The Daily Signal - Attacks on Jewish Community Equate to ‘Hunting’ Jews, Congressman Warns

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

There is a lot of fear among the Jewish community in America following Sunday’s attack and the shooting in D.C. in May that left two Israel embassy staff members dead. In both instances, Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., who is Jewish, says the suspects went “hunting” for Jewish people to harm.    “I mean, people are afraid because there's not enough security to solve for this problem. And what we've seen is we've seen it tolerated,” Fine said.   Today, Fine says, “we have reached a world where ... the left has told us, ‘globalize the Antifada,’ [and] their soldiers are listening.” Still, the congressman says he has hope because the policy steps taken in Florida have been effective.    “When you show that you're not afraid, when you call evil for what it is, when you don't back down, they back off,” he said.    Mohamed Soliman, the lead suspect in attack, used a makeshift flamethrower and incendiary device as he shouted, “Free Palestine,” and attacked the group of people marching in support of freeing the Israeli hostages. Soliman, an Egyptian national who was in the country illegally, is now in custody and has been charged with a federal hate crime.   The morning after the attack, Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., both openly Muslim, had yet to issue statements.    Fine was critical of the silence from the two Muslim congresswomen following the attack that left eight people injured in Boulder, Colorado.    “They're Muslim terrorists,” he said when asked what he made of their lack of a public statement as of Monday morning.    “I put it to people this way,” Fine continued, “the people who are sitting, running Hamas in Qatar, they're not blowing anything up, but they support terrorism. If you support Muslim terrorism, you're a Muslim terrorist, and I believe that they both do. You can see it in the silence. I think it is a disgrace that they are Americans, let alone in Congress. And I believe that the way you fight for good is to call out evil.”    Tlaib did respond to the attack on Monday afternoon following The Daily Signal’s conversation with Fine.   "The violent attack in Boulder is horrific,” Tlaib wrote on X. “My heart goes out to all of the victims and their families. Violence has no place in our communities.”    Twenty-four hours after the attack, Omar had yet to issue a statement on the incident. Neither Tlaib or Omar answered The Daily Signal’s request for comment in response to Fine’s claim that the congresswoman are “Muslim terrorists.”    Fine sits down with The Daily Signal to discuss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, bonus edition. I'm Virginia Allen. Following the attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday that left eight individuals injured, Congressman Randy Fine is sitting down with the Daily Signal to talk about this anti-Semitic attack and what it means for the Jewish community across the United States. Stay tuned for my conversation with Randy Fine as we discuss the implications and where this kind of hatred has really come from and stem trump i'll give you a hint it has something to do with american universities my conversation with the congressman is next at desjardin we speak business we speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans we've mastered made to measure growth and expansion advice and we can talk

your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes because at de jardin business we speak the same language you do business so join the more than 400 000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Congressman Randy Fine of Florida, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with the daily signal today. Of course, we're speaking at a really critical moment in history.

You're yourself, you're very open about your Jewish faith, your Jewish heritage. On Sunday night, we saw the news break that an individual in Colorado launched an attack on a pro-Israel event in Boulder. This was a peaceful event standing in support of the hostages that remain in Gaza. When you learned about this attack, what was the first thought that came to your mind? Again, again, because it happened a week and a half ago, right here in Washington. And my second thought was when are people going to understand what globalized the antifada

and, you know, resistance by any means. Where are they going to understand what that means? Because it wasn't actually a pro-Israel event, by the way. You could have marched in that event in Colorado. Even if you weren't pro-Israel, this was a get the hostages out, which, by the way, any good person should want. No one should be thinking 58 people should be held against their will, starving to death in tunnels.

That's what it was. It was about the hostages. And so, yeah. And now I've had all kinds. of emotions, anger, fear, all kinds of things, because it's a scary time. Yeah. You were very, very open on X. You posted a very, very long as you were flying in this morning.

