MANCHESTER, N.H. — There are certain questions Rand Paul doesn’t like to answer, The Daily Caller discovered Saturday night.
In a 2009 interview with Iranian-state funded Press TV, Texas Rep. Ron Paul — the Kentucky senator’s father and a presidential candidate — said during the Israel-Gaza war that Gaza appeared to him to be like a concentration camp.
“To me I look at it like a concentration camp,” he said then.
Asked by TheDC in the spin room after the ABC News–Yahoo! News Republican primary debate whether his father still stood by that assessment of Gaza as a concentration camp, the younger Paul wouldn’t say.
“I don’t know about that comment,” Rand Paul said before pivoting to say that his “father doesn’t want [Iran] to have nuclear weapons, he thinks it would be destabilizing for them to have them, but he thinks there needs to be a healthy debate in Congress about what our response should be.”
Pressed again on whether his father still thinks Gaza is like a concentration camp, Paul mumbled “I don’t know that” before turning away from TheDC to answer other questions.
Later, while continuing to act as his father’s surrogate for reporters, Rand Paul was questioned about newsletters published under his father’s name for over a decade, which contained racial and anti-Israel invective as well as conspiratorial ramblings. When TheDC asked him if he ever read his father’s newsletters during the period they were published, he refused to answer.
“Anybody got any current events?” Sen. Paul said, turning away.
Rep. Paul maintains that he didn’t write the offending passages of the newsletters, though a Reason magazine report in 2008 demonstrated that he did profit from them.