A conservative lobbyist has sparked outrage for suggesting that the Iranian schoolgirls killed in airstrikes this week amid the joint U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign are better off dead than being “alive in a burqa”

Matt Schlapp, who heads up the Conservative Union advocacy group, which runs the Conservative Political Action Conference, made the remark Wednesday night on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored during a heated debate

A missile strike on the war’s first day, Saturday, killed 175 children and staff at an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, according to the non-profit humanitarian group Iranian Red Crescent Society. Iran has pointed the finger at the U.S. and Israel, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that the administration was “investigating”

Journalist Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, told Morgan that the U.S. and Israel were to blame even if an Iranian missile was responsible for the attack on the school

“We know that if the U.S. and Israel had not attacked a country that poses no serious threat to them – Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, America has thousands – that those girls would be alive,” Beinart said

“They’d be alive in a burqa,” Schlapp interjected before he was cut off by Morgan, who spoke over him. “This is…a barbaric society,” Schlapp said, before Morgan told him to “hang on”

A few minutes later, Morgan invited Schlapp back to the conversation

“It's hypocritical to say that these attacks harmed women and children when those women and children, the young girls that you reference, would be...live a life in a barbaric, unequal society behind a burqa, with no ability to make career choices,” Schlapp said

“So just kill them?” challenged Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-American commentator who was also on the panel