The Pauls have a longstanding strain of anti-Semitism in their libertarian politics. Sen. Paul has tried his hand at scrubbing some of that as he gears up for a presidential run. The WFB has the details.
Sen. Rand Paul’s (R., Ky.) office deleted a “student reading list” that promoted anti-Israel books from his official Senate website this week, shortly after the Weekly Standard published an article last Friday highlighting the controversial recommendations.
Paul’s Senate website has advertised the list of 17 books as “suggested titles for a student, or anyone else interested in learning more about freedom and the role of government in a free society” under a “students” section since 2011.
While most of the recommended titles focus on economic policy, the list also included books that claim the “Israel Lobby” controls U.S. foreign policy, call for the United States to cut ties with the Jewish state, and argue that support for Israel is anti-Christian and anti-American.
One of the recommended titles, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency by Patrick Buchanan, has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for containing “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
In the book, Buchanan accused “the Beltway Likud” of plotting the war in Iraq “long before 9/11.”
“President Bush no longer sits at the head of the negotiating table, but directly behind [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon,” Buchanan wrote.
Buchanan also compared former Bush adviser Richard Perle with “Fagin,” the villainous, anti-Semitic caricature in Oliver Twist.
And so forth.
I’d like to like Rand Paul, for his small government, libertarian principles. I share those, and the fact is, we will go bankrupt as a country if we do not get spending under control. But Paul’s foreign policy instincts have too much of the far left, Dennis Kucinich, blame-America-and-Israel-first detritus to make him a serious commander in chief. This reading list is a symptom of that. It suggests that Paul sees Israel as the prime problem in the Middle East, and Jews the prime problem in the world.
If that’s what he thinks, there isn’t a whole lot left to talk about.
We already have a president whose tendency is to blame America for the world’s ills and does not step up forcefully to defend American citizens or US global interests. That’s not working out very well at all. Today, Obama put himself even to the left of his own Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. She spoke far more clearly on the Ukraine crisis today than he did. She called Putin out. Obama backed Putin’s call for a cease-fire and delayed any action he would have to take by hiding behind an investigation that stands no chance of being seriously and fairly conducted, not with Putin’s proxies in control of the crash site.
The best name you can put on that is “incoherence.” It’s also weakness, and it tells our enemies that we have no plan and no strong leadership. Commit a heinous act, give Obama a way to escape having to deal with it, and he’ll take it.
Eight years of that look like they’ll leave America economically and diplomatically weakened and more isolated than before, and Putin and his axis and every other bad actor out there emboldened.
It’s hard to see Rand Paul being an antidote to any of that.
Eight years of Obama stand to leave Israel also more isolated, as Islamists take over more territory around it.
It’s impossible to see Rand Paul being an antidote to that.
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