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Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, on June 1, the Boulder chapter of Run for Their Lives gathered at the Pearl Street Mall for their solemn weekly routine. Every week since Hamas's October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, they have shown up to march peacefully in solidarity with the hostages that Hamas kidnapped and continues to hold, over 600 days after that fateful day. They come to sing songs, tell stories, and read the names of hostages to affirm for them and for us and for the world that those hostages have not been forgotten, that they never will be forgotten.

June 1 started like any other early-summer Boulder Sunday--cool and clear and promising the kind of bluebird day we love in Colorado.

The group gathered on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot for their memorial march. One man, however, was thinking only of violence and hate. Amid his yells of ``End Zionists,'' he unleashed a makeshift flamethrower and launched Molotov cocktails to burn the marchers. He inflicted his terror directly on at least 12 innocent people, including a Holocaust survivor in her late eighties who survived the unfathomable war in Europe only to face anti-Semitic evil once again--only this time in the United States.

If there is any doubt that this was an anti-Semitic hate crime and an act of terror, the attacker has told investigators that ``he wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.'' He said he specifically targeted this group and that he researched and planned the attack for more than a year.

He did not have some intellectual point that he was trying to make about Israel's politics. He was not trying to improve the lives of Palestinians. He simply wanted to kill Jews by burning them in the most painful way possible, and he knew where to find them--at the Pearl Street Mall, marching peacefully on behalf of hostages a terrorist group stole from their families.

America's Founders built this country on the tenets of religious freedom and tolerance. In 1790, George Washington wrote to Rhode Island's Jewish community that the America he was building would give ``to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.'' This letter affirmed that the Jewish people had a place in the United States--a rare refuge amid Europe's thousand-year pogrom.

The United States, like all countries, has never always lived up to our lofty ideals, but it is our commitment to trying, to striving to become the city on the hill we proclaim to be that has long made this country a beacon to the world and different from almost all other countries in the world. That is why my mother immigrated here rather than somewhere else in Europe or the Western Hemisphere. It is why the world's weary dreamers still give up everything they have to seek a better life in the United States rather than crossing the Gobi Desert for China or the Eurasian Steppe for Russia.

But in recent years, American anti-Semitism has reached unprecedented levels. The Anti-Defamation League tracked over 9,300 anti-Semitic incidents across the United States last year--the highest number in 46 years of tracking. In 2024, anti-Semites made bomb threats against and vandalized synagogues, including in Colorado. They assaulted congregants at Jewish institutions. They targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic threats. They protested Israeli policy and Zionism at synagogues as if American Jews are responsible for decisions made by a foreign government thousands of miles away.

American anti-Semitism tends to spike when Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares up, such as following Hamas's May 2021 and October 2023 attacks. But we cannot forget that anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred. It long predates the Holocaust, let alone the October 7 or the recent DC and Boulder attacks.

As Ukrainian Jewish author Vasily Grossman--the first journalist to see the Nazi death camp Treblinka--wrote in the mid-20th century, ``Antisemitism has been as strong in the age of atomic reactors and computers as in the age of oil-lamps, sailing-boats, and spinning- wheels.''

Anti-Semitism--even American anti-Semitism--is an ancient prejudice indeed; it is not some kind of knee-jerk response to Israeli policy.

Anti-Semites in America do not aim to make profound points or philosophical points about Israel by throwing Molotov cocktails at elderly Coloradans or gunning down a young couple leaving an event about Middle East peacekeeping in our Nation's Capital. No. These anti- Semites use events in the Middle East as an excuse to express their latent anti-Semitism, their medieval hatred of Jews, who they blame for some swath of society's ills. They want to harm Jews, to add more tragedy to the family histories of the people whose collective chronicle is already overstocked with victims, to say the least.

The Boulder attack, the recent DC shooting, and the thousands of anti-Semitic incidents across the United States over the last few years are a direct result of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has been left unchecked.

Even before this attack, American Jews wondered whether they should hide their Star of David necklaces before leaving the house, whether Friday Shabbat service will be safe, and whether their synagogues will have to hire still more security officials.

This omnipresent fear of anti-Semitic violence makes it impossible for Jews to feel safe in a non-Jewish America and in a non-Jewish world. And this fear produces behaviors like hiding one's Star of David or avoiding Jewish events on a college campus where a dean says the school can't guarantee Jewish students' safety. That amounts to what the historian Simon Schama has called a ``passive deprivation of basic civil rights.''

Yet how else are American Jews supposed to react when American anti- Semitism has reached record levels? When a terrorist massacres congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue? When elderly women in Boulder, CO, can't march on behalf of innocent hostages without being targeted by fire?

It is long past time that all American political and community leaders come together to affirm that this fear is unacceptable and that we must fight together the anti-Semitic hate behind it. We must use our voices and our power, whether in the Halls of Congress or in our own communities, to counter anti-Semitism in both words and action. We must speak up because we know the dangers of failing to do so. We must stand with the Jewish community for freedom of speech and religion and against fear, because as Grossman knew and as he wrote, ``life can be defined as freedom.
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