WASHINGTON ― When Maya Berry was called in as an expert to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, she thought she’d be sharing new data on hate crimes against Arab Americans and Jewish Americans since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Instead, Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, a national nonpartisan civil rights advocacy organization, was subjected to some of the most offensive and bigoted attacks by Republican senators the committee has seen in recent years.
Her experience is part of a bigger, years-long problem with this committee, a purportedly storied body responsible for major legislation and lifetime appointments to federal courts, including the Supreme Court: Some of its GOP members have ditched basic decorum and opted for disgusting attacks on the people coming before the panel. And as Republicans berated Berry, Democrats on the panel did little to back up a witness they had called to testify.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) cut off Berry the moment she started engaging with him. As he pressed panelists to answer foreign policy questions about Israel, Berry tried to pivot back to the topic of the hearing: stemming hate crimes. Graham started yelling at her.
“If you think it’s complicated to figure out that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran wants to kill all the Jews, I should not 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 from pro-Palestinian campus protests and asked Berry if each image counted as a hate crime, which is, by definition, a criminal act. As Berry tried to steer the conversation away from free speech on campuses and back to actual hate crimes, Hawley began shouting over her: “What you’re trying to do here today is wrong!”
And in an exchange that went viral and drew the most attention to this hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) used all of his allotted time to baselessly accuse Berry of supporting terrorist groups, pressing her on whether she endorses Hamas and Hezbollah. As she repeatedly said she did not and called out his blatant Islamophobia, Kennedy drew audible gasps in the crowd by finally telling her she should go “hide her head in a bag.”
Kennedy’s treatment of Berry drew widespread condemnation from Arab American groups, Jewish groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“I don’t even know what it means to put a bag on your head,” Berry, who is also the co-chair of a hate crime 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 kids warned her to stay off of social media after the hearing, but she came across a tweet with an image of her next to the image of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who had a black bag over his head.
“I never thought of that,” she said, trailing off. “I never thought the bigotry would land the way it did. … Like, it’s anti-Arab racism in the middle of a hearing about hate crimes.”
The offices of Kennedy, Hawley and Graham did not return requests for comment.
This is not what a Senate hearing is supposed to look like.
These hearings are supposed to be public conversations with top experts who spend weeks preparing and volunteer their time to share what they know, to help lawmakers make better laws to fix big problems. On the most basic level, they’re supposed to be about adults being respectful to each other and to the democratic institutions they’re fortunate to be a part of.
Tuesday’s hearing was supposed to be a conversation about policies to help stem an increase in hate crimes. In Berry’s prepared testimony, which she was able to get into only when Democrats on the committee engaged with her, she underscored how anti-Black hate crimes consistently represent most hate crimes in the U.S. She came ready to share her new data analysis showing a spike in anti-Arab and anti-Jewish hate crimes in the last quarter of 2023, tied to the Oct. 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 this panel have been doing this for years, typically with President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, all of whom have to come before this committee if and when they can be confirmed.
Since Biden took office, Republicans on this committee have been making blatantly racist, sexist, Islamophobic or otherwiseoffensive attacks on his court picks. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the panel’s chairman, has managed to get a good number of Biden’s nominees through amid the ugliness. But many who got through first had to endure inappropriate and belligerent questioning from Republicans, who have demonstrated that one of their primary goals is to generate viral video clips of themselves looking tough to share on social media.
Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), for example, have used their role on this committee to make a show of baselessly smearing a historic Muslim judicial nominee, Adeel Mangi. In a video clip Cotton pushed out on social media that now has 4.3 million views, the Arkansas Republican is seen pressing Mangi to answer foreign policy questions about Israel way outside the parameters of what potential federal judges are supposed to talk about.
The intent behind the video, presumably, is to show Cotton looking like he’s defending Israel’s war in Gaza, and Mangi, the Muslim guy, not saying much in response to his questions, creating the impression he is anti-Israel. In fact, none of this is appropriate for a judicial nomination hearing, and Cotton and Mangi both know that. But it sure makes for a buzzy video clip.
Stunningly, during Berry’s hearing on Tuesday, nobody on the committee intervened as Kennedy unleashed his Islamophobic attacks on her. Durbin did give Berry a chance to respond to the Louisianan when he was done, though.
“I regret some of the things that were said today at this hearing,” is 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 harm that Republican senators caused during Tuesday’s committee hearing ― not to her but to Jewish Americans and Arab Americans by fanning the same kind of hatred they were supposed to be working 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 are, honestly, beyond me.”
