[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 98 (Tuesday, June 11, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S4006]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Nova Music Festival Exhibition

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, last Friday, I had the opportunity to 
visit the Nova exhibit in New York City, downtown on Wall Street.
  The exhibit documents what happened on October 7. Thousands of 
beautiful young people gathered, as the Sun was setting, at a music 
festival. When you go into the exhibit, the first thing you see is 
thousands of young people dancing, embracing each other, and as happy 
as can be--young people, beautiful, in the prime of their lives, the 
Sun shining on them as it was setting--only to realize what had 
happened.
  The rest of the exhibit documents the brutal murder of these young 
people--innocent, happy, young people with so much of their lives in 
front of them. We see vicious Hamas terrorists machine-gunning, 
brutalizing, and we hear interviews that are done by the families and 
those who were there.
  So it was a wrenching experience, the contrast--this exhibit was so 
well done--of those beautiful young people, happily enjoying life and 
then knowing that hundreds of them would be slain brutally and scores 
of them would be kidnapped by terrorists, running away in fear.
  What was even worse--or at least adding salt into the wound--was that 
just a day or two after I visited the exhibit, protesters gathered 
outside the exhibit, chanting repugnant anti-Semitic phrases, donning 
banners that read: ``Long Live October 7th,'' and ``The Zionists are 
not Jews and not humans.'' How low can you go?
  Having visited the exhibit and seeing those young people, then 
knowing and seeing on film what happened to them at the vicious hands 
of Hamas, and then having people come outside and protest and say 
``Long Live October 7th''; ``The Zionists are not Jews and not 
humans''--how repugnant, how despicable, how terribly unnerving that 
humanity could sink that low.
  It is the lowest of low for anyone to protest an exhibit dedicated to 
honoring the memory of precious lives that were brutally murdered by 
Hamas. It is sick that anyone should show up at an exhibit like this to 
protest.
  The protest and the vitriolic rhetoric outside the Nova exhibit were 
nothing short of despicable, inhumane, and anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism, 
like what occurred outside the Nova Music Festival Exhibition, has no 
place in our city, in our State, or in America.