Following last Tuesday’s election, RWW will bring you our list of the “The Ten Scariest Republicans Heading to Congress.” Our fourth candidate profile is on Florida’s Allen West:
In one of the Tea Party’s biggest victories, Florida’s Allen West defeated incumbent Democrat Ron Klein in a rematch of their 2008 race. West, an Army veteran, became a YouTube sensation by criticizing “this tyrannical government” and crying out: “if you’re here to stand up to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.” He said that the country was engaging in “class warfare” between “a producing class and an entitlement class,” which is composed of Obama supporters.
While serving in Iraq, he was forced out of the Army for his violent handling of an investigation of a police officer. During the interrogation, West dragged “him outside, pushed his head into the sand, and fired a gun next to his face to get him to sing.” According to West: “It wasn’t torture. Seeing Rosie O’Donnell naked would be torture.”
West also has close ties to the Outlaws motorcycle gang, which an NBC News report found had criminal-ties and a website that features a page honoring members who are in prison, extolling “members convicted of violent crimes, including murder.” In a letter, West wrote: “Please, no more references to ‘criminal’ because I can tell you, they have the utmost respect for me and that which I seek to achieve. I was never more amazed at how members of the Outlaws guarded me during a one hour cell phone radio interview.”
Moreover, he addressed events sponsored by Outlaws-linked organizations, used Outlaws members to harass his rival’s campaign workers, and writes a column for their magazine. Their magazine, “Wheels on the Road,” has also used anti-Semitic, racist and sexist material, and once called women “oral relief stations.”
West encouraged his supporters to use violence in suppressing the votes of opponents, saying, “You’ve got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house.”
He maintains that it is “unfortunate” that gays and lesbians are serving in the military, and compares homosexuality to adultery. West is also radically anti-choice. On abortion rights, he has said “I believe all future discussion on this issue should move us toward the elimination of abortion except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” and accused pro-choice groups of “promot[ing] abortion as a means of birth control.”
West wants to eliminate the progressive tax system. He supports tax cuts for the rich, and calls Wall Street Reform a “sham.” He’s advocated for eliminating the Departments of Energy and Education.
On immigration, he claims that illegal immigrants should not have access to care in emergency rooms, and that Muslim terrorists are coming through the border with Mexico. West’s first decision as Representative-elect was to choose as his chief of staff right-wing radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who called for illegal immigrants to be “hung on the central square. ”
A Republican partisan, West said: “I hate big-tent. I hate inclusiveness. And I hate outreach.” West uses extreme rhetoric against Democrats and liberals. He said that liberals resented the fact that he saved the lives of American soldiers. On the anti-Islam blog Atlas Shrugs, he wrote that progressives “detest anyone who has the courage of conviction and love of America, something which they find unconscionable.” In the same post, he wrote, “”Liberals seek to destroy any institution of intrinsic value: God, country, family, honor, valor, courage, VIRTUE… Why? Because if such things exist, then they must be defended, which brings them back to their fear of action.” He also claims that Democratic combat veterans Joe Sestak and Patrick Murphy “hate the military.”
West says that Obama does not “care for this country” and wants to “make it like some type of third world socialist cesspool,” and is not an American since he grew up in Indonesia and “never played little league baseball.” He compared Obama and his “tyrannical government” to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany, and dubbed the Obama Administration a “thugocracy.”
Militantly anti-Muslim, he consistently criticizes Arabs and Muslims, and he told Atlas Shrugs’ Pamela Geller that the Bible is evidence the Arabs are a “wild” people: “the Angel of the Lord said to [Hagar]: Behold you are with child, and you shall bear a son, you shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your affliction. He shall be a wild man; His hand shall be against everyman, and every man’s hand against him. And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.’ Ishmael of course became the beginning of the Arab people….and God’s word is immutable truth.”
He has suggested that there are “thirty-six training camps” run by terrorists inside the US, and that soldiers are becoming “brainwashed” by terrorists who “infiltrated the military.” According to West, Islam is “not a religion” but a “theo-political belief system and construct” that must be destroyed.
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