Republican Randy Fine wants to nuke Gaza.
He said so after two Israeli Embassy employees were shot and killed in Washington DC on Wednesday.
Fox News asked Fine on Thursday if he thought this could affect the ceasefire proposed between Israel and Palestine. Fine said the embassy deaths were due to “Muslim terror” and compared Palestinians to World War II-era Nazis and Japanese.
“The fact of the matter is the Palestinian cause is an evil one,” Fine said. “We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.”
Fine’s website states that he defends “the right to life” and shows that he has been endorsed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
But Fine doesn’t defend the right to life. He is very much in favor of taking innocent life, excited and even boastful about it, and doesn’t acknowledge the rights his human targets might claim to their own lives.
Randy Fine is against abortion. But once that baby is born, as a matter of politics and geography, Fine has no problem tearing children apart. Any moral differences between his zeal for taking innocent life and the “shout your abortion” crowd aren’t really clear from a pro-life perspective.
Fine is by no means the only phony “pro-life” Republican.
After the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel in 2023, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said of Gaza “level the place.”
This week a baby’s hand was seen protruding from the rubble piled on her by Israel’s military and paid for with U.S. tax dollars. It is heartbreaking to watch.
The place where that baby stood was leveled. In another scenario, it could have been nuked too.
In May 2024, The Guardian reported, “an Israeli assault struck displaced Palestinians sheltering in tents outside of Rafah, in southern Gaza. The barrage killed at least 45 people in a hellish blaze, according to medics and witnesses, with many of the dead children charred or dismembered beyond recognition…’We pulled out children who were in pieces,’ Mohammed Abuassa, who rushed to the scene, told the Associated Press.”
Not long after this, former Republican governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley wrote “finish them” on an Israeli missile.
Those children torn to pieces were certainly finished.
I could go on. But there has never been a shortage of neoconservative or warmongering Republicans who advertise themselves as pro-life but in reality are just anti-abortion.
Pope John Paul II’s “culture of life” was a call to respect and protect every stage of human life from conception until natural death, not just until a child is born. Observing this sanctity of life, it is no surprise the Catholic Church has opposed so many wars.
What did that baby whose hand stuck out from the rubble do to deserve such a fate? If the answer is the child was associated with the wrong people, how is that different from Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the United States in 2001, or Hamas attack on Israel in 2023?
Both terrorist groups were just targeting random people because of who they were associated with.
This was also the rationale of the anti-Israel shooter who took the lives of two young people in Washington DC recently because of who they were associated with.
There are casualties in any war. War is necessary sometimes. Certainly wars of defense are necessary.
But targeting innocent civilians as a war tactic?
Former president and general Dwight D. Eisenhower was horrified when the United States used nuclear weapons in World War II. “I was against it on two counts,” Eisenhower said of dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
These are the words of a man who values life. He was not only not eager to “nuke” the women and children of Japan, he didn’t want to do it all.
Because humanity. Morality. Basic decency. In Ike’s case, patriotism and not wanting to bring shame to his own country was part of the mix.
Because, most simply, life. A concept so simple and precious that it doesn’t have to be explained to others whose heads aren’t twisted up by war and bloodlust.
There are a number of terms that can be used to describe Republicans who are seemingly eager to murder innocents abroad as part of a foreign policy strategy.
“Pro-life” is not one of them.
