Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on prioritizing Israel’s security

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. There’s a woman in the United States congress who has spent, well, most of her life waging that war with great courage and conviction and effect. She is the former chairwoman of the House foreign affairs committee. These days, she chairs its Mid-East and North African subcommittee. She is, of course, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who represents the people of the twenty-seventh congressional district of Florida, and a dear friend of mine and this program. We’re always glad to have her with us. Welcome back, Congresswoman.

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

Well, thank you so much, Frank. There is no way I’m going to live up to that.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

You do every day. Listen, I want to ask you a bunch of questions quickly, so let me move through this smartly. One of your colleagues and friends I know in the Florida delegation is Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And I wonder what you made of the fix she finds herself in now as her party is veering into what can only be described as a really anti-Israel attitude. With the appointment to the platform committee of a couple of Bernie Sanders anti-Israel partisans. And is this really a fundamental transformation of the Democratic party that we’re watching before our eyes?

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

Well, first of all, I do want to state what you had just stated. I know your listeners don’t want to hear this, but I am a friend of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She’s a good South Florida colleague. We share Miami Beach together and I’ve known her since the days that she was a legislative aide to her predecessor, Congressman Peter Deutsch. So I’ve known her over twenty-five years. Now, one thing totally different from that is the platform of the party. And I’ve got to admit that that causes me a lot of grief to think that the platform for either party would ever turn into something that is neutral on the issue of the protection and the security of Israel. So I hope that folks who are involved in setting up the platform will fight to make sure that it is a strong platform in both parties about the security of Israel. Anybody who’s been to Israel understands, has an even better understanding of how fragile the security is for Israel, even though they have a robust system, thanks to the US and so many partners, to defend herself. But they are never on the offensive. They are always defending themselves. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to the Democratic platform. There’s some issue that I have with the Republican platform. So we belong to different parties. I may disagree with my party on some issues, but one thing that the parties should always agree to is the security and the state of Israel has to be one of the best and robust programs, military, whether it’s Iron Dome or David’s Sling, etcetera. We host a lot of programs with Israel. And she’s surrounded by hostile neighbours, so let’s hope it doesn’t happen because that would be dreadful for America’s security as well.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That’s really the key point. And I guess the best case is that this party platform of the Democrats turns out to be neutral. I worry it may be even worse than that. Ileana, let me ask you, you’ve, of course, been one of the champions inside the United States congress opposing those who are trying to destroy Israel. And I’m afraid that includes the Palestinians. There’s an effort underway at the moment, as you know, to create a Palestinian state. Not through negotiations with Israel, but unilaterally. The French have been championing this. They’re pushing the so-called Mid-East Quartet to a new action in this regard. But I just wondered, one of the things that I know you’ve been involved in in the past is trying to insure that the law is enforced with respect to the United Nations or other organisations essentially giving the status of a member in sort of connoting a nation-state status to the Palestinian Authority. That seems to have happened now in this so-called climate change treaty. Not being treated as a treaty in the United States senate as you know. But nonetheless, would you be of the view that this should not be something that American tax dollars are going into if the Palestinians are made a member state?

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

Well, we – that has been an issue with which, as you point out, I have been involved in for many years and I have filed legislation and amendments and have spoken on the floor repeatedly about the Palestinians not having a vote, not having a say in the United Nations. It is not a state. The first thing that the Palestinians need to do is have a peace accord with Israel. Just to say that Israel exists for them is a pretty long haul. They don’t even want to acknowledge Israel’s existence. Yet alone, when it happened, that debacle that UNESCO did when they admitted as a member – what happened? We cut off the funding for UNESCO. Now, every year, they come up to me, the UNESCO head and everybody else to say, we need flexibility. Flexibility for the Obama administration means, let us do what we want to do regardless of the law. The law says, any entity that admits Palestine cannot receive US funding. Now they’re going to try to do it on many other issues and many other agencies or sub-official agencies and we’ve got to be very cognisant that this goes against US law. It’s not flexibility. It is against the law for any entity to be funded. So I’m going to continue that. We need to reform the entire United Nations system, but that law must be sacrosanct.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Wonderful. Hold that line, as they say. Our guest is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, representing the people of the twenty-seventh district of Florida. Congresswoman, let me ask you about, very quickly if I may, one issue that I know you’re also tracking, the Iran deal. Of course, we’ve seen this spectacular disclosure about what’s basically been a propaganda operation run out of the White House, using the ploughshares fund to create an echo chamber and so on to sell congress basically a bill of goods. And I not that this morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that the man president Obama just had killed in Afghanistan was coming out of Iran where his family resides, demonstrating that the Shia-Sunni split is a sometime thing, but more to the point demonstrating Iran’s support for terrorism. What do you make of this and what should we be doing about this so-called Iran deal?

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

Well, this is unbelievable and this should be one of the biggest scandals of the Obama administration, but of course the media was getting paid. They were getting paid to sell this deal as it was brought out in that New York Times magazine article that profiled Ben Rhodes, who was one of the president’s top foreign policy aides. And AP and everybody has picked it up. But this ploughshares fund, what the mission was, to really sell this deal, they gave National Public Radio, NPR, a hundred thousand dollars last year to help report it on the pack. And it’s been sold as – it’s just a bill of goods, it’s – to create that echo chamber, that’s the very phrase that Ben Rhodes used. An echo chamber. Outside groups like ploughshares helped carry out the message. And this should be a bigger scandal than it is. I cannot believe that folks are just, oh, okay, that’s fine. I mean, I just point out NPR, but that’s one of many. Folks, people on Twitter who were supposedly journalists and they were tweeting almost verbatim what the administration had been giving them. So they had a whole media room. And using taxpayer funds to pay these outlets to parrot back the words about why this deal is so good. And the more we know about this nuclear deal, Frank, as you know and your listeners know, the more worried we should be. We are no longer treating Iran as the existential threat that it is, not just to Israel, but to America’s security. Iran continues to do deals with entities that are adversaries, enemies of the United States. They’re going to continue to not report everything that they’re doing. And of course, the kindergarten standards that the administration has set out in that Iranian deal are so low that they’re going to keep saying every six months, yes, they’re complying, yes, they’re complying. Well, why wouldn’t they comply? They’re such low standards. We used to have really tough UN Security Council resolutions against the Iran program. What we’ve given them is really a licence to create a nuclear weapon. It’s dangerous for the whole planet.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Amen. Well, I hope one of the other things that you’ll look at, Congressman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is the possibility that what you’ve just described really transgresses American law about using taxpayer dollars to propagandise the American people. Because I think that’s exactly what’s going on here. And you’re right, it’s national security fraud with respect to this treaty.

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

And to not be truthful about it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Exactly.

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

Look, if you’re going to give NPR, any entity, the money, they can accept it, but be honest about it. Say in your reporting that you’re funded by the Obama administration, that this is not unbiased reporting, but at least be truthful about the source of the funding. And that’s the troubling part.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

I have so much I want to talk to you further about. I hope we’ll have a chance to do so again soon. We didn’t even get to Venezuela or the Ladies in White, which I know you’re very concerned about –

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN:

[OVERLAP] Oh, I hope we’ll do it next time.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— the evidence of the disaster in Cuba. But we’re so grateful to you for your time, Congresswoman, and for your leadership on all of these subjects. Come back to us very soon. Luis Fleischman is next.