Randy Fine Should Resign
The Florida congressman advocated Gaza’s nuclear annihilation.
Florida Republican Randy Fine, a sitting congressman, called last week for nuclear bombs to be dropped on the people of Gaza.
Fine made the comment on national television after two employees of the Israeli embassy in DC were murdered by a left-wing lunatic, who shouted “free Palestine!” as he was apprehended.
“We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender,” Fine said during a Fox News interview. “That needs to be the same here.”
After calling for a nuclear assault on a densely-populated territory smaller than Seattle, Fine added, “There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.” You’d almost think Fine was breaking the fourth wall and telling us there is something “deeply wrong” with his own culture of American ideologues who dehumanize the Palestinians. But no, he was instead referring to the culture of the Palestinians themselves.
As the founder and president of the Catholic apostolate the Vulnerable People Project, I have had the privilege of getting to know first-hand the various cultures of the Holy Land, including the Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the West Bank, and Gaza, as well as their non-Christian neighbors. In my discussions with these people, I have not encountered the view that entire cultures must be annihilated to make more room for themselves.
No, that disgraceful sentiment belongs to Fine, who describes himself as a “Zionist” and calls pro-Palestinians “demons” who “must be put down by any means necessary.” That statement came in response to the grotesque act of political violence in DC, but Fine was painting with a broad brush.
Before I go on, I first and foremost want to give my own response to the Florida congressman’s recent comments: Rep. Randy Fine is a disgrace, and I am calling on him to resign.
What’s more, if he will not resign, then I call on his colleagues in Congress to force him out.
What Fine proposed last week is a betrayal of what voters turned out in record numbers for last year. The Trump movement, though it shored up Fine’s own vote count considerably, is a movement of peace. A movement of holding the pro-war establishment accountable and wrestling away their power after decades of them cynically using foreign peoples—especially in the Middle East –as their own private chess pieces and as means to their own bizarre military ends rather than as human beings, who ought only ever to be treated as ends in themselves.
The Trump movement drew record numbers of Middle-Eastern voters in particular, including from Palestine. I personally know Palestinian Christian ex-pats who voted for Trump, moved by his advocacy for a ceasefire in Gaza.
After taking office, Trump has reassured those supporters by speaking compassionately about the “suffering” people of Gaza, by telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his face “you got to be good to Gaza,” and by pressuring Israel to open up corridors for humanitarian aid.
The Trump movement, in fact, has much more in common with the best representatives of the “free Palestine movement” that Fine wants “put down” than with his own mass-murderous brand of “Zionism.”
MAGA is based, to an extent, on a basic degree of human solidarity with the vulnerable. At the very outset of Trump’s career in national politics, he spoke often of the “forgotten men and women of America,” showing compassion for those whom the old ruling class had ignored for decades.
So, it was no surprise that Trump—and his movement more broadly—would later show the same compassion for the victims of the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s many cynical wars.
Increasingly, that includes compassion for the victims in Gaza—half of them under the age of eighteen—who are starving and wasting away behind an Israel-imposed blockade on lifesaving medicine and food.
And what about their culture? My friend Khalil Sayegh, a Palestinian Christian, represents it well, and he resists the temptation to demonize and dehumanize members of other tribes. “The attack on the Jewish museum yesterday in Washington is a despicable act of violence,” he stated after the murder of those two Israeli embassy employees. Sayegh continued:
It brings shame to the “Free Palestine movement” if someone associated with it commits a random murder while shouting its slogans. There must be self-reflection, and a clear condemnation.
My deepest sympathy to our Jewish neighbors in DC. We love you, support you, and stand with you. We will never accept the name of our cause being used to attack your spaces or harm your people.
That is a Palestinian Christian’s response to the same event that occasioned Fine’s deranged rant.
American Christians should take note: The culture Fine referred to as having something “deeply” wrong with it is the culture of the people of the Holy Land, including Christians directly descended from the Jews who first accepted Jesus and received the Holy Spirit.
That’s the culture that gave birth to much of what sets the West, and the United States, apart. It’s the culture of the Gospel, which proclaims the inviolable dignity of every human being as made in the Image and Likeness of God. Or, as our Declaration of Independence put it: “all men are created equal” before “Nature’s God” with “certain unalienable rights.”
And it’s the same culture that eventually gave rise to the Trump movement, with its respect for the common man and for the victims of U.S. aggression abroad. If Fine finds something “deeply wrong” with it, then, again, he should show himself the door. And again, if he won’t, Trump and his supporters should show him out ourselves.
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