Hope at the End of an Era, Why Islam Is Not the Problem, and Blowback

            On Thanksgiving, the Ron Paul Liberty Report episode was titled, “The Most Dangerous Time In Our History?”  Ron Paul talked about how, that as bad as the current geopolitical affairs are, they’re not as bad as they were during spikes in the Cold War.   Transcribed below is an excerpt from the end of the show, in which Dr. Paul outlines some basic rules that individual and nations could follow if they wanted to make the world a better place.

     We shouldn’t be all that disturbed that we are witnessing the chaos of the end of an era.  But, we also can be thankful that the end of an era that I lived through – and that was the Cold War, a Soviet system that had all these nuclear weapons, and we were up against each other over the Cuban crisis – you know, we got by those.  Sometimes the solutions come much easier than we ever dream. 

     But I do believe the only thing that can rectify all this is to have a growing number of people, especially young people, who will be moving into positons of leadership, understanding what personal liberty is all about, what it means that liberty is an individual event and that you have to follow a couple rules.

    One: You have to reject the notion that anybody or any government can ever initiate violence against somebody else to have their way.  And, boy, if they could just follow that rule. 

    And then it takes another thing that’s less prevalent today among some of our candidates and that’s a little bit of tolerance and understanding.   So if we have killed three million Muslims over the past fifteen years, we ought to recognize that and not think that all violence comes from the other side.  We have to be really very honest with ourselves.  To me that is what really counts, is honesty with ourselves and an honest approach to looking at the issues, but once you come to the conclusion that you believe in individual liberty and you believe in non-violence and you believe in tolerating other people who have different views and different religious views – as long as they’re not forcing their values on us – it would be a much better place and a much better world.  I think we’re further advance than we have ever been in the understanding of these issues, disregarding all the problems that are on the surface that motivate people to say that “we live in the most dangerous times ever.”  I think we live in one of the most exciting times ever, because, all of sudden, peace may break out and liberty may reign. 

         I’m going to follow-up on this transcription with an excerpt from another episode of the Liberty Report, this one from November 27^th and titled “Myth-Busters! Things Are Not As Government Makes Them Seem.”  Here, Ron Paul addresses the fallacious notion that Islam is inherently violent, and that the United States, a largely Christian nation, has been victimized by pugnacious Muslim barbarians.  The excerpt transcribed here begins around the 6 min. point of the show:

      Chris Rossini:  Our argument is always that it’s a matter of foreign policy.  That a bunch of radical religious people are able to do a lot of what they do because nation-states are able to fund them and give them weapons to carry-out a lot of these atrocities.  We could go all the way, even further than this, but we could start during the 1980’s when Ronald Regan decided to intervene and back the Mujahedeen with Osama bin Laden to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan.  Of course that was none of the U.S’s business, and Osama bin Laden then went on to start Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda branched out into ISIS.  Please, Dr. Paul, talk about how the big worry is U.S foreign policy, and other governments too, in funding and creating these monsters that now the government is asked to stop.

Footage of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski cheerleading for the Afghan Mujahadeen in 1979.

     Dr. Paul:  Okay, I’ll do that, but first I’ll put my priority where I think the biggest problem is, and that’s the size and growth of our government and the undermining of our personal liberties.  But that’s very much connected to your question about what’s going on with our foreign policy, how that is a source of many of our problems, and why ISIS is not the sole cause of the problem.  Yes, our policies have encouraged the growth of radicalism, but what has happened is because there are some radicals, there are some actually that we support.  You indicated the Mujahedeen and the Taliban – we’ve supported in the past, we’ve encouraged Hamas, the growth of Hamas along with Israel’s support for this.  And now we’re very much involved in pushing ISIS mainly because we think, or we pretend, that ISIS will go after Assad.  And so the whole effort our allies right now in NATO and Israel and Saudi Arabia – everybody wants to get rid of Assad and they’re willing to subsidize and push ISIS – but for them to turn around and say the whole problem is not our foreign policy contributing to the rising up of people, the whole thing is, they say, “radical Islam.”  If you don’t say “radical Islam” then you won’t admit the truth, so they want to say that Islam is the problem.  To me that’s sort of like saying Christianity is the problem because we have the Ku Klux Klan that claims they have Christian ideals and principles and that they only follow those principles.   Well how many people would be willing to accept the fact that the Ku Klux Klan states the religious principles of Christianity? And that’s sort of what is going on here...

Bush holds hands with his boyfriend, Saudi King Abdullah.

     And if there is a danger – and I believe there is a danger of what we’re doing there – but if we don’t understand it… what the candidates are saying so often is that what we need to do is bomb and kill more people, rather than saying how did we contribute to it, how can we back off, how can we moderate this a little bit and not say that it is all Islam.  Maybe the fact that our policies lead to the killing of four million Muslims in the past fourteen years – so that has to play a role in it – but they say, “oh no, that really isn’t, you’re ducking it, you’re un-American, you want to blame America.”  But, the foreign policy that we have is deadly.  It’s deadly for us because it costs a lot of money, it kills a lot of people, it causes a lot of friction – just look at the results, the results are disastrous: chaos continues in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and look at what’s going on in Syria, look how we’ve contributed to the mess in Ukraine, and look at where Libya is – and it’s only when we get involved that these conditions just deteriorate.  But a lot of people believe that we’re well motivated, and we’re the exceptional nation, and it’s our personal moral responsibility to be the policeman of the world so if there are any infractions on our standards overseas we have this obligation to correct it.   That’s absolutely wrong, it costs too much money, it destroys our liberties here at home, and makes us very unsafe overseas, so I think it’s time the American people wake up and say, “Let’s change our foreign policy, because it’s nothing but trouble for us…”

Tony Blair shakes hands with his former lover, Muammar Gaddafi.

Prince Charles dances for his Saudi allies.

     So we have the problem of blowback, which means that when people feel that we’ve done them harm, invaded their country, and killed a lot of their people, they don’t have tanks and planes and navies to come and attack us and try to throw us out of their country, but they can use the technique which people refer to as terrorism which means that people just go and put bombs and place that get our attention.  That just means that the answer by those who believe in neo-conservatism, the Dick Cheney types, is that we just need to kill more.  They’re still crying that losing 60,000 people in Vietnam wasn’t enough.  “If we would have only kept doing it,” and people say the same thing about Iraq, “We left too soon, and we should have more troops in there, and we should put more troops in Syria…” 

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shakes hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983.