I want to read a portion of what you wrote. You said, call your Jewish friends today. They will tell you that it feels like we are being hunted, that it is open season. We are experiencing anti-Semitic hate unlike anything we have ever experienced. Do you feel like you're being hunted as a Jewish American? Well, I have for a long time. I mean, that's the risk you take when you're as outspoken on the issue as I have. But let's look at these two attacks in the last week and a half.

And the first one, you had an individual who went to a Jewish museum looking to kill Jews. That is hunting. In this one yesterday, you had an illegal immigrant Muslim named Mohammed who was hanging around with a made-up flamethrower and a Molotov cocktail. he was waiting for them to come. That is hunting. And in both of these instances, that is what you see. And so, yes, I mean, it is open season.

And what is extraordinary is there will people, there will be people who will justify it. I mean, just go look at the comments on my Twitter if you can get past the ones that have vile, curse words and everything else. But there are people who go, well, Israel shouldn't do what they're doing. Now, let's examine that for a minute. Let's assume Israel was doing something bad, which they're not. But let's assume they were. even if they were doing something terrible. You go burn Jewish people in Colorado because of that.

If I get angry at something China does, should I go to the Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood and burn it down? Of course not. But we have reached a world where, again, the left has told us, globalized the antifada. Their soldiers are listening. You mentioned that this individual was an illegal alien. We're learning. He was from Egypt overstate a visa in the U.S. And what does this tell us about, you know, the policies, our immigration system?

Do we know if he was vetted before he came into the country? What are we learning? I don't know a lot of that. But what I do know is this, it actually illustrates a major problem with our illegal immigration crisis. So people think illegal immigration and they think like someone swam across the Rio Grande. That is the image that people have in their minds. What they don't realize is my understanding is about 50% of illegal immigrants came here legally and then just overstayed. So this guy effectively had a tourist visa. He's coming to America on

vacation. The visa was good for six months. And then he just didn't go home. Now, there's some question of did he do one of these fake asylum things that people do? But the bottom line is he came, when he entered the country, he was legal. He just overstayed his visa. And so I think it speaks to the problem of illegal immigration. Joe Biden just threw the doors open and said, come on in, everybody. and now we have how many people in this country have been killed, hurt, murdered because of someone who shouldn't have been here at all. I mean, if we needed a reason to deport every single illegal immigrant, we got it yesterday. Yeah. What are you hearing from the Jewish community today?

What I told you, fear. I mean, people are afraid because you can't, there's not enough security to solve for this problem. And what we've seen is we've seen it tolerated. I mean, this comes directly from our universities. This comes directly from pro-Hamas Muslim terror organizations that have been allowed to operate in the United States. Care is a Muslim terror front. They have an office down the street from the Capitol. They're a terrorist group.

You know, students for justice in Palestine. So many of these, these are actual terrorist organizations that have been allowed to flourish, protest, and everything else. And it's also you look at the people we've allowed to come. coming to this country. Coming to America's a privilege, it is not a right. And whether it is coming to study, whether it's coming to immigrate, we have let too many of the wrong people in. And now we're dealing with that. You've said publicly that all kind of quote unquote Palestinian organizations operating in the U.S. should be labeled as terrorist organizations. Some people might say that sounds pretty extreme. Well, that they just don't understand their history. The Palestinian cause is fake.

Newt Gingrich called the Palestinian people an invention years ago. It is a fake thing that was invented in the 1960s. You know, the most common last names in Gaza are something like the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Saud. It is not a people. The Gazans are largely Arabs, and there are people who may have come there shortly before 1948. This is a fictionalized movement whose goal simply is the destruction of Israel, and the death of Jews and the West.

And by the way, go ask somebody when they're yelling free, free Palestine. Ask them if they think Israel should exist. Or from the river to the sea, where should Israel exist? They don't. This is just a cover for anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism.

