WASHINGTON — At a large tea party rally Wednesday, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck changed the topic from domestic policy, railing against the Obama administration’s arming of Syrian rebels while the crowd booed loudly in agreement.
The move was striking, as since its inception in 2009, the tea party has largely stayed away from foreign policy issues, emphasizing issues of limited government instead.
“Now they are plotting a new war with Syria,” Beck said of the Obama administration during the “Audit the IRS” tea party rally, drawing boos from the thousands in attendance on the West Lawn of the Capitol.
Last week, the Obama administration announced they would send arms to the rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime after determining his forces had been using chemical weapons on its people.
“We are told that we have to pick sides to arm those, but those people who we are choosing to arm are so far down on the scale of decency that even Vladimir Putin this week asked if Americans knew that the people we were arming were actually eating their enemies on the battlefield,” he said.
A much-watched video has surfaced on Internet of a Syrian rebel eating the heart of a dead solider.
Referencing the president of Russia, Beck added, “The fact that Putin even had to ask that question and the fact that most Americans didn’t even know or had seen the video of that commander that we are arming now engaging in those things is an indictment not only of our Congress, our president, but our media and, quite honestly, ourselves.”