When it comes to crises, Rep. Cory Mills has been there before.
Before entering politics, the first-term Florida Republican was a military man who served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne, where he earned a Bronze Star and was wounded by both an IED and an Iranian-made explosive, according to his congressional biography.
And with Saturday’s terrorist attack in Israel bringing war to the country, and potentially the Middle East, Mills was back at it.
According to The Floridian, the congressman was on the ground in Israel on Wednesday, facilitating the escape of 32 Americans.
Mills said he was “helping and showing solidarity with our Israeli brethren and helping Americans evacuate.”
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Mills told The Floridian there are hundreds more Americans waiting to come home.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The Israeli situation has some resemblance to August and September 2021, when President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan left Americans stranded in a country that’s now ruled by the Muslim fanatics of the Taliban.
Amid that abysmal failure of American policy, Mills flew to Afghanistan to help arrange the escape of an American woman and her three children.
Of course, any comparison between the U.S. humiliation in Afghanistan and the war in Israel is going to be off base in many ways.
Israel is a modern democracy and a technologically advanced society. Afghanistan is a backwater now in the grip of an Islamist theocracy that apparently thinks life was better in 670 A.D.
In Afghanistan, the government’s armed forces collapsed in the face of their foes (or very possibly joined them).
In Israel, that isn’t going to happen. The Israel Defense Forces have spent more than 75 years establishing themselves as a tenacious military power, enabling the tiny Jewish state to survive since its 1948 founding as an island of freedom in a hostile sea of authoritarian Muslim enemies.
And for Israel, there’s really no accommodation possible with the enemy. The Hamas terrorists who launched the war from the southern enclave of Gaza are dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state.
In the north, the terrorist group Hezbollah, which is likewise set on eradicating Israel, rules the territory on the country’s Lebanese border. To the east, the vicious regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is supported by the terrorist state of Iran, which is probably Israel’s most dangerous enemy.
The goal of all of them — whether terror group or terror-supporting government — is the destruction of Israel and the death of its Jewish population. The sheer barbarism of the Hamas attack, with its murders, rapes and kidnappings, proved that beyond all doubt.
And Mills proved that there are American lawmakers willing to put themselves in harm’s way when the need arises.
(It’s worth noting that, according to Politico, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman of New York were in Israel on the day of the Hamas attack on separate trips. Both returned to the U.S. immediately.)
When Biden on Tuesday delivered a speech about the act of war against Israel, he made only a passing reference to Americans being held hostage by Hamas — and absolutely no demand for their immediate release.
Mills, by contrast, flew directly to Israel in a time of war and made sure Americans were able to get out.
The Biden administration, despite sending U.S. aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean, has demonstrated neither the will nor the competence to face the crisis — or any crisis — successfully.
Considering the anti-Israel positions of left-wing Democrats and his own petty antipathy toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s almost surprising Biden is taking Israel’s side in the first place.
Mills, on the other hand, has demonstrated both the willingness and the ability to handle a crisis in which Americans are in danger from an Islamist military action — again.
There’s a reason he’s a Republican.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
