Protests At University of Wisconsin At Milwaukee

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to comment on a controversy affecting the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee this past week.

Wisconsin at Milwaukee, like many universities in America, has been the site of bizarre protests in favor of Hamas. Milwaukee is the second largest university in the State of Wisconsin. While the response to these protests by universities around the country can best be described as pathetic, Milwaukee is one of the worst.

Israel has suffered an attack almost unprecedented in its brutality in which Hamas and its supporters reveled in the horrific deaths of civilians, including young children. Israel's response can best be described as very measured, particularly given that Hamas has decided to hide among hospitals and other civilian locations.

Certainly, Israel's response was more measured than our response during World War II when you look at what was done to Tokyo and Dresden, so by comparison, there is no comparison.

Hamas could end this war tomorrow if they would surrender, show Israel its tunnels and its arms, and surrender the hostages. They are entirely responsible for allowing this war to go on.

The university's statement to the protesters appears to blame Israel. Even before the October attacks, it should have been obvious who wears the white hats here.

Israel is a modern, prosperous, and tolerant country in which even Muslims can build mosques and are allowed to vote. In Gaza, from childhood on, children are raised to hate Jews. People from Thailand, the Philippines, and Latin America--non-Jewish people--flow to Israel to live and work there.

Hamas' leadership, meanwhile, takes their foreign aid from Europe and lives in Qatar and Turkiye. The descendants of Yasser Arafat himself don't want to live in Gaza. They live in Paris.

Even with this, UWM feels they should side with Hamas. The university has tried recently to amend their position, but they still display a moral equivalence in which they can't bring themselves to say there is a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, in this conflict. Their bias shows further in that their first impulse was to meet only with representatives of the protesters and not with the broader community, this despite the fact that public opinion polls consistently show the American public as a whole, including presumably the taxpayers who fund the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, have no problem figuring out who is good and who is evil.

The university should apologize for developing their own foreign policy and spend some time with the broader community to learn what the vast majority of Americans and Wisconsinites think.

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