Cruz: Standing for Israel was right thing to do

A conference last week in Washington was supposed to raise the profile of minority Christian communities in the Islamic world. Instead, it made headlines for a standoff between audience members and keynote speaker Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Cruz walked off the stage mid-speech after hecklers booed him for expressing his support for Israel. I caught up with Cruz this past weekend in Atlanta and asked him about the controversy. Here is an excerpt from that conversation.

Senator, a couple of days ago, you left the stage. Some said you were booed off the stage at the event. Do you have any regrets about that? The event was heartbreaking, what happened there. It was a gala dinner in Washington that was put together to defend Christians who are being persecuted, who are being murdered throughout the Middle East. This has been a passion of mine for a long time. For many, many months, I have been endeavoring over and over again to try to highlight the persecution of Christians, the pastors who are imprisoned, the Christians who are being literally crucified and beheaded for their faith.

I came to this dinner. It was roughly a thousand Christians, predominantly from the Middle East, from Syria, from Lebanon. Before I arrived, a news story broke that a couple of the speakers who had been at the event were prominent supporters of Hezbollah, the terrorists, and had spoken in strong support of them. We had a debate internally in the office about what to do when we discovered that some—not all, but some—of the speakers had been and remain defenders of Hezbollah. There were some in the office who advocated that we should cancel, that I should simply not go, but I didn’t think that would be the right thing to do. I didn’t want to not go and to not do what I could to shine the light on the persecution of Christians, which is absolutely unspeakable. The degree to which the mainstream media is ignoring it is utterly unacceptable. Secondly, I didn’t want to cede the discussion to the extremes. If we simply stay away and allow those who are defending radical Islamic terrorist groups to dominate the conversation, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do.

Do you think the hecklers you encountered were the ringers, the Hezbollah mouthpieces? Or were they representative of the group as a whole? Unfortunately, it was more than just a handful. I would say out of the thousand people there, about 40 percent were applauding what I said in terms of standing with the Jews, of standing with Israel, but it was about 20 percent of the crowd that was angrily booing. It was a couple of hundred people; it wasn’t one or two. It was angry enough that I ended up putting aside my written remarks that I had for that evening and just speaking from the heart to the people who were booing and heckling.

Again, do you regret the way you handled that? Do you think that was the best way you could have handled it under those circumstances? What I regret is that there was such an outpouring of hatred and anti-Semitism. It truly surprised me. Look, I anticipated that there were one or two radical speakers who I didn’t expect would be happy with what I was saying. What I didn’t understand was that a significant minority of the attendees there reflected the same bitter hatred towards Israel and the Jews. That surprised me. It disappointed me, but at the end of the day, we are called as Christians and Americans to speak the truth. That is what I endeavored to do.

Did you fear for your safety that night? I did not. At the end of the day, my concern was simply to speak for the truth.

Finally, what response have you gotten since then? The response has been very mixed. I have received a great deal of encouragement, both within the Christian community and the Jewish community, people saying simply thank you for standing up and speaking out and speaking the truth. Then, among one particular community, which is sort of the elite, intellectual Washington, D.C., crowd, there has been considerable criticism. … A number of the critics, a number of the folks in the media have suggested, for example, that my saying what I did distracted from the plight of persecuted Christians.

What I find interesting is almost to a person, the people writing those columns have never or virtually never spoken of persecuted Christians in any other context. I have spoken literally hundreds of times all over the country. This is a passion. I’ve been on the Senate floor, and I intend to keep highlighting this persecution. I will say it does seem interesting that the only time at least some of these writers seem to care about persecuted Christians is when it furthers an anti-Israel narrative for them. That starts to suggest that maybe their motivation is not exactly what they’re saying.

There are others who have suggested that I should have either canceled or gone to the event and not spoken of Israel and the Jews. I think both of those would have been the wrong approach. … I don’t agree with those Washington, D.C., and New York media critics, who think we should hide from speaking out against Hezbollah, against radical Islamic terrorism, or that we should only speak out when it impacts Christians, but we should not speak out when it impacts Jews. We have an obligation to speak the truth in every circumstance. That’s what I tried to the best of my ability to do.

Listen to the conversation between Warren Cole Smith and Sen. Ted Cruz on The World and Everything in It: