Republican Rep. Has Truly Unhinged Response to Campus Protests

The Gaza solidarity encampments have actually made progress at several universities across the nation, pushing school administrators to meet with student protest leaders to consider divestment away from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But Representative Nancy Mace doesn’t see any of that—instead, she insisted that the protesters were just a bunch of “terrorist-loving kids” who “hate our country so much.”

“They should take their terrorist flags, they should go to Gaza in their crop tops and nose rings and see how long they would last, because Hamas would chop off their heads, throw them off the roof of a building, before they ever had the chance to tell them their pronouns,” Mace told Fox News Thursday afternoon.

“I want to know where the adults are on campus, putting a stop to this kind of violence,” the South Carolina lawmaker continued. “They are preventing Jewish students from going to class. They are trashing these college campuses. This is not what America stands for. We stand for freedom and liberty of all people, but this is what Biden, this is what the left and Democrats … created this mess, and they need to own it.”

But the violent police response that Mace seems to be endorsing to break up the protests has already happened at a slew of other institutions, and it didn’t exactly paint the United States as an international bastion of freedom or free speech. Instead, the actions taken by police at Columbia University on Tuesday shocked human rights and press freedom advocates around the globe after authorities ripped apart a peaceful protest, fired a gun inside an administrative building occupied by protesters, and threatened to arrest the dean of one of the country’s top journalism schools for shielding the media’s First Amendment right to cover the event.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, police allowed pro-Israel counterprotesters to violently attack an otherwise peaceful encampment set up by UCLA students in support of Gaza.

The international criminal court at The Hague is currently weighing whether to charge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes, as more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 77,000  injured in the conflict—the majority of whom were women and children, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry.