\n<\/p>\n
United States Congressman Randy Fine, an ally of President Donald Trump, has suggested that the Palestinian people should be destroyed, boasting that he is not afraid to be called Islamophobic.<\/p>\n
During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Fine \u2013 who has a long history of Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian statements \u2013 cited the myth that Israelis are banned from going to some areas in the occupied West Bank due to \u201capartheid\u201d imposed against Israeli settlers.<\/p>\n
list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/p>\n In reality, the Israeli military, which controls the Palestinian territory, has signs warning settlers against entering Palestinian towns for safety concerns.<\/p>\n But settlers, often armed and protected by Israeli forces, regularly storm and ransack Palestinian villages. At least two US citizens have been killed in settler attacks this year.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you are dealing with a group of people who continually call for the destruction of the State of Israel, who are OK with signs that say, \u2018Jews may not enter these areas\u2019, we want to be free of Jews, how do you make peace with that?\u201d Fine asked Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, during the hearing.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you create a long-term solution with that? Or is there another way that we have to go?\u201d<\/p>\n Klein \u2013 who previously used the slur \u201cfilthy Arab\u201d and called for profiling Muslims in the US \u2013 said Islam needs to undergo a \u201creformation\u201d and accept \u201cIsrael as a Jewish state\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody wants to talk about it. They\u2019re afraid of being called Islamophobic,\u201d Klein said.<\/p>\n Fine interrupted, saying, \u201cI\u2019m not afraid of that.\u201d<\/p>\n The Republican US congressman, who represents a district in the state of Florida, then doubled down on his volatile rhetoric.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction. I think you destroy them first,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A United Nations convention defines genocide as \u201cacts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including killing, causing harm, preventing births, forcibly transferring children, and imposing life conditions to cause destruction\u201d.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 70,400 Palestinians and turned nearly the entire territory into rubble, aimed to destroy the Palestinian people, leading rights groups and UN investigators have said.<\/p>\n Abed Ayoub, executive director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), slammed Fine, calling him \u201cthe Temu version of Benjamin Netanyahu,\u201d referring to the discount online retailer and the Israeli prime minister.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s hated by Republicans and Democrats for his policy of Israel first, Israel second, Israel third \u2014 Americans nowhere. He\u2019s basically a foreign spokesperson at this point, and not even a good one,\u201d Ayoub told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cHis unhinged, genocidal rhetoric shows his desperation as he tries to appease his bosses back in Tel Aviv.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time that Fine \u2013 who was elected to Congress earlier this year with the endorsements of Trump and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) \u2013 has made inflammatory statements about Palestinians.<\/p>\n In 2021, Fine commented on a social post with a photo of a dead Palestinian child asking him how he sleeps at night with: \u201cQuite well, actually! Thanks for the pic!\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier this year, he wrote \u201cstarve away\u201d in response to a report about the deadly hunger in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade.<\/p>\n Last year, Fine lauded the killing of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a US activist who was fatally shot by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n \u201cThrow rocks, get shot. One less #MuslimTerror ist. #FireAway,\u201d Fine wrote in a social media post.<\/p>\n He has also previously argued that fear of Muslims is warranted. \u201cWhile many Muslims are not terrorists, they are the radicals, not the mainstream,\u201d he wrote in a post on X in 2023. \u201cNow is the time to speak truth, not bathe in political correctness that will kill us.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite such comments, Fine \u2013 who refers to himself as the Hebrew Hammer \u2013 has been a regular guest on some mainstream media outlets, including CNN.<\/p>\n Hatem Abudayyeh, national chair of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), called out Republicans in Congress and Trump for failing to denounce Fine.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to read disgusting, racist, anti-Palestinian, anti-Black, and xenophobic vile on social media 24-7, but we\u2019re not supposed to hear it from actual elected officials in this country,\u201d Abudayyeh told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what the Trump era has brought to the political arena: hateful speech from hateful people like Randy Fine, a sickening Zionist apologist for genocide who is allowed to spew his racism without condemnation from the rest of his party or his president.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" United States Congressman Randy Fine, an ally of President Donald Trump, has suggested that the Palestinian people should be destroyed, boasting that he is not afraid to be called Islamophobic. During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Fine \u2013 who has a long history of Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian statements \u2013 cited the myth that Israelis are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[7871,2915,3201,16614,150,2786,7562,3415],"class_list":{"0":"post-36780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-congressman","9":"tag-destroyed","10":"tag-fine","11":"tag-islamophobia","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-palestinians","14":"tag-randy","15":"tag-suggests"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}