The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is the single most powerful voice on American foreign policy outside the executive branch. He sets the agenda on arms sales, humanitarian aid and diplomacy. House Republicans gave that job to Brian Mast in December 2024.

Here is what Mast had spent the previous fourteen months saying and doing.

"Which One Is an Innocent Civilian?"

In October 2023, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee markup of his own bill, Mast challenged the room:

"I would challenge anybody in here to point to me, which Palestinian is Hamas, and which one is an innocent civilian?"

And on humanitarian assistance to Gaza:

"Any assistance should be slowed down — any assistance."

Days later, on the House floor, he said the part that made international news:

"I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term 'innocent Nazi civilians' during World War II. It is not a far stretch to say there are very few innocent Palestinian civilians."

It Wasn't Just Rhetoric — He Wrote It Into a Bill

The reason this matters more than a bad quote is that Mast turned it into legislation, and he was the sponsor.

His bill, the Hamas International Financing Prevention Act, contained a humanitarian carve-out: the sanctions it imposed would not block food, medicine and medical devices reaching civilians.

Mast offered an amendment that deleted that exemption. In its place he substituted a case-by-case presidential waiver — meaning food and medicine would flow only if the White House affirmatively approved each instance.

When a colleague moved to restore the humanitarian language, AIPAC urged members to vote against it.

The Uniform

Two weeks before that markup, on October 13, 2023, Mast walked into a House Republican meeting at the Capitol wearing an Israeli army uniform, with a shoulder patch identifying him as a Sar-El volunteer — the program he had served with in 2015, doing civilian support work on an Israeli base.

Asked about it by a reporter, Mast answered: "Tlaib's got her flag, I've got my uniform."

A member of the United States Congress, wearing a foreign country's military uniform to work, while that country was at war and while he sat on the committee overseeing American policy toward it.

"These Are Not Innocent Palestinian Civilians"

In early 2024, a CodePink activist confronted Mast in the Capitol and asked him directly: "You haven't seen the pictures of all the babies being killed?"

His answer, as reported by The Daily Beast:

"These are not innocent Palestinian civilians."

When the activists compared the destruction of Gaza to Dresden, Mast added: "And there's more infrastructure that needs to be destroyed."

That is a sitting congressman, asked about dead babies, replying that they were not innocent.

Who Pays for This

Mast's position is his own. But it has been extraordinarily well funded.

Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Brian Mast $901,030 over his career — and AIPAC has been his single largest donor in each of the last three election cycles, including $331,623 this cycle. He is one of the clearest examples of a broader pattern we've documented: a handful of billionaires funding a lobby that now effectively owns the Republican Party's foreign policy.

He is not the only Republican to talk this way about Gaza's civilians — Tim Walberg was recorded saying Gaza should be handled "like Nagasaki and Hiroshima" and that the U.S. shouldn't spend "a dime" on humanitarian aid there. But Walberg is a backbencher. Mast holds the gavel.

He Has Never Walked Any of It Back

Mast has not retracted the Nazi comparison. He has not retracted "these are not innocent Palestinian civilians." He has not disowned the amendment stripping food and medicine out of his own bill. There was no apology, because from his perspective there was nothing to apologize for — and his party rewarded him with the chairmanship a year later.

This is the same congressman who, after Parkland, wrote about "children I swore to defend" — and then voted against the assault weapons ban he himself had called for. The moral language comes out when it's useful. The votes go the other way.

Florida's 21st District is choosing whether to send him back for a sixth term. What he does in that job is not abstract. He decides which humanitarian aid moves and which doesn't, and he has told us in his own words how he thinks about the people on the other end of it.

We deserve better.

Source

• GOP Rep. Brian Mast Denies "Innocent Palestinian Civilians" Exist — The Intercept, November 1, 2023.