At Super Bowl media day in 2015, Seahawks star running back Marshawn Lynch famously replied to every reporter’s question with “I’m here so I don’t get fined.” For five full minutes, that’s all anybody got out of Lynch on the eve of the big game.

Today’s Senate hearing on “hate crimes” would have been more transparent had the Democrats on the committee simply repeated Lynch’s phrase every time it was their turn to talk. Although the Democrats are the majority party and therefore the hosts of today’s hearing, they made it clear they didn’t want to be there and resented the pressure to even hold such a hearing.

That’s because the pressure was actually to hold a hearing on anti-Semitism. When Democrats finally relented and agreed to hold such a hearing, they All Lives Matter’d it into oblivion by making it a generalized “hate crimes” hearing and calling only witnesses who were at odds with the Jewish victims of anti-Semitism across America’s elite university campuses. Republicans were allowed one witness, and he served as the sole voice of the put-upon campus Jew.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, the committee chair, opened the hearings this way: “Since the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, we have seen an increase in attacks on Jewish Americans, Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans.” So Jews are in the top four victims of the pogrom and its aftermath, according to Durbin. Quite the start to this morning’s festivities.

Durbin then played a video of two attacks he believed were representative of the topic: the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, which took place five years before Hamas’s attacks, and the murder of a young Palestinian boy in Illinois in mid-October.

Durbin’s seething resentment at being asked to talk about the threat of anti-Semitism was on display from one of his party’s two witnesses as well: Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute. She was made to look like a fool because she did exactly what Democrats asked her to do and said what they asked her to say. Her performance was atrocious from a moral standpoint but perfect from an “understood the assignment” perspective. Her main point was that focusing on any one group undermines the fight against all hate, a demonstrably false and frankly ridiculous belief.

But the key moment came during the witnesses’ questioning by Republican ranking member Lindsey Graham. Quoting the director of national intelligence regarding the pro-Hamas protests, Graham said: “We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protest, and even providing financial support to protesters.” He asked if any of the three witnesses doubted the veracity of that report, and no one did. Graham then asked each witness the following: “Is it Hamas’s goal to destroy the Jewish state? Is it Hezbollah’s goal to destroy the Jewish state? Is it Iran’s goal to destroy the Jewish state?”

Two of the three witnesses—Kenneth Stern and Rabbi Mark Goldfeder—answered in the affirmative. All three entities mentioned in Graham’s question, after all, have said they want to destroy the Jewish state without shame or ambiguity. Which is what made Berry’s response so odd. “I think these are complicated questions,” she said—immediately earning a shake of the head from Graham and conjuring memories of the catastrophic answer given by several college presidents when asked before Congress if genocidal anti-Semitism counts as harassment: It depends on the context.

“If you think it’s complicated to figure out that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want to kill all the Jews,” Graham responded, “I should not listen to anything else you’ve got to say. And I won’t.” And with that, Graham moved on to the next witness.

Berry was rattled. Though Graham left the hearing soon after, Berry referenced that exchange at least twice more with other senators, signaling that she’d realized how poorly her comments made her look and desperately trying to claw back some credibility.

The bad news for Berry was that she could not undo the damage. The good news was that she would eventually provide another quote that might make people forget about the first quote, if only because it was potentially even worse. Asked by Sen. Josh Hawley about the inherently violent implications of the phrase “Long live the intifada,” Berry argued for the slogan’s ambiguity. “‘Long live the intifada’ can mean different” things, she said, catching herself before she got to the word “things” but far too late to avoid the rest of the ridiculous comment, which was tailor-made for the sound-bite politics of congressional hearings.

She also defended “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for all Jews to be cleansed from the land.

It would be easy to make this all about Berry. But the real travesty of this hearing was that she was asked to appear in order to say what Senate Democrats wanted their witnesses to say. Democrats wanted this hearing to produce a watering-down of anti-Semitism and a defense of various pro-Palestinian slogans that call for a genocide of the Jewish people. And that’s what they got.

The words were spoken by Berry but summoned by Dick Durbin. And that’s how a Republican request for a hearing on anti-Semitism alone was turned by Democrats into a hearing on a laundry list of bigotry and oh-by-the-way anti-Semitism, too.

“Here’s what’s happening at this hearing: We can’t talk about anti-Semitism without also talking about something else,” Hawley said late in the hearing. “The message that’s being sent today at this hearing is ‘anti-Semitism isn’t enough.’ The attempts to kill Jews on campuses—that’s not a conversation worthy of discussion. You’ve got to add something else to it.”

There is no question that was the intended message from Dick Durbin. And there is no question that message came through loud and clear.