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The principles that rule this blog

Principles that will govern my thoughts as I express them here (from my opening statement):


  • Freedom of the individual should be as total as possible, limited only by the fact that nobody should be free to cause physical injury to another, or to deprive another person of his freedoms.
  • Government is necessary primarily to provide those services that private enterprise won't, or won't at a price that people can afford.
  • No person has a right to have his own beliefs on religious, moral, political, or other controversial issues imposed on others who do not share those beliefs.

I believe that Abraham Lincoln expressed it very well:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot
so well do, for themselves — in their separate, individual capacities.”


Comments will be invited, and I will attempt to reply to any comments that are offered in a serious and non-abusive manner. However, I will not tolerate abusive or profane language (my reasoning is that this is my blog, and so I can control it; I wouldn't interfere with your using such language on your own!)

If anyone finds an opinion that I express to be contrary to my principles, they are welcome to point this out. I hope that I can make a rational case for my comments. Because, in fact, one label I'll happily accept is rationalist.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Anti-Semites: Ron Paul, and Pat Buchanan -- does the GOP want their kind?

The Washington Examiner has formally endorsed Mitt Romney, but clearly some of its columnists have different ideas. Today I saw a column by Timothy P. Carney, a columnist who has a twice-weekly column in that paper, and who seems to be favoring Ron Paul. Carney refers to Paul as “[t]he principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating, libertarian Republican congressman from Texas,” and while his libertarianism has much to recommend him (though it goes to a far-too-extreme degree, by my standards), there is one particular aspect of Ron Paul that Carney seems to deny: Ron Paul's anti-Semitism.

Of course, in that same column, Carney seems to deny that Pat Buchanan was anti-Semitic. And Buchanan has made some statements that cannot be construed any other way. For example,

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats' idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.


And there is quite a number of other quotes by Pat Buchanan that can be found, such as (in 1990):

After denouncing a group of commentators with Jewish names, including Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger, Buchanan wrote: “If it comes to war, it will not be the civilized world humping up that bloody road to Baghdad, it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown."


And, (in 2007):

“If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where the real power is at…"


If Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, Hitler was a rabbi! But we are really talking about Ron Paul. And it doesn't take much digging to find quotes by him that demonstrate his anti-Semitism. In fact, the same Examiner that featured Carney's column recently carried a column by Philip Klein, with such notes as:

Nearly three years ago, Israel launched a counterattack on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza who had been firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. In early January 2009, Paul released a web video in which he charged that Israel was launching a “pre-emptive war,” that Palestinians were living in a “concentration camp” and that they merely had “a few small missiles.”

He then repeated this claim on Press TV — the state-owned propaganda channel of Iran's Islamist government. “To me, I look at it like a concentration camp, and people are making homemade bombs,” he said of the situation in Gaza, adding sarcastically, “like they're they aggressors?”

Not only did Paul inaccurately portray Israel as the aggressor, and ignore the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks, but he also played into the global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel. Israel's enemies think that Jews have exploited global sympathy for the Holocaust, so they routinely liken Israelis to Nazis with phrases like “concentration camp.” That isn't an isolated instance of Paul employing the term. He also used it in 2010, when the Israeli navy blocked a flotilla funded by a group with terrorist ties as it attempted to break the blockade of Gaza — a blockade designed to prevent weapons from reaching Gaza terrorists. Nine of the “activists” aboard one ship were killed in the act of attacking the Israeli commandos who intercepted them — an event well documented on video. In response, Paul again condemned Israel, reiterating his claim that Palestinians were living in “concentration camps” in Gaza.


One can accept Paul's desire to avoid foreign wars as a product of his desire to reduce the role of government in general. But his desire in particular to avoid wars in support of Israel is not just that. It is clearly a sign of an underlying anti-Semitism.

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