Schiff, Ricketts introduce bill targeting group they say was involved in Oct. 7 attack
The Accountability for Terrorist Perpetrators of October 7th Act, also introduced last year by Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), calls for sanctions to be put in place by the president against the Popular Resistance Committees group.
The senators said in their bill that the Popular Resistance Committees took place in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that started the recent war in Gaza and 'regularly carried out terror attacks against Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians.'
'The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) is the third-largest terrorist organization in Gaza and another puppet of Iran,' Ricketts said in a Tuesday statement.
'Despite decades of attacks against Americans and Israelis, including on October 7th, the PRC has yet to be properly sanctioned for its barbarism. This bill will help hold accountable every terrorist that participated in the October 7th attacks,' he added.
Among the sanctions called for in the bill are sanctions targeting property transactions and visa status.
'For years, the Popular Resistance Committees have carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians,' Schiff also said in the Tuesday release. 'They were willing and cruel participants with Hamas during the horrific October 7th massacre, killing innocent Israelis and taking and holding hostages after that terrible attack.'
Sherman, Kustoff, McCaul and Schneider were joined by Reps. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) in their reintroduction of the bill on the House side Tuesday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
9 minutes ago
- The Hill
Colleges must speak up for their Chinese students
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said all the right things last week after Hong Kong issued arrest warrants for 19 pro-democracy activists in other countries, including in the U.S. 'The extraterritorial targeting of Hong Kongers who are exercising their fundamental freedoms is a form of transnational oppression,' Rubio declared in a statement. 'We will not tolerate the Hong Kong government's attempts to apply its national security laws to silence or intimidate Americans or anyone on U.S. soil.' But we already tolerate the transnational oppression of one large group on our soil: Chinese students. And for the most part, our universities have kept silent about that. That's because of the billions of dollars that Chinese students bring to American colleges, of course. We're already facing an expected decline in Chinese enrollment because of the Trump administration's threats against international students, which higher-education leaders have rightly condemned. But if we really cared about those students — and not just their tuition fees — we would also speak out against the Chinese government's extraterritorial targeting of their fundamental freedoms. Anything less makes us look petty, scared and small. In a report issued last year — titled 'On my campus, I am afraid' — Amnesty International showed how Chinese and Hong Kong students in the U.S. and Europe faced surveillance and intimidation from Chinese authorities. Students reported being photographed and followed at protests, and that their families back home had been harassed. At Georgetown, for example, a Chinese law student who handed out pamphlets denouncing China's 'zero-COVID' policies was videotaped by members of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, an organization sponsored by the Chinese government. They told him that the pictures would be sent to security officials in China. And soon after that, his family was interrogated and warned that they could face penalties if he continued to speak out. None of this is news, unfortunately. In 2021, ProPublica reported that Chinese intelligence agents were using local informants to threaten and harass students in America. Some Chinese students said they avoided taking courses with other students from their country, because they did not know who was working for the government — and who might report on them. And in 2020, when COVID forced universities to move online, the Wall Street Journal revealed that some professors had told Chinese students that they wouldn't be evaluated on class participation. The faculty didn't want their students to feel the need to speak up and risk getting on the wrong side of Chinese security officials, who were likely monitoring them on Zoom. 'There is no way I can say to my students, 'You can say whatever you want on the phone call and you are totally free and safe,'' one Harvard professor admitted. But most of our university leaders are keeping quiet about the matter. They don't want to take any risks, either, with so much money at stake. A welcome exception is Purdue University, which denounced Chinese spying after ProPublica revealed that one of its students was harassed by security agents for posting a letter about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. That's a taboo topic in China, which has prohibited public discussion and commemoration of the event. 'Any student found to have reported another student to any foreign entity for exercising their freedom of speech or belief will be subject to significant sanction,' declared Mitch Daniels, Purdue's president at the time. 'We regret that we were unaware at the time of these events and had to learn of them from national sources,' Daniels added, referring to the 2021 ProPublica report. The rest of us have no excuse, especially now. Everything we have learned over the last four years confirms the same fact: China is intimidating students at our institutions. And so is the Trump administration, of course. It has arrested and deported international students who made pro-Palestinian comments. And it has been screening the social media accounts of student visa applicants to find 'any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.' Nobody knows what that means, so applicants have been scrubbing their accounts of material about Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and anything else that might put them in the administration's crosshairs. To me, that sounds more like China than America. Our most important founding principle is freedom of expression. And we are flouting it by harassing our international students, even as we accuse them of being hostile to it. But we can't make a persuasive case against Trump's assault on freedom if we ignore the Chinese attacks on it. Anticipating that many international students won't be allowed to come here, some universities — including my own — are creating online courses and programs to serve them. That's a great gesture, but it also leaves the students even more vulnerable to harassment by internet snoops back home. And that's why we have to speak up for the students and make it clear that we won't tolerate intimidation of them, just as Rubio said. Thomas Jefferson — who knew something about America's founding principles — swore 'eternal hostility against every form of tyranny.' He didn't care where it came from. Neither should we.
