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Floor Speech

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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.

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