Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Issa Defends Record on Mideast

Rep. Darrell Issa, the San Diego Republican who is funding the recall drive against Governor Gray Davis, says his record on Israel is solid, and Democratic efforts to depict him as a pro-Palestinian extremist are “a smear.”

Issa, a third-generation Lebanese-American, met with Yasser Arafat in April along with two other congressman in an attempt to get him to stop blocking Palestinian reforms. He defended that effort as “appropriate,” arguing that the administration’s opposition to contacts with Arafat effectively left the Palestinian leader in the dark about “what he must do” to satisfy American aims.

Issa said a speech he had made in Beirut in October 2001, calling for Hezbollah to disband, had been distorted to appear pro-Hezbollah in Lebanese and Iranian newspaper accounts. As proof, he provided an Associated Press report, which stated that Issa had “told reporters that for the United States to remove Hezbollah from its list of terrorist organizations, the Lebanese-based group must renounce terrorism and confine itself to its humanitarian and parliamentary activities.”

On domestic issues, Issa described himself as “pro-life” and a “supporter of the Second Amendment,” but said he had never sought to overturn California’s gun control laws. He said he has never supported offshore drilling, but said the country might legitimately tap offshore oil resources “as a strategic reserve in time of need.”

He said that his candidacy is about “making California a safe place for business and jobs” and said that Davis had stinted the education system in his budget. He said that more than a million Californians agreed with him that Davis had cooked the state’s books.

“If you want to call that a vast, right-wing conspiracy, 30% of them are Democrats,” he said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.