of Congress, for air strikes on Gaza. The strikes, in retaliation for rocket fire from Hamas, have resulted in hundreds of Palestinian civilian casualties, including women and children.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, said in a Senate floor speech last week that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism.”
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, condemned violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I believe that we should be mourning the loss of Israeli life, but we should also be mourning the loss of Palestinian lives,” Sanders said.
Missouri Democratic Rep. Cori Bush and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” last week.
Hawley’s contention that comments from these lawmakers have fueled anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S. comes after he was the only senator to vote against a bill intended to curb attacks against Asian Americans, which have increased during COVID-19 pandemic.
The bill, which was signed into law last week by Biden, instructs the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services to issue a guidance on “best practices to mitigate racially discriminatory language in describing the COVID–19 pandemic.”
Hawley said on Twitter last month that he opposed the bill because it “turns the federal government into the speech police — gives government sweeping authority to decide what counts as offensive speech and then monitor it.”
Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono, the bill’s sponsor, said at the time that Hawley chose “not to stand with AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) community.”
Hawley’s office said there was no inconsistency between his opposition to Hirono’s anti-hate crime bill on free speech grounds and his introduction of the resolution linking violence to criticism of Israel.
“Josh treats all people with dignity and respect regardless of race or creed,” said Hawley spokeswoman Abigail Marone. “The Democrats’ anti-Semitic attacks are shameful and must be condemned.”
Gavriela Geller, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Bureau and American Jewish Committee in Kansas City, said in an email that Hawley “is correct that there are a few specific members of the Democratic party whose incendiary rhetoric regarding Israel has absolutely been contributing to this issue and putting Jews in danger.”
However, she said that neither party has a monopoly on anti-Semitism and making it “into a partisan issue to score political points does a dangerous disservice to our community and the threats we face.”
Geller praised the new anti-hate crime law as a bipartisan solution that was vocally supported by the Jewish community. The legislation includes grant funding for local police departments to track and investigate hate crimes.
Rabbi Doug Alpert, president of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City, rejected said the Jewish community does not need Hawley as a spokesman.
“Anything that Hawley does is for his own benefit and no one else’s. This is the Josh Hawley who talked about the ‘cosmopolitan elite,’” said Alpert, referencing a controversy in which Hawley faced allegations used anti-Semitic dog whistles in a 2019 speech.
Alpert also pointed to the photograph of Hawley pumping his fist to the crowd outside the Capitol shortly before the Jan. 6 riot, which was perpetrated by a mob that included people neo-Nazi paraphernalia.
“Bernie Sanders is trying to make a pathway for peace and we can agree or disagree with that path, but I don’t question his intent,” Alpert said. “And I completely question Hawley’s.”
Hawley’s resolution blaming colleagues’ rhetoric for violence comes after several months during which he has vehemently rejected the notion that his decision to object to Biden’s Electoral College victory played a role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“One of the largest publishers in the nation cancelled this book, citing my ‘role’ in the events of January 6,” Hawley writes in the preface of his new book.
“My sin? Not encouraging the riot, as the publisher certainly knew. I fiercely condemned the violence and the thugs who perpetrated it. … No, my sin was to raise an objection (against) one state during the electoral college certification process, thereby triggering a congressional debate, precisely as permitted by the law.”
