SETH LIPSKY
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/ron-paul-will-be-missed-at-forum-of-jewish/87591/
When the Republican candidates gather Wednesday at Washington for a forum focusing on Jewish issues, one candidate will be absent — Congressman Ron Paul. The host of the event, the Republican Jewish Coalition, “rejects his misguided and extreme views,” the group’s executive director, Matt Brooks, told the Washington Jewish Week. So it has excluded him from the event.
By my lights it will lead to a less illuminating discussion. It happens that I’ve covered the Republican Jewish Coalition and Mr. Brooks for years; they have created an important space for those of us who dissent from the old liberal, Democratic Party program. I’ve also covered Congressman Paul for years and have come to have a great deal of respect for him, even when we disagree. Which we do in respect of granting foreign aid to Israel. At least we disagree in part. I support giving to our allies, particularly Israel, military aid, which is what we are mainly now giving to Israel. It strikes me as important, especially in a time of war, and I would back Israel to the hilt. Foreign economic aid, however, has long struck me as a dangerous course for recipient countries.
“Israel’s Poison” was the headline the Jewish Forward newspaper put on an editorial issued in March, 1991, not many months after I’d become its editor. The administration of President George H.W. Bush had just decided to grant the Jewish state $650 million over and above what the Forward called its “already bloated aid package.” The editorial acknowledged that the Bush administration had its geopolitical reasons for upping the ante.
Nonetheless, the Forward warned the aid “will be yet another draught of poison that will sap Israel’s incentive to reform its economy and further forestall the day when the Jewish state can stand on its own.” It noted that an American delegation had just returned from Israel disappointed with the pace of economic reform in a state whose early pioneers had been inspired by socialist ideals.
The editorial cited South Korea and Taiwan, two other small nations facing determined enemies, as examples of what market-based approaches could create. “Sooner or later,” the editorial said, “serious voices are going to start asking why Israel can’t match these other nations . . . At some point the cycle of aid-without-reform in Israel will be broken, and when that happens Israel will begin to purchase true independence and security.”
The Forward has taken a more liberal editorial line since I edited it, but Israel has moved sharply in the free-market direction. It performed an economic miracle, precisely by freeing up its economy and liberating its private sector. One hero of that effort has been the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The story has been told in such books as “Startup Nation,” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, and “The Israel Test,” by George Gilder.
So vibrant has Israel’s high-tech economy been in recent years that Mr. Gilder has argued that America needs Israel’s help now more than Israel needs America’s. It’s an important story, of which friends of Israel are proud. It strikes me that the supporters of a burgeoning Israel are in a strong position to invite Dr. Paul onto the stage and talk about economic self-sufficiency and the power of markets.
Then there’s the question of Dr. Paul’s remarks suggesting that Al Qaeda’s attack on America was animated by hostility to our bases in the Arab world rather than by baser hatreds. Whatever one thinks of that notion (I think it’s naïve at best), all the more impressive that Dr. Paul supports using against Al Qaeda one of the bedrock instruments of war given to the Congress, letters of marque and reprisal.
These are, in effect, licenses to private parties to carry out acts of war. We used them against the Barbary pirates. Almost immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center, Dr. Paul introduced in the 107th Congress H.R. 2076, called the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, authorizing holders of the letters to go after bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and seize them and their property. He also voted to give President Bush authority to use the military to go after Al Qaeda, but he has been pressing for letters of marque ever since.
Bin Laden himself is dead now, but Dr. Paul’s bill would have covered not only past attacks but any “planned future air piratical aggressions and depredations” against us. It would have given the president discretion to pay up to $40 billion in what were, in effect, bounties for the “capture, alive or dead, of Osama bin Laden or any other al Qaeda conspirator responsible for the act of air piracy upon the United States on September 11, 2001.”
The point is that whatever errors Dr. Paul may have made about bin Laden’s motives, it can’t be said that he would go easy on al Qaeda or has any sympathy with its crimes. He would no doubt say — as he did at an editorial dinner of The New York Sun in 2009 — that one thing he wanted as to avoid a trillion dollar expedition when there was a simpler, constitutional approach of bringing the war to our enemy.
That may be outside the mainstream, but the whole idea of an organization of Jewish Republicans worrying about the mainstream strikes me as a bit contradictory. Wouldn’t the debate, both within the Jewish community and without, be richer were these kinds of views at least brought up for discussion? There are today scores of Jewish leaders prepared to meet with, say, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority. What is the logic of excluding a libertarian who is, at least for the moment, polling as one of the most popular figures in the Republican Party?
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