John Kennedy: Biden admin wants to read Socrates while we're in a bar fight
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., criticized the Biden administration's 'nice guys' approach to the Middle East on 'The Story with Martha MacCallum.'
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., joined "The Story with Martha MacCallum" to criticize the Biden administration's "weakness" towards adversaries in the Middle East as the Israel-Hamas war rages.
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: There is no cause in the world that justifies what Hamas did, Martha. Burning babies alive, slitting their throats, all the while yelling for joy, and spare me the retort that we often hear, "But these people are oppressed." All the college kids and the faculty members at these universities who believe in diversity, equity and inclusion and the right to kill Jews. Well, this is America, and they're entitled to their opinion, but I'm entitled to mine, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Part of the reason we find ourselves in a world on fire in Ukraine, in the Indo-Pacific and now in the Middle East is because of our naïveté and our weakness, and more specifically, the naïveté and the weakness of the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden speaks during an arrival ceremony after arriving at Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday, July 13, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (AP/Evan Vucci)
We're playing footsie, and we have for years with Qatar. Qatar does provide the electricity for Gaza. In effect, they give it to Hamas and the Biden administration allows it. The Biden administration allows billionaires to live in Qatar and not just from Hamas, but also from ISIS. The Biden administration sends a message of weakness when it refuses to enforce the oil sanctions on Iran, when it cut and ran in Afghanistan, when it removed the sanctions on Russia's Nord Stream II pipeline, when it gave Iran $4.5 billion in cash from the International Monetary Fund. And I could go on.
And the problem we've got, it's not the total responsibility for this, but President Biden and his team think while we're in the middle of a bar fight or a prison riot, they want to quote Socrates and read Beowulf and think if we're just nice guys, that we can be partners with Iran and we can't. We have to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.
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Kennedy spoke shortly before a senior U.S. defense official confirmed Wednesday that the Iranian-backed Houthis shot down a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone near the Yemeni Coast.
"We can confirm that a U.S. military MQ-9 remotely-piloted aircraft was shot down off the coast of Yemen by Houthi forces," the senior official told Fox News.
The senior U.S. defense official added that the aircraft was shot down while in international airspace over international waters off the coast of Yemen, and that U.S. Central Command officials are currently assessing the incident.
The MQ-9 was reportedly conducting surveillance over Yemen when a Houthi militia backed by Iran, fired at and shot down the $30 million drone Wednesday.
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