It’s coming up again and again: Ron Paul. Look I get it, you’re a libertarian and I agree it seems there is nowhere else to turn. The Democrats have marched off to the far left and are knocking on the doors of an authoritarian, totalitarian future of lock down and abandoned rights.
Most of the “official” Republicans don’t show much sign of understanding real personal freedoms in a framework of personal responsibilities either.
So like our frequent commenter here, juvanya, you’re drawn to the one man who, especially on domestic economics and personal freedoms in the US, says all the right things. I do get that.
And I also listen to the No Agenda Podcast and they love Ron Paul for most of the same reasons.
But on foreign policy he either doesn’t have a clue how it should be done or he’s evil. I veer toward the former. Barry Rubin picked apart a particular plank of Ron Paul platform on foreign issues: they hate us because we bombed them. It turns out if you actually look at Iranian history concerning the rise of the Shah instead of believing media soundbites, you learn something. When it comes to the 7th century form of Islam that rules Iran and as espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere: they hate us. Why? Because we exist and continue not to bow down and submit.
But that’s just one aspect. The following started off as an email to Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak relating to things they said on No Agenda yesterday, but if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for Israellycool readers!
1. The Israelis I know (real people) don’t want American GI’s fighting for us: we didn’t want Gulf War 1 or 2 and when the Scuds were falling the country had to forcibly restrained from fighting back. Iraq wasn’t Iran and even when the US et al went to Iraq the 2nd time, Israel was quietly screaming that Iran was the problem. All we ask is that if the shit really kicks off, you’ll help us with guns and bullets so we can hold our own: we don’t need guys, girls, gays or pilots: we have our own. In the past this hasn’t happened and in our hour of need we’ve been let down.
2. During the last war with Lebanon thousands of real Iranian and Syrian supplied rockets landed on real homes and real people in northern Israel. I know them. I know where they landed. I know my brother in law was wounded by an Iranian re-manufactured Chinese anti-tank missile. The ONLY reason we had so few civilian casualties was because we all (even me here in Tel Aviv 1 km from the sea) have mandated safe rooms in all new homes. In the north those saved countless lives. Some Israeli Arabs break the law and build without these expensive rooms: in the last war a disproportionate number of Israeli Arab civilians in the north died from Hezbollah’s rockets. Hezbollah called them Martyrs. Nice.
3. I know you guys follow the mantra “words matter” and they do, but your quibbling (and Dr P’s) about the exact words Ahmedinnnerjacket uses to wish me dead don’t matter in English translation. In the end it all comes down to the following because both Sunni and Shi Islam take the following line from the stories of the life of Muhammad as, well, “gospel” and very very seriously:
“The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
Add in that, like saying Voldermort in the Harry Potter books, Ahmedin-Jihad (which is what his name really means), can’t say Israel (there is a perfectly good Farsi word for us) so he uses various constructs around Zionist regime or Zionist rulers. There has never been any sane person who claims that should any Muslim army conquer present Israel, the result for us 6 million Jews (we’ve hit that number here now) living here would be pretty.
Update: I threw in the line above separating out the Jihad sound from the end of Ahmadinejad’s name more as a rhetorical flourish than a serious exegesis. I’m grateful to juvanya in the comments for the following:
As for Ahmadinejad, you are absolutely wrong about what it means and I highly recommend you correct this. Ahmadinejad means “from the race of Ahmad”.
There’s so much more not to like in Islamic scripture but if I had to pick only one it would be that one. It’s no coincidence this is a favourite passage when rulers want to whip up a mob. There’s no escaping that Muhammad by his own hand murdered hundreds of Jews: and he is the perfect man to be emulated.
Iran’s regime (and not just front man and puppet Ahmadinejad) are firm believers in an Iranian apocalyptic end of days form of Islam. The really are nuts: MAD doesn’t work with these guys and that is why we’re worried. I’ve also read the IAEA reports (I even have some inside info) but that agency was so thoroughly broken especially under El Baradi that we can’t trust anything it says (even when it says they are working on bad stuff).
In the end, and I know why you guys are suspicious of your government, there is one obligation I believe the Israeli government does take seriously and that is summed up by Never Again. The media in the US and the West never showed the photos of the train tracks, they never showed the photos of the camps and nothing was done. We’re not going quietly again. And after they showed it and after the “liberation”, the British kept as many Jews out of Israel as they could even (you don’t know this) cutting the food rations of the 100,000 survivors in the Displaced Persons camps in Europe if they tried to get to Israel.
BTW I, like many others in Israel, would prefer not to get the loan guarantees we get from the US with which we must buy US weapons. I’d prefer we made more of our own and exported them back to you but the realities of modern weapon systems are such that we don’t have the scale the US has. We already do that with upgrades as most of your top weapon systems have been improved here (again I have personal first hand experience with this). The F15 is only still in service because of Israeli upgrades.
I ain’t going back to the UK and America has turned me down once already. This is my home and we’ll fight to keep it.
