RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am anxious not to be overly judgmental in telling Israel exactly what to do. I think it’s in many ways they’re business.

Hold it, Cal, that doesn’t sound so bad to me.  Maybe the NRB crew has been too tough on him. Just wait, grasshopper…

But it’s our business because we are, not only very close allies of Israel, we finance Israel, so any weapon they use, ship they own, or plane they own, or any threat they make, we back them up.

Ah, now there’s the Crazy Uncle Ron we all know and love!  For just how much we “back up” Israel these days, click here and here.  Or maybe here.  Then again, you could also click here, or perhaps here…

We back them up on this embargo preventing food and medicine going into Gaza.  So we’re morally responsible and people see us as one and the same.  So-but I think this is atrocious. But I think sanctions and embargos and boycotts preventing goods from going in is actually an act of war, so this is why recently a few of us voted against sanctions against the Iranians…it’s absolutely wrong to prevent people that are starving and having problems, almost like in concentration camps, and saying, ‘yes, we endorse this whole concept that we can’t allow ships to go in there in a humanitarian way.

If you, unlike the Congressman from Texas’s 14^th District, feel the slightest sense of obligation to inform yourself about the facts of any given situation before opening your mouth (and feel obliged to tell the truth about those facts once you do know them), you’d know this is all bogus: the blockade was born out of legitimate and urgent security concerns, the IDF has been letting humanitarian aid through, and Gaza’s “concentration camp”-like conditions have been vastly exaggerated.

How did Paul react when Don Imus pointed this out?

Well, they’re [Hamas] an elected government, I mean, Hamas? We have thousands of our soldiers dying to say that we want elections, and we want democracy, so we finally get one in Palestine, and they elect Hamas, and then all of a sudden, ‘oh, you elected the wrong people! [laughs] So, you’re not legitimate, you stole the government!’ Well, our CIA, when we have elections, frequently rig elections, and is Karzai a truly elected leader of Afghanistan? He’s a puppet. So this whole notion that we should die for spreading democracy and then when we get democracy we undermine it. I mean, this all started back in the fifties when Mossadegh was elected as a legitimate democratic leader of Iran, and we went, and our CIA, that was our beginning of the CIA overthrowing governments, and we got rid of him.

Note well that none of this addresses Imus’s question.  However overly optimistic some may have been about the power of elections to transform the Middle East, or whatever the CIA did or didn’t do in the past (and beware taking Uncle Ron at face value when it comes to history), it’s all immaterial to whether or not Paul’s initial characterization of the situation was accurate.  It’s clearly not, but Paul doesn’t seem to care.

This, along with his overall record of lying on behalf of anti-liberty Islamic bigots, more than proves that reasonable, informed people can no longer claim in good conscience that Ron Paul is an honest man who can be trusted to accurately assess foreign policy questions. (This, of course, makes him ultimately unreliable in any policy area.)

They’re probably not the best people in the world, but, y’know, didn’t we talk to the Soviets?  They weren’t very good people. We talked to the Chinese over the years, and they were thugs. And yet, in talking to them and dealing with these countries like China, actually our relationships have improved. So this whole idea that we have absolute control over people in Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank, I don’t think that’s right.

“Not the best people”?!  Rod Blagojevich and Paris Hilton “aren’t the best people.” Hamas are monsters.  It’s not as if the two governments disagree on an issue or two, or they just had some trade agreements that went sour. 6,000 rockets since 2007, murderous & bigoted children’s television, and their very charter committed to Israel’s destruction; doesn’t any of this qualify as “an act of war” in Paul’s mind?  Who’s calling for “absolute control over” the Palestinians? Further, where does Paul draw the line regarding what talking to one’s enemies can and can’t accomplish? (Then again, the decade the free world spent talking to Saddam Hussein worked out pretty well, so maybe Paul’s on to – oh, wait.  No it didn’t…)

If Hamas’s current aggression doesn’t justify military force and skepticism toward negotiations, it’s hard to imagine what would persuade Paul to give Israel the green light—or whether or not he feels Israel is entitled to any options other than “surrender” and “die.”

Paulestinians relentlessly boast that Ron Paul is Congress’s last true conservative, but nothing could be further from the truth.  His refusal to make moral distinctions between fundamentally unlike states and his childlike faith in talking to evil plant him firmly on the hard Left.  The Right indulges such immoral nonsense at America’s peril.

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Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.