It is a philosophy rooted in evil. And I think it is a problem that we have to deal with because we haven't been willing to call it for what it is. We've seen under the Trump administration that they've been defunding some universities like Harvard.

over anti-Semitism. Or I went. Or your graduate? Okay. Well, what are other actions, or are there other actions that you would like to see the Trump administration take in response to what we're seeing on college campuses to these attacks? Well, it's not that President Trump's doing an amazing job, and I'm so grateful that he is our president. I mean, Jews have never had a better friend in the White House. But it's not just what he does. It's what we in Congress have to do. And there are bills, I have a bill that I filed with Senator Scott, a bill that would basically make religion a protected class just like race and gender.

We've largely solved this problem in Florida. We did it in the eight and a half years I was in the legislature because I handwrote bills that we turned into laws that solved these problems. And you know how we solve this problem at our universities? I said, hey, why don't we just say you have to treat anti-Semitism the same way you treat racism? You got all these rules. You can't go on.

It's amazing how people discover free speech when it comes to the Jews. But you can't go on to a college campus and start yelling the N-word at your black classmates. If you do that, you'll be invited to go get an education somewhere else, which, by the way, as you should. But somehow when it came to Jews, well, it's different. I said, look, just treat it the same. Don't discriminate in how you deal with discrimination. That one piece of legislation has largely solved that problem in Florida. And so I have a bill with Senator Scott that will do that at our universities. You have to understand these idiots, and that's what they are, when they hear the nation's premier universities, say Israel is a genocidal state, which is like the dumbest statement ever. You have to be an idiot to believe this. And I can explain why if you want. But when you hear these things, you go, well, if they're saying it at Columbia, they're smart there, it must be true. When you're hearing it on left-wing media, things that are knowingly false, 14,000 babies will die in 24 hours.

Israel's shooting up aid stations. It makes people angry and people believe it, and it's a problem. But universities give this a veneer of credibility. And they've also been penetrated by too much foreign money, which we have to deal with. Well, I think you're hitting the nail on the head because, for one, you have students who worked hard to get into those universities. They're paying a lot of money or their parents are or they're taking out student loans for a lot of money to be on those campuses. And then, yeah, the perception from Americans is these are very prestigious universities, maybe that I applied to and couldn't get into. So there is that weight put on them of what they say matters and should not.

be totally disregarded. And I think a lot of the problems at these universities are not even coming from American students. Our universities have been corrupted by foreign money, whether it's Qatari money, whether it's Chinese money. They are buying influence at our universities. And it's not just about putting their students in. It's about creating programs and professorships and changing the curriculum.

And we're having to deal with that now. We need to, if you are not a friend of America, which Cutter is not, which which China is not, you should not be able to buy your way into our universities. But the other thing that should bother people is this. If you've got a really smart kid and I'm going to make up a school that they didn't pick it out, I'll pick on it because I went to Harvard. If you wanted your kid to go to Yale and your kid can't go to Yale because they're full of foreign students.

And by the way, I don't know what the percentage of foreign students is at Yale. How fair is that? Because Yale, as is every one of our universities, to call them private is largely. a lie. As far as I know, there's one private university in the United States. It's called Hillsdale College. It's private. They take no money from the government. They really are private. All these other institutions are dependent on government money to survive. If for no other reason, people need their student loans to pay for their inflated prices. If you're going to be dependent on the federal government, then you should serve the needs of Americans. Now, we have that in Florida. At our

premier institutions, I believe 90% of the students have to be from Florida. You know, and that's how That's how we make sure they take care of Floridians. But these private schools that pretend to be private, they aren't. They're dependent on government money. So when we talk about solutions, when you talk about, you know, legislation, to what extent do you think solving this really crisis, this anti-Semitic crisis that we're seeing unfold in America, is, needs to be dependent on legislation versus it's a cultural issue, that we need a cultural shift.

I mean, is it both? It's both. It's both. But you need legislation to create the groundwork where, so I see it in my own. So I'm obviously focused on myself. I see it in my own social media. And I can see that there is a very orchestrated, you know, Muslim terror infrastructure out there, bot farms, media outlets that are all structured around creating the fomenting this rebellion.

and look at the encampments that we had on universities, and they all had the same tents. None of this is organic. None of it. That's the one of the things that I've learned. Like, I'll make a post on social media, and it'll be direct. That's one way of putting how I phrase things.

