U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, whose district includes all of Flagler County, attacked people who accused him of wanting to “nuke” Gaza as idiots and said those are probably from Gaza, where he claimed half the population is incestuously married and therefore prone to being idiots. Gaza’s population is 2 million.
Fine made the comments to Flagler Broadcasting’s Liz Ryan in a brief news clip WNZF has been broadcasting today, five days after he told Fox News that the Palestinians of Gaza should be treated the same way Germans and Japanese were treated in World War II. The Israeli war on Gaza has so far caused upward of 52,000 deaths, and significantly more according to a study by The Lancet, the British medical journal
“In World War Two, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis,” Fine had said on May 22. “We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.” Fine did not qualify his statement at the time.
Today, he said: “People claiming I said Israel should nuke Gaza are idiots. But remember, they may be from Gaza, and in Gaza, 50 percent of people are married to their cousins, so obviously they do have a lot of people who aren’t very smart.”
Fine’s original comments drew rebukes by Americans in the American press, though not widely, and have been reported in the Times of Israel. His statement that half the people of Gaza–an enclave the size of Bunnell–are married to their cousins is false, and mirrors a mounting record of racist and degrading statements Fine has been making about Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims simultaneously with claims that critics of Israel or Israel’s war in Gaza are anti-Semitic.
The American Conservative magazine has called for his resignation or for his colleagues to oust him from Congress. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said his May 22 statement “represents one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing remarks ever made by a sitting member of Congress and marks an escalation of Fine’s long-standing pattern of inciting violence and bigotry.”
He was not challenged during the Flagler Broadcasting interview, which was the first of two. Ryan is to speak with Fine “about his Preventing Anti-Semitic Harassment on Campus Act.” The station’s president and its news director did not respond to a question about whether Ryan intends to challenge Fine’s claims or his anti-Arab bigotry.
In the radio report, he appeared to walk back the comments he’d made last week, repeating them in their essence: “When we fought evil in World War Two, we didn’t go, boo hoo hoo. The Germans are suffering. Let’s cut a deal. We didn’t say to the Japanese, oh no, you’re suffering. Let’s cut a deal. No, we nuked them twice in order to get them to unconditionally surrender. And Gaza is a situation no different. So Israel needs to do what is necessary in order to win the war.” (Germany was not nuked before it surrendered, though the bombing of its cities was in several cases more devastating than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Israel, a nuclear power, is believed to have a stockpile of some 90 warheads, according to the Arms Control Association.)
The news clip referred to Tucker Carlson saying Fine should “get the help he needs,” prompting Fine to tell WNZF a string of falsehoods–that Calson “just takes Muslim terrorist money,” that “he’s just bought off by the Qataris,” and that “he’s just a nut.”
The president, who endorsed Fine in the special election Fine won on April 1 to replace Mike Waltz, has just accepted the gift of a $400 million jet from the Qataris.
