Immediately following his disappointing third-place showing in South Carolina on Saturday, presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) headed directly to Nevada to campaign ahead of Tuesday night’s Republican caucus.
Sunday, at a rally in Pahrump, a town of about 36,000 in central Nevada, the senator gave his usual stump speech. But midway through, with the crowd fully fired up, he made an impassioned case for defending the sovereignty of Israel.
“America will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel,” he said. “Between the terrorist who straps dynamite on his chest in order to murder innocent women and children, and the soldiers who are seeking to protect the innocent, we should not be neutral, because they’re not similarly situated.”
The reference was an issued-based attack on front-runner Donald Trump, who has said during a CNN town hall event that it would be difficult to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians if he campaigned strictly on one side or the other. Those comments were later reported as he was “neutral” about defending Israel.
