Ron DeSantis redoubled his strong opposition to what are very hypothetical attacks from a friendly nation to a South Florida city for the second time in one week on Sunday.
Remarkably, the second time around comes after the U.S. Embassy in Nassau issued a statement of regret for the last time he used the imagery.
Yet again, he likened Israel's onslaught onto Hamas to what would happen if he, as Governor of the state of Florida, had to respond to "missiles" from the Bahamas to Fort Lauderdale in a 9/11 parallel metaphor.
"Can you imagine just after our 9/11, if three weeks later, people were demanding that we had a cease fire against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, we would, we would never have done that. And I think to myself as Governor of Florida, if we had, if someone in the Bahamas was launching missiles into Fort Lauderdale, we would not accept that for a minute," DeSantis vowed. "We would go in and we would flatten them in no time certain."
"And yet Israel is supposed to just live there with this, with this existential threat," he said Sunday, before moving onto the more imminent threat Israel faces from Hamas, during a campaign swing through Charles City.
During an event Saturday in Muscadine last weekend, he floated the unexpected metaphor likening terror attacks on Israelis to the distant hypothetical threat of "rockets" from the Bahama Islands.
"What are you supposed to do? I mean, I used to say even when they would just fire the normal rockets because they've been firing these rockets for years and years. And I thought to myself, like, if the Bahamas were firing rockets into Fort Lauderdale, like, we would not accept that for, like, one minute. I mean, we would just level it. We would never be willing to live like that as Americans," DeSantis said.
A day after Florida Politics first publicized the statement, the U.S. government responded via the Bahamian press.
"The Bahamas and the United States enjoy an enduring and unique partnership. (Charge d'Affairs Usha Pitts) regrets if DeSantis' comments suggested anything other than a close alliance between our two democratic nations," the US Embassy said in a statement to The Nassau Guardian.
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