Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis danced around condemning a small Nazi rally that occurred in Orlando over the weekend, spending much more time on politicians who believe in divesting American money from Israel over continued war crimes in Palestine.
"These Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something with to do that, we’re not playing their game," he said. "First of all, state law enforcement is going to hold them accountable because they were doing stuff on the overpass. So they’re going to absolutely do that. And they should do that."
DeSantis went on to attack Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar for her criticism of the state of Israel, calling her an anti-Semite.
"I’m not going to have people try to smear me that belong to a political party that has elevated anti-Semites to the halls of Congress like Ilhan Omar, that have played footsie with the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] movement."
To be perfectly clear, the state of Israel is not Judaism and Judaism is not Israel. Israel is a nation and, as such, should be held to account for horrific human rights violations in Gaza. This doesn't matter to DeSantis, who has pushed back against anything but complete support for the country as anti-Semitic.
"We’re going to take our record in Florida and what we’ve done, [including] sign the strongest antisemitism bill in the country. We’ve stared down companies who were indulged in BDS like Airbnb. And we’ve won," he said. "We’ve had the strongest relationship between Florida and Israel than we ever had in terms of education, business, all these tremendous things that have happened since our state visit in 2019."
DeSantis' own press secretary floated a conspiracy theory that the assembled Nazis might be paid actors on the Democratic Party dime. DeSantis had nothing to say on the matter.
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