[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 94 (Tuesday, June 3, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3197-S3198]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        Boulder, Colorado Attack

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, on June 1, the Boulder chapter of Run for 
Their Lives gathered at the Pearl Street Mall for their solemn weekly 
routine. Every week since Hamas's October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, 
they have shown up to march peacefully in solidarity with the hostages 
that Hamas kidnapped and continues to hold, over 600 days after that 
fateful day. They come to sing songs, tell stories, and read the names 
of hostages to affirm for them and for us and for the world that those 
hostages have not been forgotten, that they never will be forgotten.
  June 1 started like any other early-summer Boulder Sunday--cool and 
clear and promising the kind of bluebird day we love in Colorado.
  The group gathered on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot for 
their memorial march. One man, however, was thinking only of violence 
and hate. Amid his yells of ``End Zionists,'' he unleashed a makeshift 
flamethrower and launched Molotov cocktails to burn the marchers. He 
inflicted his terror directly on at least 12 innocent people, including 
a Holocaust survivor in her late eighties who survived the unfathomable 
war in Europe only to face anti-Semitic evil once again--only this time 
in the United States.
  If there is any doubt that this was an anti-Semitic hate crime and an 
act of terror, the attacker has told investigators that ``he wanted to 
kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.'' He said he 
specifically targeted this group and that he researched and planned the 
attack for more than a year.
  He did not have some intellectual point that he was trying to make 
about Israel's politics. He was not trying to improve the lives of 
Palestinians. He simply wanted to kill Jews by burning them in the most 
painful way possible, and he knew where to find them--at the Pearl 
Street Mall, marching peacefully on behalf of hostages a terrorist 
group stole from their families.
  America's Founders built this country on the tenets of religious 
freedom and tolerance. In 1790, George Washington wrote to Rhode 
Island's Jewish community that the America he was building would give 
``to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.'' This letter 
affirmed that the Jewish people had a place in the United States--a 
rare refuge amid Europe's thousand-year pogrom.
  The United States, like all countries, has never always lived up to 
our lofty ideals, but it is our commitment to trying, to striving to 
become the city on the hill we proclaim to be that has long made this 
country a beacon to the world and different from almost all other 
countries in the world. That is why my mother immigrated here rather 
than somewhere else in Europe or the Western Hemisphere. It is why the 
world's weary dreamers still give up everything they have to seek a 
better life in the United States rather than crossing the Gobi Desert 
for China or the Eurasian Steppe for Russia.
  But in recent years, American anti-Semitism has reached unprecedented 
levels. The Anti-Defamation League tracked over 9,300 anti-Semitic 
incidents across the United States last year--the highest number in 46 
years of tracking. In 2024, anti-Semites made bomb threats against and 
vandalized synagogues, including in Colorado. They assaulted 
congregants at Jewish institutions. They targeted Jewish students with 
anti-Semitic threats. They protested Israeli policy and Zionism at 
synagogues as if American Jews are responsible for decisions made by a 
foreign government thousands of miles away.
  American anti-Semitism tends to spike when Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict flares up, such as following Hamas's May 2021 and October 2023 
attacks. But we cannot forget that anti-Semitism is the world's oldest 
hatred. It long predates the Holocaust, let alone the October 7 or the 
recent DC and Boulder attacks.
  As Ukrainian Jewish author Vasily Grossman--the first journalist to 
see the Nazi death camp Treblinka--wrote in the mid-20th century, 
``Antisemitism has been as strong in the age of atomic reactors and 
computers as in the age of oil-lamps, sailing-boats, and spinning-
wheels.''
  Anti-Semitism--even American anti-Semitism--is an ancient prejudice 
indeed; it is not some kind of knee-jerk response to Israeli policy.
  Anti-Semites in America do not aim to make profound points or 
philosophical points about Israel by throwing Molotov cocktails at 
elderly Coloradans or gunning down a young couple leaving an event 
about Middle East peacekeeping in our Nation's Capital. No. These anti-
Semites use events in the Middle East as an excuse to express their 
latent anti-Semitism, their medieval hatred of Jews, who they blame for 
some swath of society's ills. They want to harm Jews, to add more 
tragedy to the family histories of the people whose collective 
chronicle is already overstocked with victims, to say the least.
  The Boulder attack, the recent DC shooting, and the thousands of 
anti-Semitic incidents across the United States over the last few years 
are a direct result of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has been left 
unchecked.
  Even before this attack, American Jews wondered whether they should 
hide their Star of David necklaces before leaving the house, whether 
Friday Shabbat service will be safe, and whether their synagogues will 
have to hire still more security officials.
  This omnipresent fear of anti-Semitic violence makes it impossible 
for Jews to feel safe in a non-Jewish America and in a non-Jewish 
world. And this fear produces behaviors like hiding one's Star of David 
or avoiding Jewish events on a college campus where a dean says the 
school can't guarantee Jewish students' safety. That amounts to what 
the historian Simon Schama has called a ``passive deprivation of basic 
civil rights.''

[[Page S3198]]

  Yet how else are American Jews supposed to react when American anti-
Semitism has reached record levels? When a terrorist massacres 
congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue? When elderly women in Boulder, 
CO, can't march on behalf of innocent hostages without being targeted 
by fire?
  It is long past time that all American political and community 
leaders come together to affirm that this fear is unacceptable and that 
we must fight together the anti-Semitic hate behind it. We must use our 
voices and our power, whether in the Halls of Congress or in our own 
communities, to counter anti-Semitism in both words and action. We must 
speak up because we know the dangers of failing to do so. We must stand 
with the Jewish community for freedom of speech and religion and 
against fear, because as Grossman knew and as he wrote, ``life can be 
defined as freedom. Life is freedom.'' And ``freedom is the fundamental 
principle of life.''
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.