‘Genocide With Our Bombs’: Ben & Jerry’s Co-Founder Clashes With Chris Cuomo Over Gaza War After Arrest
Ben Cohen, the co-founder of ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s, told NewsNation that his protest and subsequent arrest at a hearing with Robert F. Kennedy on Wednesday “didn’t really have anything to do” with the secretary of Health and Human Services.
After NewsNation host Chris Cuomo asked, “What is it about Bobby Kennedy that you believe is worth getting arrested for?” Cohen replied:
It didn’t really have anything to do with Bobby Kennedy. What it had to do with is that Congress has been cutting money for Medicaid, health care for poor kids, and they’re using the money they save doing that to bomb other poor kids in Gaza, and now, you know, there’s this– they’re halting all the food aid that’s going in, so they’re starving the people of Gaza.
“Yes, what’s happening in Gaza is horrible,” responded Cuomo. “They just agreed to restart the aid, and I have been critical of the stopping of aid and how necessary it is, but don’t you have to give some space to the fact that Hamas, a terror organization, is still holding five dozen people just about and that they need to give them back if they want to have high ground, don’t they?”
Cohen declared, “Yes, the hostages need to be returned, but that’s no justification to kill tens of thousands of children, old people, mothers, fathers, you know, people just like us.”
Cuomo argued, “Well just like us, some, yes. Others are aligned with a terror organization. I’m not talking about the kids, I’m talking about the people who are on the ground who are adults in Gaza, and if it were America and they had 59 of our people and they were a terror organization, do you think the United States would be doing anything different than Israel?”
“Boy, I would hope they’d be doing something different because what’s going on [in Gaza] right now is genocide with our bombs,” replied Cohen. “The American people have become complicit in the genocide that Israel is engaging in, and if it weren’t for us providing the bombs, they wouldn’t be able to do it.”
After Cuomo argued that Israel was not committing a genocide in Gaza, claiming, “We’ve seen what that looks like in other situations, it doesn’t look like this,” Cohen shot back, “Boy, it sure looks like it to me.”
“All the hospitals have been destroyed, all the universities have been destroyed, the schools have been destroyed, the housing has been destroyed, and tens of thousands of people have been killed,” he noted. “You can’t tell me that they’re all members of Hamas.”
Cohen was one of several protesters dragged out of a hearing with Kennedy and arrested on Wednesday.
After one of the protesters was removed for shouting, “RFK kills people with AIDS!” Cohen yelled, “Congress pays for bombs that kills kids in Gaza!”
Watch above via NewsNation.
