Daniel Greenfield
Dec 13th, 2011
Do you know who the latest Zionist on the block is? It’s the man who called Israel, “an aggressive, national socialist state” and suggested that the original World Trade Center bombing may have really been carried out by Israel.
Then there’s the solicitation letter which boasted that this courageous fellow was exposing the, “Bohemian Grove–perverted, pagan playground of the powerful. Skull & Bones: the demonic fraternity that includes George Bush and leftist Senator John Kerry, Congress’s Mr. New Money. The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica.” So how is he a Zionist? Ask Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. According to him, Ron Paul is, “in one sense, a true Zionist, a believer in two core values of the Jewish liberation movement: Jewish independence and Jewish self-reliance.” The “sense” in which this is true is the sense in which the segregationists were really a black power movement who wanted black people to be independent and self-reliant.
This discussion began when the Republican Jewish Coalition failed to invite Ron Paul to their forum of leading presidential candidates. The RJC had not invited Paul back in 2007 either and there was no obvious reason for them to have done so this time around. A forum is not a debate and a Jewish group has no obligation to invite an anti-Israel candidate, just as a Catholic pro-life group has no obligation to invite Nancy Pelosi.
Goldberg perpetuates the myth that the issue is Ron Paul’s opposition to foreign aid. That is not the issue. If it were the issue, Governor Perry, who said that “The foreign aid budget in my administration for every country is going to start at zero dollars,” would not have been invited either.
Foreign aid is not the issue. The actual issue is that Ron Paul’s views on Israel and Jews (as well as American foreign policy) are indistinguishable from those of Pat Buchanan.
Ron Paul isn’t simply against foreign aid; he believes that the Israeli lobby controls Washington and involves American in foreign wars… and that this was among the causes of September 11. Paul has described the original World Trade Center bombing as a “retaliation” and during the Republican debates in 2007 and 2011 blamed American foreign policy for Al-Qaeda’s attacks.
The Buchanan comparison is true in more ways than one. Ron Paul has insisted that we should have stayed out of WW2 and let Nazi Germany and the USSR fight it out, and that by entering the war Churchill only prolonged it. Clearly this was another expression of Ron Paul’s Zionism and his desire to promote “Jewish independence and Jewish self-reliance.”
Ron Paul supporters will clamor that the above material comes from the Ron Paul Survival Report, which according to the Paul campaign was supposedly written for years by some mysterious stranger pretending to be Ron Paul. This unknown stranger discussed his time in Congress, his medical career and his wife Carol all in the first person. That the media actually bought this ridiculous explanation, even while actual Republicans were lynched for much less than writing in support of David Duke, should tell you all you need to know about Paul’s cheerleaders in the mainstream media. But let’s skip over the “Report” for a moment.
In an interview with Iranian television, Ron Paul complained that the president had not said anything to Israel about its horrible massacre, compared Gaza to a concentration camp, and made it rather clear that he sympathized with the terrorists. It wasn’t some unknown mysterious stranger signing Paul’s name to hateful screeds. It was the man himself doing an interview with the agents of a murderous regime responsible for the murders of numerous Americans.
What about the following statement in the House of Representatives?
“Bin Laden’s claims are straightforward. The U.S. defiles Islam with military bases on holy land in Saudi Arabia, its initiation of war against Iraq, with 12 years of persistent bombing, and its dollars and weapons being used against the Palestinians as the Palestinian territory shrinks and Israel’s occupation expands. There will be no peace in the world for the next 50 years or longer if we refuse to believe why those who are attacking us do it.”
Ron Paul isn’t calling for impartiality or agitating for non-interventionism because he supports Jewish self-reliance, but because he believes that Israel is the source of our problems. He has made it clear over and over again that he blames Israel’s own war on terrorists for terrorism, just as he blames America’s war on terror for terrorism against America.
Paul’s hatred for the United States government has led him to make a common intellectual cause with Islamic terrorists. As far back as his Survival Report days, Paul had gotten in the habit of responding to Islamic violence with conspiracy theories. When Tehran was calling for Rushdie’s head on a plate, Paul wondered if “Some of the people hyping the Rushdie affair have other motives? For example to make Moslems look bad for geopolitical reasons?” (Ron Paul Survival Report – April 1989)
In January 2002, Paul wrote, “How can we forever fail to address the provocative nature of U.S. taxpayer money being used to suppress and kill Palestinians and ignore the affront to the Islamic people that our military presence on their holy land of Saudi Arabia causes.” In that same article he described the terrorists as “those who so passionately hate us that suicide becomes a just and noble cause in their effort to kill and terrorize us”.
In his book, “A Foreign Policy of Freedom,” Ron Paul insisted that, “all recent presidents have reiterated our obligation to bleed for Israel.” American soldiers have never bled for Israel, but language of this sort plays well with Paul’s base, and continues feeding the myth that America’s confrontation with Islamic terror is due to Israel, rather than Islam.
Occasionally Paul switches gears and points out that a cutoff in foreign aid would be good for Israel. That may well be the case. I believe that and so do quite a few people who support Israel. But this issue stands entirely apart from Paul’s larger “Blame Israel” worldview.
Ron Paul is not simply anti-foreign aid, he is anti-Israel. That is the country he has singled out for blame over and over again. And while he has every right to his opinion, conservative Jewish groups have a right not to give him a forum.
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