Chris Smith: “I thank the chairman for his leadership on this legislation on the issue itself; Eliot Engel, of course, who has been a…”

“I thank the chairman for his leadership on this legislation on the issue itself; Eliot Engel, of course, who has been a great friend, a part of this Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Anti-Semitism; and you, Mr. Presiding Speaker, you are one of the cosponsors. We have 83 bipartisan cosponsors, and this is an idea whose time has come. I especially want to thank Leader McCarthy for making sure the bill got to the floor today, for his leadership and strong support for it. Anti-Semitism, Mr. Speaker, is exploding. Just look around in any country in the world, look at the human rights reports that are out there, and it is a problem here in the United States as well. It is exploding. My first trip to the Soviet Union, now Russia, of course, was in 1982 on behalf of Soviet refuseniks. When I saw what that country was doing to individual Jewish men and women and families, I became committed then. I worked with Mr. Hastings on this for many, many years with the Helsinki Commission, to try to combat this ever escalating scourge of anti-Semitism. It is an age-old scourge. It is bad, and it is getting worse. There is a persistent anti-Semitism, as I think my colleagues know, that historically has manifested itself throughout European history, from pogroms in Russia, to the Dreyfus affair, to Nazism in the 1930s, and, of course, the Holocaust right up until its modern-day iterations.…”