Ron Paul, blithering idiot

Listen to him tell Don Imus that Israel is keeping food from entering Gaza, that Gaza is “almost like a concentration camp,” and that Israel has no right to keep weapons from Hamas because “Hamas is an elected government.” Let’s not bother replying to Paul’s first two points, which everyone with an ounce of intelligence knows by now are blatantly false. But with regard to his last point,

• First, since when does a country not have the natural right and duty to defend itself from an armed group that is at war with it?

• Second, what difference does it make how that group came into power in the area it controls? If it’s at war with you, it’s at war with you.

• Third, Paul is so stupid and ignorant he doesn’t even know that Hamas came into power in Gaza not by democratic means but by means of armed conflict in which it overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and killed many of its officials, events which were prominently covered in the media at the time.

Note again: Paul is not criticizing Israel for some identifiable excess or some discrete, wrongful action. He is criticizing Israel for keeping ships from landing in Gaza, which it does in order to keep weapons from being shipped into Gaza, an area controlled by Hamas which is at war with Israel. Israel is the first country in world history that has been told by world opinion (meaning leftist and Muslim opinion) that it doesn’t have the right to defend itself from an enemy. And Paul, along with the anti-Israel paleocons and Buchananites, is part of that disgusting phenomenon which discredits everyone connected with it.

Finally: that voice of his! Egad. He sounds like some broken-down snake oil salesman in a woebegone frontier town. And this repulsive character is virtually an object of worship to his followers, who in 2008 were fanatically eager to see him elected president. For months they swirled around my head like mosquitoes, refusing to take no for an answer.

- end of initial entry -

N.S. writes:

Just one minor correction:

Hamas was elected into power by the Palestinians … it was the Fatah party that refused to have anything to do with them.

(What does that say about the Palestinians and how they feel about Israel?)

LA replies:

What happened was, Hamas won the election for control of the P.A. parliament, not the government, but the legislature—an election in which the Bush administration, believing in democracy, insisted they be included, and Israel obeyed (another example of the Israeli intransigence the anti-Israel paleocons are always telling us about). As a result of that victory, Hamas began to feel their oats, and shortly afterward launched a small scale civil war for the direct control of Gaza.

June 14

Alexis Zarkov writes:

Ron Paul seems unaware that Egypt gets a tremendous amount of U.S. military aid (it might be the second largest), and like Israel, it blockades Gaza. Launch Google Earth and do a flyover to the Egypt-Gaza border, and you can see the border is sealed off. One has to ask: why does Egypt get no criticism from Paul or anyone else for doing exactly what Israel does? I don’t think Ron Paul is anti-Semitic; he’s just stupid. He also repeats the old canard about the CIA deposing Prime Minister Mosaddegh thereby ending democracy in Iran. The overthrow of Mosaddegh was more in the nature of a counter coup because the constitutional monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was forced to flee. When the Shah was reinstated the government of Iran did not change; it remained a multi-party democracy. However 20 years later, the Shah became an autocrat outlawing all opposition parties. The left skips over the time gap, and falsely portrays the CIA backed counter-coup as an anti-democratic act. All this and much else escapes Ron Paul.

James P. writes:

Here, in 2002, Ron Paul scoffed at the idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East, and particularly to Iraq. Here, in 2007, he stated that democracy in the Middle East was not in America’s interest, because free elections would bring to power people who hate America:

The tired assertion that America “supports democracy” in the Middle East is increasingly transparent. It was false 50 years ago, when we supported and funded the hated Shah of Iran to prevent nationalization of Iranian oil, and it’s false today when we back an unelected military dictator in Pakistan—just to name two examples. If honest democratic elections were held throughout the Middle East tomorrow, many countries would elect religious fundamentalist leaders hostile to the United States. Cliché or not, the Arab Street really doesn’t like America, so we should stop the charade about democracy and start pursuing a coherent foreign policy that serves America’s long-term interests.

So then, what are we to make of his statement that “Hamas is an elected government”? Is Ron Paul suddenly on board with the neocon freedom agenda that he previously scorned? One might think that Hamas is a fine example of a Middle East “democracy” that is hostile to the United States. The only thing that’s different about Hamas is that it is fighting Israel. Is that the reason Ron Paul now wants to fetishize Hamas as a “democracy”?

LA replies:

Very good. I would add to that and say: He wants to fetishize Hamas-ruled Gaza as a “democracy” which, because it is a democracy, is inherently peaceful and lawful, and from which, because it is a “democracy,” Israel has no right to keep weapons. Therefore Israel’s blockade of Gaza is by definition a criminal act.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 13, 2010 02:20 PM | Send