Ben Cohen among seven people arrested after interrupting the testimony of the American secretary for health Robert F Kennedy Jr.
The co -founder of the Ben & Jerry ice cream and six other people were arrested after having disrupted an audience of the American Senate to protest against the support of Washington for the War of Israel in Gaza.
On Wednesday, the arrests of Ben Cohen and the other demonstrators came while the Secretary in the United States of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr testified to the legislators on his upheaval of the Federal Health Agencies.
“Congress kills poor children in Gaza by buying bombs and paying it by launching children in Medicaid in the United States,” said Cohen when he was escorted by police.
The seven were arrested to “curl, hindering or inconvenient”, assaulting a police officer or resisting arrest, the American Capitol said in a statement.
The police said that Cohen had only been accused of overcrowding, obstruction or inconvenience, an offense punishable by 90 days in prison, a fine of $ 500, or both.
Cohen and his co -founder of Ben & Jerry, Jerry Greenfield, are well known for their progressive activism, including the opposition to the actions of Israel in Gaza and in occupied West Bank.
In an interview with the former Fox News animator, Tucker Carlson, earlier this month, Cohen, who is Jewish, said that the United States had a “strange relationship” with Israel who involved Washington “providing weapons for his genocide”.
“At the moment, what it means to be American is that we are the largest exporter of weapons in the world, we have the largest soldier in the world, we support the slaughter of people in Gaza,” said Cohen.
“If someone protests against the massacre of people in Gaza, we stop them. What does our country represent? “
In 2021, Ben & Jerry announced that he would no longer allow his Israeli licensee to sell his ice cream in the West Bank and Gaza, saying that it would be “incoherent with our values”.
An American judge the following year rejected Ben & Jerry’s offer for an injunction to block sales after discovering that the company had not shown that it would suffer irreparable damage.
Ben & Jerry’s, who was founded in 1978 in the American state of Vermont, and his parent company, Unilever, then settled their legal dispute on unknown conditions.
In March, Ben & Jerry brought legal action accusing Unilever of having dismissed CEO David Stever for his support for the brand’s “social mission”.
More than 51,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched his war after the attacks on October 7, 2023 Hamas against the country.
