Rick Santorum: Would expect Rand Paul’s Islamic State comments from ‘maybe Bernie Sanders’

Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who announced on Wednesday he is running for president in 2016, said he would expect to hear Sen. Rand Paul’s remarks on the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group from “maybe Bernie Sanders,” but not from someone seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

“I would expect to hear that from maybe Bernie Sanders — I don’t expect to hear that from someone running for the Republican nomination,” Mr. Santorum told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think that is just fundamentally a misunderstanding of the nature of the enemy we face.”

In an interview that aired Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, blamed the rise of the Islamic State on GOP hawks “who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS.”

“So everything that they have talked about in foreign policy they’ve been wrong about for 20 years and yet they have somehow the gall to keep saying and pointing fingers otherwise,” said Mr. Paul, who is running for president in 2016.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, is currently former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s only declared rival for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Mr. Santorum went on to say that the terrorists hate “everything we believe in.”

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“ISIS didn’t come about because of the…arms that America left behind - ISIS came about because they hate everything that we believe in and we stand for,” he said. “That’s what the problem is. They hate who we are, not necessarily what we do. But they hate who we are.”

“Don’t believe me — believe them,” he said. “That’s what they say.”

Mr. Paul has come under fire over his foreign policy views from others within the GOP ranks as well, with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declaring Wednesday that Mr. Paul is “unsuited to be commander-in-chief.”

Paul adviser Doug Stafford fired back at Mr. Jindal’s comment by saying that Mr. Paul “is the only Republican running it seems who is willing to learn from our mistakes in the Middle East in order to keep us safer and stronger.”