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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined America’s Newsroom to discuss his criticism of ambassador to Israel nominee Jack Lew and the progressive left’s anti-Israel rhetoric. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble. 

On Rubio’s criticism of ambassador to Israel nominee Jack Lew:

“[Jack Lew] testifies before Congress and says, ‘We are never going to help Iran get access to our banks.’ We now know he did that. He precisely did that through a special license that was not published…was kept secret, and it got out in the press. 

“So we asked him, ‘Are you doing anything to help Iran circumvent the sanctions?’ They were pressuring at least two banks, we now know, to help Iran turn dollar accounts in an Omani bank into euros. He denied not once but twice, in responses to my letters in 2015, 2016, that they were doing it. Now it turns out that that was not the case. They deliberately misled us. 

“You add to that all these other things…, [such as] his support of that resolution at the UN that basically says all of East Jerusalem is illegally occupied by the Israelis. The list goes on and on about things that they’ve done. [He] obviously misled us about the deal…. [H]e went out and gave a speech saying these were going to be the toughest inspections ever. But he knew that the deal would not allow us to inspect military facilities. Where do we think they would build nuclear weapons? Probably in a military facility. He misled Congress repeatedly. Now this guy wants to be an ambassador. 

“And he’s anti-Netanyahu. He has taken shots at Netanyahu in the past. This is probably the wrong time to send someone like this there. The president’s entitled to their ambassadors, and they’re all not going to be people we like or people we would appoint. But it can’t be someone that actually undermines, especially at this moment, our relationship with Israel.”

On the progressive left’s false allegation that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital:

“She [Representative Rashida Tlaib] doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and she’s just parroting a Hamas line…. We need to stop referring to the Gaza ministry of health. It is the Hamas ministry of health…. Senator Warner, a Democrat, and I – he’s the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I’m the vice chairman – we put out a statement together. We both reviewed the intelligence available, not just Israeli intelligence but U.S. intelligence and that of others, and we are convinced that this was not an Israeli strike. There’s multiple pieces of evidence that point to the fact, including video evidence that this was a rocket that malfunctioned and landed on this hospital. 

“[Representative Tlaib] has aligned with not just the Palestinian cause, but [she] has looked for ways in the past to justify violence against Jews in Israel. The danger here is that these aren’t just annoying words. They are leading to action. We see unrest in Amman, we see unrest in Lebanon, we see growing unrest in the West Bank, we see it developing all over the world. When you go out and have people parroting this line that Israel is targeting hospitals, it is going to lead to ancillary violence in all these other places that actually…begin to threaten the governments of countries that are critical to stability in the Middle East, like Jordan, like Lebanon, potentially like Egypt.”