The Hill
9 minutes ago
- The Hill
Slotkin says she would have voted to block arms sales to Israel
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said Thursday that she would have voted to block arms sales to Israel over hunger in Gaza after missing a series of Senate votes Wednesday night to appear on Stephen Colbert's show. The Michigan senator said she was worried about the lack of food and medicine entering Gaza, and that 'images of emaciated children are hard to turn away from.' 'Should similar votes on offensive weapons come up in the future, I will take them on a case-by-case basis, with the hope of important humanitarian course corrections,' she wrote in a lengthy statement on X. 'While the leaders of Hamas deserve what they're getting in response to October 7, and Israel — like any other country in the world — has the right to defend itself, that doesn't include letting children go hungry.' The resolutions, sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), would have blocked more than $675 million in weapons sales to Israel, and barred another transfer of tens of thousands of assault rifles. They were resoundingly defeated in the Senate, although a record number of Democrats — more than half the caucus — voted in favor. The votes came amidst growing worry in the Democratic caucus over what the United Nations termed 'mounting evidence of famine and widespread starvation' in Gaza, where Israel's war is nearing its two-year mark. President Trump has also expressed concern with the situation, acknowledging earlier this week that there was 'real starvation' in the territory. Slotkin, who is Jewish, served three tours in Iraq as a CIA analyst in the early 2000s. She said in her statement that her experience in the Middle East showed her that aid could be safely distributed in complex war zones. '[E]ven in the most violent years of the war, the U.S. still had the responsibility to facilitate humanitarian supplies into places like Fallujah,' she wrote. 'And militaries that can pull off dangerous and complex operations overseas can also ensure aid is safely distributed in occupied areas.' Slotkin also said that the conduct of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had significantly undermined the country's standing among American lawmakers, writing that he had threatened 'the longstanding bipartisan consensus that have helped keep Israel safe since its inception.' Still, Slotkin appeared to garner criticism from fellow Michigander Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D), the only Palestinian-American in Congress. 'Shame on every senator who voted to continue arming the Israeli apartheid regime or didn't even have the courage to show up and vote,' the representative wrote on X. Michigan is home to one of the largest populations of Arab Americans in the country and was the epicenter of backlash during the 2024 election against the Biden administration's support of Israel.
Miami Herald
9 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Perceptions on who faces discrimination in US have changed, poll finds. See how
Americans' perceptions of discrimination in the United States are different now than four years ago — with a new group being recognized as facing the most discrimination, a poll found. Immigrants without legal status are now being perceived by the public as experiencing more discrimination than any other group in the U.S., and the number of Americans who said Asian people and Black people are being discriminated against has decreased significantly since 2021, according to a July 31 Associated Press-NORC poll. The survey of 1,437 U.S. adults was taken July 10-14 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. While the earlier poll came on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic — a time when many were worried about incidents of violence against Asian Americans because of the pandemic's reported origin — and nearly a year after the death of George Floyd while communities were still holding sweeping demonstrations against racial inequality in the country, the recent poll comes as President Donald Trump's administration continues an aggressive immigration crackdown. More than 60,000 immigrants in the U.S. illegally, including some who do not have criminal records, were arrested within the first 100 days of Trump's second term, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data. Immigrant advocacy groups have complained and filed lawsuits against the administration in cases involving the deportation of U.S. citizens or people married to U.S. citizens, along with the mass deportations, McClatchy News reported. A majority of Americans, 58%, said they think immigrants without legal status face 'a great deal' or 'quite a bit' of discrimination — a shift from four years ago when Black Americans were seen as the group experiencing the most discrimination, according to the poll. Twenty-six percent of respondents said immigrants living illegally in the U.S. face a 'moderate' amount of discrimination, while 15% said they face 'only a little' or 'none at all,' per the poll. A plurality of respondents, 42%, said immigrants living in the U.S. with legal status face a lot of discrimination, the poll found. Black people and Hispanic people were also seen by Americans as facing higher amounts of discrimination, with 45% and 44%, respectively, saying that was the case, according to the poll. However, the number of respondents who said Black people face a lot of discrimination dropped significantly: 15 percentage points since a previous poll in April 2021, researchers said. The number of people who said Asian Americans were experiencing a 'great deal of' discrimination also considerably decreased from 45% in 2021 to 32% in 2025, according to the poll. Perceptions of discrimination among Hispanic people and white people also saw a small drop since 2021, researchers said.
