What's (just one thing) wrong with Ron Paul, and several things wrong with George Ajjan

I used to be a big fan of Ron Paul. I was really pleased when I heard he was running in the primary and at first was considering voting for him. But really, I didn't know all that much about him. My attitude changed abruptly when I saw the now-infamous clip of Paul debating with Giuliani (for whom I hold no brief whatsoever) about the cause of 9/11. I kept listening through the whole clip, hoping Paul would clarify or something, that he really wasn't that confused, but it just kept getting worse. Well, that was it. Paul made it clear that he was one of those "blame America" paleolibertarians and that he doesn't recognize the Islamist threat, that he thinks non-interventionism can solve all our problems. It's a position with which I've been becoming increasingly familiar over the past year, so I recognized it right away in that clip.

Now, Paul didn't say anything there specifically about domestic policy concerning, say, Muslim immigration, "profiling," and the like. So someone really pulling for him might try to say that he'd be strong on those domestic issues and only objects to foreign intervention.

To that argument, I present this open letter to "Arab Americans" by George Ajjan in support of Ron Paul.

Ajjan is...terribly confused. (There, that was tactful, wasn't it?) He obviously thinks that getting (gasp!) profiled because of his last name is a much bigger thing to worry about than getting blown up on a plane by one of his fellow "Arab Americans." He also is just absolutely dying to bring Arab Christians and Arab Muslims together in a common cause against such evils--profiling, that is, not blowing people up. He has strangely little to say about that. He speaks without irony of "the Prophet Mohammed," and I swear by that point in the letter I nearly expected him to add "peace be upon him" in parentheses afterwards. Read it and see for yourself. It's very ironic that Ajjan begins the letter by making fun of Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch, though not by name, for using the term 'Islamo-Christian' and then proceeds to illustrate exactly what Fitzgerald means by that word. This whole "we Arabs are all in this together" stuff is really pretty disgusting, at least to a conservative.

I will pass by with arduous self-restraint and relatively little comment Ajjan's fantasy that the Israelis could have peace tomorrow if only they could get rid of their "militant elements" (which ones were those?) and make use of the principle of (drumroll) land for peace. Gosh! What a bodacious, new-fangled concept! Why didn't anybody ever think of that before, or try it? Unless, of course, Ajjan means by "land" what evidently the Palestinian Authority (those were the "moderate" Palestinians, in case you get confused) mean by "land"--i.e., all of the land between the Jordan River and the Sea. I suppose once that is turned over to the Arabs and made judenrein we might have peace...of a sort.

But I digress. What does all of this have to do with Ron Paul? Well, let's just start with the fact that Ron Paul was the only Republican candidate to court the Hezbollah-loving Arab American Institute at their conference in Dearbornistan. Here's a good Front Page Mag. article on it, for the link to which I am indebted to Mr. Ajjan! That's pretty significant in itself. Here's one bit of fluff, quoted by Ajjan, from Paul's speech:

The freedom message brings all of us together, whatever our religion is, or whatever our beliefs are, and wherever we came from, because freedom is not judgmental. It allows people to make their own choices as long as they don't use force to impose their will on us. So this brings people together, and this is what has been happening in this campaign. People from all walks of life are coming together.

Straightforward libertarian ideology, you may say, but libertarian ideology that takes on a peculiarly foolish, not to say dangerously stupid, ring when addressed to this particular audience! Then there's this little bit of challenging naivete:

For us to be so fearful and so intimidated from a country, whether it's Iraq or Iran, that they might attack us? How are they going to attack us, even if they had a nuclear weapon? How or why would they attack us?

One wonders what Paul would say to Iran's recent announcement that Iran has missiles that can go as far as Israel. I have a terrible feeling that I know what he would say: "It's none of our business."

And finally, there is this sentence, which is obviously part of Ajjan's reason for thinking Paul would protect people with his name against the horrors of profiling:

But we should NEVER have punishments because we belong to a particular group either.

What all of this says to me is that I was spot-on right about the implication of Ron Paul's words in that debate. And that, I might add, was before he started having such very unsavory followers in the form of neo-Nazis and such. My judgement there was a straightforward one about his judgement on matters of policy--that it is poor. Ron Paul, like so many paleos--whether -conservative or -libertarian--really doesn't believe that Muslims are any more dangerous than anybody else or that we need to have any special policy, either foreign or domestic, to take into account that threat. On the contrary, he is courting a group whose entire approach to Islamic terrorism is, as Robert Spencer points out in the article linked above, to start running about worrying that maybe somebody will be "profiled" and to act as though the enemy, and the center of all their anger and worry, should be their fellow Americans who are making obvious inductive connections rather than their fellow Arabs who are blowing people up and giving them a bad rep. In other words, Ron Paul is clueless on this subject.

And that's just one thing that is wrong with Ron Paul.