WASHINGTON ― When Maya Berry was called as an expert witness to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, she thought she would be sharing new data on hate crimes against Arab and Jewish Americans since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Instead, Berry, the director of the Arab American Institute, a national, nonpartisan civil rights organization, was the victim of some of the most offensive and intolerant attacks by Republican senators the committee has seen in recent years.
Her experience is part of a larger, years-long problem with the committee, a supposedly storied body responsible for major legislation and lifetime appointments to federal courts, including the Supreme Court: Some of its GOP members have abandoned basic decorum and opted for vile attacks on the people who appear before the panel. And while Republicans rebuked Berry, Democrats on the panel did little to support a witness they had called to testify.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) interrupted Berry as she was about to engage with him. As he pressed the panelists to answer foreign policy questions about Israel, Berry tried to return to the topic of the hearing: curbing hate crimes. Graham began yelling at her.
“If you think it’s complicated to understand that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want to kill all Jews, then I don’t need to listen to anything else you have to say!” he shouted over her as she repeatedly tried to speak.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) brought posters with photos of pro-Palestinian campus protests and asked Berry whether each image was considered a hate crime, which by definition it is. a criminal actAs Berry attempted to steer the conversation away from free speech on campus and back to actual hate crimes, Hawley began shouting over her, “What you are trying to do here today is wrong!”
And in an exchange that went viral and drew most of the attention to this hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) used his allotted time to baselessly accuse Berry of supporting terrorist groups, asking her if she supported Hamas and Hezbollah. When she repeatedly said she did not and called out his blatant Islamophobia, Kennedy elicited audible gasps from the crowd by finally telling her to go “hide her head in a bag.”
Kennedy’s treatment of Berry was widely condemned by Arab-American groups, Jewish groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“I don’t even know what it means to put a bag over your head,” Berry, who also co-chairs a hate crimes task force at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of civil rights groups, told HuffPost on Wednesday. She said her children warned her to stay off social media after the hearing, but she came across a tweet with an image of her next to an image of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with a black bag over his head.
“I never thought about that,” she said, trailing off. “I never thought the bigotry would turn out like this. … It’s anti-Arab racism in the middle of a hate crimes hearing.”
The offices of Kennedy, Hawley and Graham did not respond to requests for comment.
This is not what a Senate hearing should look like.
These hearings should be public conversations with top experts who spend weeks preparing and volunteering their time to share what they know, to help lawmakers craft better laws to solve big problems. At the most basic level, they should be about adults being respectful to each other and to the democratic institutions they are fortunate enough to be a part of.
Tuesday’s hearing is supposed to be a conversation about policies to address the rise in hate crimes. In Berry’s prepared testimonyShe emphasized, which she could only address when Democrats on the committee pressed her, that anti-black hate crimes consistently make up the majority of hate crimes in the U.S. She was about to share her new data analysis showing a spike in anti-Arab and anti-Jewish hate crimes in the last quarter of 2023, linked to the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Berry is not the first Judiciary Committee witness to face this treatment. Republicans on the panel have been doing it for years, usually with President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, all of whom must appear before the committee if and when they can be confirmed.
Since Biden took office, Republicans on this committee have downright racist, sexist, Islamophobic or otherwiseoffensive attacks on his court picks. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the panel’s chairman, has managed to get a fair number of Biden’s nominees through amid the ugliness. But many who got through first have had to withstand inappropriate and aggressive questioning from Republicans who have shown that one of their primary goals is to generate viral video clips of themselves that look hard to share on social media.
For example, Republicans like Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas) have abused their role on this committee to show that they to smear without reason a historic Muslim judicial nominee, Adeel Mangi. In a video clip Cotton sent away on social media which has now been viewed 4.3 million times, the Arkansas Republican is shown pressuring Mangi to answer questions about Israel’s foreign policy that fall well outside the bounds of what potential federal judges are supposed to discuss.
The point of the video is presumably to show Cotton as if he’s defending Israel’s war in Gaza, and Mangi, the Muslim, not saying much in response to his questions, giving the impression that he’s anti-Israel. None of this is appropriate for a judicial nomination hearing, and Cotton and Mangi both know it. But it does make for a controversial video clip.
Astonishingly, no one on the committee intervened during Berry’s Tuesday hearing when Kennedy unleashed his Islamophobic attacks on her. Durbin did give Berry a chance to respond to the Louisianan when he was done.
“I regret some of the things that were said in this hearing today,” was all Durbin said at the end of the hearing. “But we are a free nation, and that’s what happens in a democracy.”
Berry told HuffPost she was “absolutely shocked” by the damage Republican senators caused during Tuesday’s committee meeting — not to her, but to Jewish Americans and Arab Americans by stoking the very kind of hatred they were meant to stop.
“It literally made both American Arabs and Jewish Americans less safe,” she said of their behavior. “It’s complete showboating for reasons that, quite frankly, are beyond me.”
