Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, compared the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to the current wave of antisemitism sweeping the country’s college campuses during a hearing on Wednesday.
At a congressional hearing titled “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” which intended to look at the elite school’s problems with responding to antisemitism, Scott immediately dived into comparing the significant rise of antisemitism on college campuses across the country to the rally at which white supremacists and many others violently clashed near the University of Virginia seven years ago.
Scott played a curated video of the Charlottesville rally, saying, “What we saw on the video was not an isolated event. It is the byproduct of this country’s centuries-long history of white supremacy and antisemitism.”
The Virginia Democrat went on to move attention away from the antisemitism at the center of the hearing, mentioning, “racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and other forms of hate.”
After Scott’s display, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the committee, called out Democrats’ constant use of the Unite the Right rally to draw equivalency.
“It’s unfortunate that referencing the tragedy in Charlottesville has become a repeated talking point at committee events intended to address the wave of antisemitism occurring nationwide today,” Foxx said.
The North Carolina Republican explained that she and other Republicans condemned those events in 2017, but despite Democratic calls to launch House Education and Workforce Committee investigations into it, UVA faculty and students had no relation to the rally — unlike the current displays of antisemitism.
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“The episode to which Congressman Scott refers was not organized or attended by university students but was instead held by a group of white supremacists who trespassed at the university. There was no cause or jurisdiction for the committee to open a broad investigation or one into the University of Virginia,” Foxx explained, noting that “there was also no pattern of such events on campuses across the nation to address.”
“In contrast at Columbia, and numerous other schools, there has been a pattern of unapproved antisemitic events, organized and attended by university students and staff that have denied Jewish students their right to a safe learning environment, and a failure by university administrators to respond appropriately to that denial,” she concluded. “We will appropriately return our focus to that current crisis”