I attended Congressman Adam Smith's town hall event last Sunday, in which he sat on a stage and briefly addressed a small but angry crowd. He canceled the event when some members of the audience became verbally disruptive over his denial of the genocide in Gaza. Now he compares his own constituents to MAGA rioters who stormed the US Capitol. 

The town hall was scheduled at a Bellevue high school on a rare sunny weekend. There was a police presence at the event, and the atmosphere was charged with anxiety, but it was not exactly hostile. As the diverse crowd took their seats, many holding signs and banners with messages like “Ceasefire” and “Tell Congress to Stop Funding Genocide,” Congressman Smith sat alone on the stage looking tired and irritable. 

He began the town hall by scolding his 9th District constituents as if he were a middle-school math teacher, lecturing us about the need for civil discourse. As soon as he mentioned Gaza, a pro-peace activist in the crowd demanded to know if he would condemn the genocide. He told the woman that she was wrong, that what’s happening in Gaza now wasn't a genocide. He went on to tell us that we weren’t really concerned about Gaza or human rights at all. Our purpose and goal, he informed us, was to “shove your opinions down other people’s throats” and “to insult me.” This accusation seemed like an odd way to demonstrate civil discourse, considering the number of Muslims and Palestinian-Americans in the crowd and in his congressional district. 

As the boos and shouts of “shame! shame!” rained down on him from the audience, Smith revealed his plan from the beginning, a classic example of “cry-bullying.” He announced with a sulk that he would have to cancel this town hall event “to respect the majority of people in the room.” He briefly addressed a few people who approached him onstage, including a local high-school student who confronted him about Palestine. Sullen and pouting after that interaction, Smith turned around and walked off the stage.  

The full cynicism of his actions became clear in a PR statement from his office, in which he called us extremists and compared us to the January 6 rioters. 

In other words, for Congressman Smith, our demanding that he acknowledge, at the bare minimum, what the International Court of Justice found to be a plausible claim is tantamount to denying an election. Protesting genocide by disrupting a pro-war Congressman's speaking event is equal to storming the Capitol. Demanding truth and justice is an extremist viewpoint. 

Now, I do understand the pressure he’s under from his campaign donors. The top contributors to his campaign this year are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and defense contractors such as General Dynamics. Denying the war crimes of the US and Israel while taking money from lobbyists who profit from those crimes would be called a “conflict of interest” in my line of work, and Smith’s role as the top-ranking Democrat in the House Armed Services Committee means that his fingerprints are all over US policy on this matter. But we all know how Congress works. That’s probably why Congress has one of the lowest approval ratings ever, with 83% of the American public stating that they disapprove of the way the body is handling its job.   

There’s an argument that these disruptive protest tactics are counterproductive, and I understand that some people wanted to hear Smith speak without the disruption. Some of the audience became angry, and at one point an older lady grabbed me roughly by the ears and screamed at me to shut up. I’m a middle-aged white male professional, and I’m sure I was obnoxious. But the disruption wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about Adam Smith’s moderate Democrat supporters. It was about the man in the crowd who kept shouting that his family was unable to collect the bodies of his relatives from the rubble for burial. He was told to sit down and shut up. A young friend sitting next to me shouted, “Congressman Smith, I wrote you a letter when I was 13 years old. If I was 13 today living in Gaza, would you have me killed?”

Whether or not one agrees that “genocide” is the correct word to describe the deliberate starving of children, the annihilation of entire families, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, we as US citizens are complicit. We should all be mad as hell. For Smith to tell his constituents that we are extremists, that we are similar to election-deniers for using “intimidation tactics” at an open public speaking event is outrageous. He should be ashamed of himself for not only his moral cowardice on the issue of the Gaza genocide, but for cynically using our outrage as a ploy for attention in his press release. 

Forest Hoag is an attorney in public service in Seattle, Washington.Â