WATCH: General Flynn Makes “Pants On Fire” Statements At A Massachusetts Synagogue
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By Susie Davidson February 17, 2017
General Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who resigned Monday night after reports that he had possibly lied to the FBI, spoke at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusets as a part of their Hausman Memorial Speaker Series in August — and, as it turns out, also made false statements there that were debunked as “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFacts and subsequently called out by CNN.
In the August 23 speech, entitled “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies,” Flynn vociferously restated the false claim that Florida Democrats had attempted to impose Sharia law at the state and local level, and emphatically praised Florida Republicans for preventing them from succeeding.
Flynn also called Islamism a vicious cancer:
“We are facing another “ism,” just like we faced Nazism, and fascism, and imperialism and communism,” Flynn said at ATC. “This is Islamism, it is a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people on this planet and it has to be excised.”
When an audience member asked if President Obama was a Muslim, Flynn replied:
“This is an individual who has an ideology, and he has apologized for all the ill will of the United States of America over our history, for who we have been. He has. The apology tour. His speech in Cairo was unbelievable. I’m sitting there and I’m listening to it because I was deployed at that time and we were watching what our president’s saying because it’s going to cause some impact, and boy did it cause some impact. It caused the Muslim world to blow up.”
But Flynn reserved his largest criticism of President Obama for his appeal for greater military action. “Give the military a mission and unleash them,” he urged, lamenting that the US military’s hands were then tied. “The harder part is the political and the diplomatic component,” he said, “especially if you have leadership in this country that is unwilling to define the enemy that we are facing…[rather than] just having this ideological direction that you want to take this country [toward], which is essentially what has happened for the past eight years.”
The country, said Flynn, had shifted more to the hard left than ever before. “I hope, I pray that it’s reversible,” he said, looking to a successive Administration.” I’m not so sure. I do believe that historic leaders show up on our stage periodically to play that role that needs to be played,” he said, citing Abraham Lincoln as one of them.
“Now I don’t know if that’s what’s stepping up, but it’s certainly a different type of leader that’s now in the political fray,” he said, likely referring to Trump, whose campaign he supported.
If so, we can now speculate, from the vantage point of the new — and decidedly un-Lincolnlike — President’s nascent foreign policy record, that Flynn may be eating those words.
“I know what we just saw is not somebody who had any leadership skills when they were running the first time,” he stated. “Zero leadership skills. There are more leadership skills in a Sergeant E5 [those with two years or less of military service] than there were in this current President when he first ran for President.”
In November, CNN’s KFile also reported that in his online activity, Flynn had both shared fake news and routinely interacted with alt-righters as well as anti-Semites on Twitter. In July, it was exposed that Flynn had retweeted an anti-Semitic message. He quickly deleted the message, saying that the retweet was an accident. Also in July, Flynn linked to a tweet that accused Hillary Clinton of wearing a hijab in solidarity with Islamic terrorists, when she had, in diplomatic courtesy, put on a head cover during a 2009 trip to a mosque in Pakistan.
“This is not showing respect. This is showing disrespect for American Values and Principles. #NeverHillary,” Flynn wrote.
As he vilified President Obama, the crowd at Ahavath Torah Congregation cheered him on with resounding applause; one can’t help but wonder what they are thinking now.
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