The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today said that Speaker Mike Johnson has turned the House Foreign Affairs Committee into an “Israel First hotbed of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism” after the committee added Rep. Randy Fine, who is notorious for extremely racist, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim statements and advocating Israel First policies.
A post by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Twitter welcomed Rep. Fine to the committee. The committee is led by Rep. Brian Mast, who previously compared the civilians of Gaza to Nazis and endorsed the bombing of civilian homes.
In a statement, CAIR Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said:
“The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top priority should be representing the American people and advancing American interests, not the interests of the Israeli government. Yet the committee is led by Brian Mast, who has equated Palestinian civilians with Nazis and walked through the halls of Congress wearing an IDF uniform, and now includes Randy Fine, who has celebrated an image of a dead Palestinian baby, threatened Muslim members of Congress, and called for nuking two million people in Gaza. Speaker Johnson has turned the House Foreign Affairs Committee into a hotbed of Islamophobia. As long as the Committee platforms genocidal racists and Israel Firsters like Mr. Mast and Mr. Fine, it will have no credibility.”
BACKGROUND:
As early as 2021, Fine openly endorsed violence against Muslims and Palestinians on his social media accounts. In June, in response to an X (formerly Twitter) post with an image of a Palestinian infant reportedly killed by an Israeli air strike, Fine responded with “Thanks for the pic!” That same year, Fine defended the bombing of a building with American journalists inside, publicly responding “Yes!” to a post inquiring if it was okay that reporters were among the targets. In another incident, he privately wrote “Go blow yourself up!” to a Florida Muslim after they challenged his social media posts, calling on an Islamophobic trope that Muslims are prone to violence or suicide bombings.
Fine’s attacks on Muslim and Palestinian communities only increased following the latest escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine in 2023.
In December 2023, as Palestinians awaited much-needed humanitarian aid, Fine mocked them, posting on his X account, “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets. There are plenty of those. #BombsAway.” Fine’s statement to deny Palestinians lifesaving aid effectively amounts to collective punishment of a civilian population. In September 2024, Fine brazenly celebrated the recent killing of 26-year-old Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, writing that it was “One less #MuslimTerrorist,” and further promoted violence against American citizens, encouraging the Israeli government to “#FireAway.”
Upon his bid to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, Fine has only become more emboldened in his violent and bigoted rhetoric toward American Muslim and Palestinian communities.
In November 2024, Fine warned Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that they should “consider leaving before [he] gets there,” followed by “#BombsAway,” an open threat against two Muslim members of Congress. Later, in 2025, Fine wrote to Tlaib again, calling her a “Muslim terrorist” and once more endorsed withholding aid from starving Palestinian civilians to whom Tlaib called attention.
Fine’s blatant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bigotry extends beyond members of Congress. In another X post from January 2025, Fine wrote that he was working on “the need to solve America’s #MuslimProblem,” invoking a common Islamophobic stereotype that an entire religious community poses a threat to American national security. In March 2025, while serving in the Florida State Senate, Fine told a member of the public wearing a keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian culture, to “enjoy your terrorist rag” and defended his anti-Palestinian remarks by claiming: “I’m the chairman, I can say whatever I want.” Later, in June, Fine’s rhetoric escalated, as he publicly called “for all ‘Palestinian’ organizations to be federally-designated terror organizations” in a post on X.
Fine’s racist and violent rhetoric against Muslim and Palestinian populations abroad has also escalated. In May 2025, Fine suggested on national television that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Gaza, invoking the atomic bombings of Japan as a model for dealing with Palestinians. When asked to explain this genocidal rhetoric, he doubled down with a racist and dehumanizing response, claiming that half of Gaza’s population is “married to their cousins” and has “mental defects,” and that “you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”
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CONTACT: CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, 404-285-9530, e-Mitchell@cair.com; CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-742-6448, rmccaw@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, ihooper@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Manager Ismail Allison, 202-770-6280, iallison@cair.com