Oral Testimony on “Desecrating Old Glory”

Hearing

“Desecrating Old Glory: Investigating How the Pro-Hamas Protests Turned National Park Service Land into a Violent Disgrace”

House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

Scott Walter’s Testimony 
Written Testimony: HTML
Oral Testimony: Video and HTML (below)
Full Subcommittee Hearing (House website)

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Oral Testimony

before

House Committee on Natural Resources
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

Rep. Paul Gosar, Chairman

Scott Walter
President, Capital Research Center

December 10, 2024

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Chairman Gosar, Vice Chairman Collins, Ranking Member Stansbury, distinguished members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the honor of testifying. I’m president of the Capital Research Center, where we study radical activists.

I applaud your attention to the outrages perpetrated on Park Service land by groups who support violence in the Middle East and America.

Free speech is precious. It’s both the mark of a free country and also the means of our self-government. But speech is not violence, and violence is not speech, though radicals often make those claims.[1]

The extremists who rioted in July exalt violence, teach techniques of violence, and justify violence. They attack the very possibility of free government, which requires that citizens and government officials be able to speak and debate freely as they try to achieve their desired policies through rational argument, rather than by using violence to coerce those who disagree with them.

But the radicals you’re investigating despise free governments and democracies like America and Israel. They love tyrannies that rule by violence, like Mao’s Communist China, the mullahs’ Iranian theocracy, and Lenin’s Soviet Union. They follow Mao’s diktat: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”[2]

Without violence, these extremists cannot achieve the dreams they graffitied onto Columbus Circle monuments: “US Empire will burn”; “Israel will fall.” They spraypainted, “Hamas is comin’,”[3]  which means these radicals want Americans to suffer the bloody violence Hamas perpetrates on Israelis.

As I testified to you in April,[4] America faces a convergence of extremist groups. Take, for instance, radical environmentalists like Interior Secretary Haaland’s friends and family at Pueblo Action Alliance, a group that not only exalts violence but joined in a riotous protest at the Interior Department that resulted in dozens of arrests and sent a policeman to the hospital.[5] These environmental activists also support radical Palestinian activists, who turn around and support other radical groups ostensibly dedicated to climate activism, anti-police activism, and more.

In radicals’ minds, all particular causes are part of a single cause: the revolt of the oppressed against the oppressor. As a 1960s American radical put it, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” Similarly, the protestors this July chanted, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”[6] But to endorse intifada is to endorse violence. Israel’s last intifada did not result in any effort to persuade others through rational speech and peaceful protest. It resulted in thousands of dead Palestinians and Israelis.

Of the 250+ endorsers of the July riot in D.C., my colleague Ryan Mauro identified 90 extremist groups that publicly support Hamas’s terrorism or identify as Marxist, communist, or anarchist revolutionaries.

These radicals work closely with foreign tyrannies opposed to America. For example, Mauro observed that ANSWER, the leader of July’s riot, “signed a declaration of the Commit­tee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran that backs Iran’s direct attack on Israel and explicitly chooses the side of the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ consisting of the government of Syria, Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist groups including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Yemen-based Houthis and Iran-backed militias in Iraq who are trying to kill U.S. troops.”[7] One more bloodthirsty tyranny ANSWER supports is Putin’s Russia, which ANSWER favors over the “US and NATO.”[8]

I do not say that every critic of American or Israeli policy has succumbed to this nihilistic lust for violence and tyranny, and I emphatically do say that peaceful protests and vigorous debates over foreign policy are entirely legitimate in our free country. But this committee, and the National Park Service that has the responsibility of overseeing protests in the nation’s capital, should continue investigating what went badly wrong in July and determine how to prevent similar misdeeds in the future.

Thank you.

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Notes

[1] See Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “Why It’s a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence: A Claim Increasingly Heard on Campus Will Make Them More Anxious and More Willing to Justify Physical Harm,” The Atlantic, July 18, 2017, https://archive.is/GzJRc.

[2] Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung: Mao Tsetung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972; San Francisco: China Books),  https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780835123884/page/60/mode/2up.

[3] Jessica Costescu, “Pro-Hamas Agitators Burn American Flag and Foist Palestinian Flag over Union Station as Bibi Addresses Congress,” Free Beacon, July 24, 2024, https://freebeacon.com/israel/pro-hamas-agitators-burn-american-flag-wave-terrorist-flags-clash-with-police-as-israeli-pm-addresses-congress/ (underlining in original graffiti.)

[4] Scott Walter, “Written Testimony on Extreme Environmental Activist Groups,” Capital Research Center, April 30, 2024, https://capitalresearch.org/article/written-testimony-on-extreme-environmental-activist-groups/.

[5] Paul Farrell, “Interior Secretary’s Daughter Is a High-Ranking Member of a Radical Group Responsible for the Violent Protest at Their Mom’s Department in DC That Was ‘Reminiscent of January 6,’” Daily Mail, February 4, 2023, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11713413/Interior-secretarys-daughter-Deb-Haaland-high-ranking-member-radical-environmentalist-group.html.

[6] Costescu, “Pro-Hamas Agitators Burn American Flag.”

[7] Ryan Mauro, Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement. Capital Research Center, October 9, 2024, https://capitalresearch.org/article/marching-toward-violence-the-domestic-anti-israeli-protest-movement/.

[8] See Committee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran. “CASI Statement: No War on Iran, Stand with Resistance,” April 18, 2024, https://solidarityiran.org/2024/04/18/casi-statement-no-war-on-iran-stand-with-resistance/.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/oral-testimony-on-desecrating-old-glory/