Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), the ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, used his opening statement at a hearing about antisemitism on campus to complain about the 2017 Charlottesville riot.
Rather than responding to the issue at hand — specifically, the testimony of Columbia University President Nemat Shafik and numerous other Columbia officials about rampant antisemitism on campus — Scott brought out an old Democratic Party favorite.
Scott played a video of the Charlottesville riot of August 2017, including the infamous torchlight parade of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and scenes of clashes in the streets the following day.
The riot spawned false claims that then-President Donald Trump had sided with the rioters (whom he “condemned totally“) — the so-called “fine people hoax” — which President Joe Biden cited as his reason for running in 2020.
Scott complained that Democrats “did not have the opportunity to address this issue seven years ago” when they had brought it up before the committee.
The committee chair, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), replied that the Charlottesville riot was different from the current issue of antisemitism on campus because the Charlottesville rioters had been trespassing on the University of Virginia campus; because the faculty staff, and students of the university had not joined the rioters; and because the views of the Charlottesville rioters were not part of a broader trend repeated on many campuses, as antisemitism has become.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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