And it'll be mostly positive. And then all of the sudden, six, eight, ten hours later, all of a sudden there's like 300 nasty comments from people who don't have faces, and there aren't real accounts. There's someone out there, orchestrating this stuff. And I think it's having a real impact. So we need the president to keep doing what he's doing. And he's got a great administration. But we also need, we need laws to

protect people. And then we need funding. And one of the important things about the big, beautiful bill is it includes the money the president needs to send everybody home. And I think at this point, it's time to ship them all out. I mean, think about this. I'm making an assumption, but I know that the Egyptian, Mohammed, I have, read this morning, he was in a home with his family. They came here a few years ago. I would presume if his visa is no longer good, neither are theirs. They had to be on a plane home today. And I mean, it is time to round these people up and send them home. We've allowed the enemy into our country, and we need to fix that right now. And when you say these people, are you specifically

referring to all illegal aliens, people who've overstayed visas? Well, I think all illegal immigrants should go home, all of them. I mean, remember, the original sin in what they did was coming here illegally. No one has the right to come to America. And I think part of it is I live in the real world. I don't live in the world of sunshine, rainbows, pixie dust, and unicorns. There's like seven billion people in the world. If you said anybody who wants can come to America, probably half of them would come. Our society would collapse. We as a society have to decide who gets to come here. By the way, I'm a big believer in immigration. I think immigration what makes America great. It's what it's what refreshes our talent pool to. It brings in new energy.

I want immigration, but we want the right immigration. We don't want Mohammed from Egypt who yells free Palestine while he's burning people alive. That's not what we want in this country. Yeah. You have called out two of your colleagues in Congress, both Rashida Talib and Ilhan Omar, for their silence. They haven't come out publicly, at least as of Monday morning, saying anything in response to that attack. What do you make of their silence? They're Muslim terrorists. I mean, it's very clear. They support these groups.

I mean, Rashida Talib, is it? Look, you don't have, I put it to people this way. The people who are sitting running Hamas in Qatar, they're not blowing anything up, but they support terrorism. If you support Muslim terrorism, you're a Muslim terrorist, and I believe that they both do. You can see it in the silence. I think it is a disgrace that they are Americans, let alone in Congress. And I believe that the way you fight for good is to call out evil. And people have to stop being afraid.

The fear is what's now people are getting burned to death. And so we need to stop being afraid. How did we get here? How did we get a time in American history where in the span of two weeks to major attacks specifically targeting Jewish individuals? Well, I think it was, I think I blame two things. I think it's the left and I think it's an orchestrated effort. So remember, the left has adopted this.

There is no good. There is no evil in the world. There used to be a time when we said some cultures were better than others. There were cultures in this world that ate people. That was part of their culture. There was a time when we said that was bad. The left today would say, would you like an arm or a leg? There was a time when there are cultures that believed in child sacrifice.

I think the left kind of does today. They're like cut off a body part if you want to change who you are. We're afraid to say some cultures are superior than others. In Gaza, for example, almost half of people are married to a relative. One in four are married to their first cousin. Now, we are allowed to say that is not a good thing. But everyone has become afraid to speak the truth. We have to say everyone's the same.

And they're not. And so I think part of it is the left's loss of a belief in what is good and what is evil. I think the second thing is orchestrated. As I said, a lot of this is funded. And it has been funded by years coming out of Qatar. It's the universities. It's fake news networks like Al Jazeera. It's paying certain influencers to spout nonsense.

So it's funding care and students for justice in Palestine. So you have both an orchestrated effort to undermine the country as well as, you're just the stupid philosophy of the left. You say, though, that you have hope? I do. Where is that hope coming from for you? Well, I saw what we did in Florida. I also understand how you deal with these issues.

