Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) criticized pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, calling them either “dumbasses” or “terrorist sympathizers” and asking the Department of Justice to look into who is funding the protest movement.
“There are two types of people here. Antisemites: If you say, ‘We are Hamas,’ and you mean it, then you are a religious Nazi. If you say, ‘We are Hamas,’ and you don’t know what Hamas is all about, you are a dumbass,” Graham said during a Fox News interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“So there are dumbasses and there are terrorist sympathizers, and how do you fix this?” he said. “Win in November.”
Graham stated that investigating the funding of pro-Palestinian protests on campus is the best way to address the issue and pledged that former President Trump would make it a top priority if reelected.
“If Donald Trump were president of the United States, his attorney general would be all over this. These college presidents would be under pressure to stop this,” he said.
The House recently passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism to review complaints of discrimination.
The bill is currently stalled in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters that there were objections from “both sides” of the aisle to moving it forward.
However, some Republicans like Graham want to further investigate the groups that are backing the protests.
Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, suggested last week that Democratic mega-donor George Soros has “funded a lot of this, stirring this all up.”
“We know he loves to put his money into upsetting people and causing situations like this,” she said on her podcast.
She did not provide any evidence that Soros is indeed funding the protests.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also recently implied that Soros or another group is behind the protests because many of the tents the demonstrators have set up on various campuses appear to be the same model.
“I think [FBI officials] need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by, I don’t know, George Soros or overseas entities,” Johnson speculated during an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill” program.
This claim was strongly criticized by House Democrats, who argued that depicting Soros, who is Jewish, as a villainous mastermind is itself an antisemitic stereotype.
“Not even 24 hours after passing a do-nothing bill under the guise of ‘fighting antisemitism,’ @SpeakerJohnson drags out one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the world,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) posted on the social platform X.
