Taxpayers have been funding radicals who hate Israel and America for a generation, thanks to Congress, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said Monday.

Roy spoke as part of a panel during a Heritage Foundation event, “Future of the U.S.-Israel Alliance at 75,” where he talked about Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel and the steps his fellow lawmakers need to take to defeat Islamists and radicals. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“The response should be overwhelming force, not just to send a message but to win,” Roy said. “Israel cannot back off and America cannot back off in its support of Israel, period.”

Roy said wars are messy and costly, a reality that should be lost on no one. He pointed out the violence of World War II, in which the United States heavily bombed both Japan and Germany.

Yet “there is a cost to allowing terrorist leadership of your country, he said, referring to Hamas as the ruling party of the Gaza Strip, from where it attacked Israel. “There’s a cost to it, and that’s what we are seeing in Gaza.“

The Texas congressman addressed the calls for a cease-fire in the latest Israel-Hamas war. 

“There are human beings in the crossfire, but let’s remember that, let’s start with the human beings who were the targets, predominantly Jewish, Israeli citizens—some Americans—who were the targets of [the] terroristic, barbaric actions of Hamas,” Roy said.

Roy stressed that American leaders have made the situation worse by continuing to fund the same people who ultimately spark terrorist attacks. He spoke about his legislation to defund and make accountable the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA.

He said that he will continue to push for defunding the agency as well as the United Nations Human Rights Council, “which is an absurd entity on its face.”

It’s ridiculous that the United States continues to fund explicitly anti-American organizations, Roy said.

“If you can walk out of this room with at least one thing from my participation in this panel, [it] is why the hell do we fund the things that are destroying our country and undermining our freedom and own national security?” he said.

Roy connected this problem to what’s at stake in the continuing battle over selection of the next speaker of the House: fundamentally changing how Washington works.

“We have for my entire life, and I’m 51 years old, [for] my entire life we have been funding the very things we campaign against. We campaign against them, but we fund them,” Roy said. “We fund the United Nations, we fund UNRWA, we fund the Human Rights Council, we fund all of these entities, direct funding, to the Palestinians—which goes directly to Hamas.”

It’s not just the funding of international entities that is a problem, the Texas Republican said.

“This is all connected, by the way, to the funding of higher education,” he said.

Roy said there is a huge problem with pro-Hamas radicals on college campuses, saying: “You’re funding it, with your tax dollars and our borrowed dollars, you’re funding it”—to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

What American politicians continue to fund are institutions that teach young people to hate America and hate Western values and principles, the lawmaker said.

Roy pointed to his alma mater, the University of Virginia, calling it an “embarrassment.” 

“Students for Justice in Palestine released a statement at UVA in support of Palestinian liberation, calling the brutal attack on Israel, quote, ‘a step toward a free Palestine,’” Roy said. “A professor at UVA offered extra credit for students attending a discussion about how to, quote, ‘stand in solidarity with Palestinians resisting occupation.’”

Roy noted that this is a professor at a taxpayer-funded university that was founded by Thomas Jefferson.

All UVA did following Hamas’ attack on Israel was to send around an article on social media saying that campus personnel in Israel were not in immediate danger, Roy said. There was no “moral clarity” at all, he said.

The Texas Republican pointed to an email sent by University of Florida President Ben Sasse as the right kind of statement to make following such a terrorist attack.

“Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother,” Sasse, the former U.S. senator from Nebraska, said in his email.

Such moral clarity, Roy said, is what we should demand from taxpayer-funded universities.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is changing things for the better in his state, Roy said. But “every Republican governor in the nation should be ashamed they are not doing the same thing,” he said.

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