[svcw]

You may justify and make excuses all you want, Paul is an anti-semic little weasel.

[George W. Bush]

correction to my previous: He voted no on asking the United Nations to condemn violence against Israel.

svcw: You may justify and make excuses all you want, Paul is an anti-semic little weasel.

Only if you believe that all the foreign aid we hand out is justified. In fact, Israel is no longer the leading recipient of it. Opposing foreign aid is simply opposing foreign aid, not antisemitism.

The argument can and has been made that U.S. aid actually harms Israel both militarily and economically. As we saw with welfare reform here in the U.S., welfare for Africa and Israel and Egypt and everyone else leads to bad results economically. It incentivizes dependency and subsidizes bureaucracies. The Exim (Export-Import Bank) is especially notorious.

[Puddleglum]

I guess you have to ask whether Israel = all Judaism. I think Israel is the fruition of a particular branch of Judaism (Zionism), acting in recent history to provide a safe haven for Jews in light of the West's historical persecution of them. It is a fruition that opens its arms to all branches of Judaism and offers Jews the right to collectively govern and defend themselves -- open even to Jews that were not/are not Zionist.

One can argue that the state-building strategy and its execution were an action contingent upon a misinterpretation of Judaism and the promise of reinheriting the holy land; that said, Israel is here - it is a fact, and US foreign policy must act upon that fact. Arab nations must accept that fact and grant Israel a right to exist.

However, now that modern Israel is a state, one can criticize it for non-religious reasons -- i.e. criticize its foreign and domestic policy, its wisdom and its efficacy, the way one judges any group that manages its resources, its people, and its relationship with its neighbors.

BTW, these are my thoughts and not Ron Paul's. He votes against everything UN, even/especially the well-intended pablum.