WASHINGTON When Maya Berry was called in as an expert to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, she thought shed be sharing new data on hate crimes against Arab Americans and Jewish Americans since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.

Instead, Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, a national nonpartisan civil rights advocacy organization, was subjected to some of the most offensive and bigoted attacks by Republican senators the committee has seen in recent years.

Her experience is part of a bigger, years-long problem with this committee, a purportedly storied body responsible for major legislation and lifetime appointments to federal courts, including the Supreme Court: Some of its GOP members have ditched basic decorum and opted for disgusting attacks on the people coming before the panel. And as Republicans berated Berry, Democrats on the panel did little to back up a witness they had called to testify.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) cut off Berry the moment she started engaging with him. As he pressed panelists to answer foreign policy questions about Israel, Berry tried to pivot back to the topic of the hearing: stemming hate crimes. Graham started yelling at her.

If you think its complicated to figure out that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran wants to kill all the Jews, I should not listen to anything else you have to say! he shouted over her as she repeatedly tried to speak.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) brought posters with photos from pro-Palestinian campus protests and asked Berry if each image counted as a hate crime, which is, by definition, a criminal act . As Berry tried to steer the conversation away from free speech on campuses and back to actual hate crimes, Hawley began shouting over her: What youre trying to do here today is wrong!

And in an exchange that went viral and drew the most attention to this hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) used all of his allotted time to baselessly accuse Berry of supporting terrorist groups, pressing her on whether she endorses Hamas and Hezbollah. As she repeatedly said she did not and called out his blatant Islamophobia, Kennedy drew audible gasps in the crowd by finally telling her she should go hide her head in a bag.

Kennedys treatment of Berry drew widespread condemnation from Arab American groups, Jewish groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

I dont even know what it means to put a bag on your head, Berry, who is also the co-chair of a hate crime task force at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of civil rights groups, told HuffPost on Wednesday. She said her kids warned her to stay off of social media after the hearing, but she came across a tweet with an image of her next to the image of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who had a black bag over his head.

I never thought of that, she said, trailing off. I never thought the bigotry would land the way it did. Like, its anti-Arab racism in the middle of a hearing about hate crimes.

The offices of Kennedy, Hawley and Graham did not return requests for comment.