[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13627]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      THE CANCER OF ANTI-SEMITISM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Jeffries) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JEFFRIES. Mr. Speaker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, 
Junior, once insightfully and eloquently observed that injustice 
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
  In the wake of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, there 
has been a disturbing outbreak of the cancer of anti-Semitism in many 
parts of the world.
  In France, there have been firebombs directed at synagogues, a radio 
station, and a library, amongst other incidents that have taken place 
in a country which is home to the third-largest Jewish community in the 
world.
  In Germany, there has been hate speech permeating rally after rally 
all throughout the country, including at one where the chant was: 
``Hamas. Hamas. Jews to the gas.'' This is disturbing language in any 
location, but it is particularly disturbing given the context of what 
we know occurred in Germany.
  In England, there has been an epidemic of violent crime directed at 
the Jewish community, an exponential increase rivaled in recent times 
only by a similar outbreak of hate crime that took place in 2009 during 
the last conflict in that region.
  Now, in a civil society, reasonable people should be able to disagree 
without being disagreeable, but anti-Semitism is not a legitimate form 
of criticism. It is a cancer that needs to be stamped out in the same 
way that racism and sexism and homophobia--whenever and wherever it 
might be found--need to be crushed to the ground.
  I urge this Congress to speak out to condemn and to do everything 
possible to eradicate this outbreak. As Dr. King observed, injustice 
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

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