Former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy was chased out of an anti-Israel protest a few blocks away from the DNC after making a surprise appearance.
Ramaswamy was noticed by the crowd of radical activists as soon as he left his car, and was swarmed by protesters and journalists at Union Park where the protests have been organizing all week.
“You should take off. We don’t want you here,” Hatem Abudayyeh, who openly supports Hamas, told Ramaswamy. The Arab activist, who had his home raided by the FBI in 2010 for “material support of terrorism,” told Ramaswamy to leave after telling him he doesn’t have a right to be present if he does not “support the Palestinian people.”
“The good news is we are in America and so we all actually get to express ourselves,” Ramaswamy quipped back.
We set up an interview with @VivekGRamaswamy at the anti-Israel protests in Chicago. Here’s what happened: pic.twitter.com/hlZJf0Xkri
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) August 22, 2024
Abudayyeh called Ramaswamy a “racist Zionist pig,” setting off chants of, “Racist go home.” Ramaswamy was then mobbed and escorted out of the park by his security team, setting off a frenzy among local police trying to contain the crowd to the park.
Immediately after the altercation, Ramaswamy told The Daily Wire that the protesters, if they really want an end to wars, should actually support former President Donald Trump.
“The irony is that if a lot of these people, if they want to stay out of war, there is a president who kept us out of war for four years,” Ramaswamy said as he was being escorted away from the scene. “There wasn’t war in the Middle East. There wasn’t war in Russia and Ukraine.”
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Before the conflict started, Ramaswamy said he enjoyed his exchange with a communist who sold him a newspaper on communism for five dollars.
“I think there are a lot of people who may want to engage in thoughtful dissent, but the majority of what it has become ends up devolving into a thoughtless and quasi-physical exercise,” he said. “You got a lot of people that are rightly pissed off about the direction of the Democratic Party.”
Brawl breaks out in Chicago after anti-Israel protesters attack man carrying the American flag pic.twitter.com/3XMtxwsu0N
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) August 22, 2024
Ramaswamy said he “wanted to come see” the protest for himself because he “didn’t trust” the media’s representation of it.
At the park, protesters were carrying a mix of Palestinian flags, Black Liberation flags, Communists flags, and a Hezbollah flag.
The protesters are expected to march outside the DNC Thursday night, the last night of the convention, which will feature Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris as the headliner.