So I'll tell you a story. I've always been this outspoken. The difference is now I'm in Congress, but I was this outspoken in Florida. And after one of the Muslim terror attacks on Israel, one of these so-called peaceful Muslim groups wanted to block the road in front of my house. to do a protest. Because, you know, peaceful protesting involves blocking roads. No, it's a form of

terror. It keeps you from where you want to go. It might keep a pregnant woman from getting to hospital on time. We solved that problem in Florida. And I'll tell you how in a minute. So they were going to do a peaceful protest. I was called by the media. They asked me what I would say to the peaceful protesters who are going to block the road in front of my house. And my answer was, well, I hope you're only four wide. They said, why? I said, well, then I won't have to back the up. See, in Florida, we passed a law that said, you can run people over if they block the road. Now, here's the question. Do you think they blocked the road in front of my house? Probably not. They did not. When you show that you're not afraid, when you call evil for what it is,

when you don't back down, they back off. This is why President Trump is being so successful, because he's like, don't mess with me. I'm not afraid of you. That is the language that they understand. And so I'm optimistic because I've seen what we've done in Florida. We don't have encampments on our college campuses. We don't have the roads get blocked. We had an issue with Jews being attacked. We passed a bill that said, if you do that, you're going to have problems. We had an issue with Nazis littering flyers in Jewish people's driveways. I said, look, you have the right to hand out a flyer on the street corner saying anything you want about me. Now, I may punch you in the face, but you have the right.

right to hand out that flyer. You do not have the right to throw that flyer on my driveway. That's called litter. We made that a crime. It stopped. What I've seen is if you're willing to fight, you can win. And so what I hope is we get out of the strongly worded letters. One of my concerns right now is people telling me, hey, we're going to do a resolution, a resolution saying anti-Semitism is bad. I didn't come to Congress to be in a debating society. I'm probably going to write an op-ed that says that I'm not going to support any of these strongly worded letters. It reminds me of Team America World Police. I don't have ever seen that movie where the guy says, you know, he says to Kim Jong-il, I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter. He says, well, what are you going to do if I don't do

anything? I'll write you an even more strongly worded letter. Now is the time for action, because what we've seen in the last two weeks will continue and it will get worse if we don't. So before I let you go, what action is coming out of your office? What should we be watching for? American citizens watching the actions of Congress? Well, you're going to see me continue to focus on getting President Trump the money he needs to deport everybody. You will see me continuing to call for this legislation that Senator Scott and I have to deal with anti-Semitism.

And I think you're going to see me talking about what we do with people who are here on visas right now. I have to figure out the solutions to this. I've been here two months. I got no orientation when I came in as a freshman. To a large degree, I don't know what I'm. I'm doing. But I believe that God puts us where he wants us to be. And as I had to talk to my sons last night about what happened, you know, they said, Dad, you need to go and fix this. The

Keepa that you see me wearing, I have not worn this my whole life. I don't want to come across as a more observant Jew than I am. But when we did a hearing a few weeks ago, dealing with anti-Semitism at Haverford College, that was unrepentant, by the way. They were unrepentant and unapologetic. And my son asked me, he said, Dad, you should wear a Kipa for all the kids who don't feel safe to wear theirs on campus. When it was over, he said, you should keep wearing it until they are safe. So, you know, I don't put myself out of the model of how to be a good Jew, but I do see myself as someone who can fight to keep them safe. And make no mistake, Jews are just the first. I often say they target Israel because it's small and it's close.

if America was where Israel is and Israel's where we are, they'd be coming after us. And in the case of the people they killed a couple weeks ago, they weren't both Jewish. I don't know that everyone who got burned in the protest in Colorado, they may not have all been Jewish. You can be not Jewish and care about people being held hostage in Gaza. This is a war of civilizations, and it is good versus evil and people have to decide where they're going to fall. Congressman, fine.

Thank you for your time. You're welcome. Thanks so much for joining us for this bonus conversation on The Daily Signal podcast. Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button so you never miss out on brand new shows from the Daily Signal. From that first coffee of the day to dropping off your dry cleaning on the way. From stepping onto the subway to opening your doors to your first customer of the day. We're here to power you along the way. Maneris, powering Canadian commerce.

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