like the “Israel must be wiped off the map” comment your linked article references, I will join your concern.

It’s been fairly well-debunked that Ahmadinejad was improperly translated and did not call for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” See here for a brief summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#Translation_controversy

That’s not to say Ahmadinejad is a good guy. And that’s not to say he hasn’t essentially called for regime change in Israel/Jerusalem. But expressing desire for a country you dislike to be dismantled or have a regime change is not unique to Ahmadinejad. Lots of political leaders do this regularly, including our political leaders, who have pretty much expressed varying degrees of desire to see regime change in every country in the middle east save Israel.

War is war and border disputes are border disputes. Israel can claim its land and defend it however she wishes, and it is only our bias toward the Jewish people and against the Islamic people that causes us to presume Israel is the good guy and the Palestinians and their allies are the bad guys.

If the remaining Native Americans declared a holy war against the American invaders who occupied their land centuries ago, I feel comfortable saying they’d be fully justified in doing so. That doesn’t mean I support them doing that. And it doesn’t mean I think America today is evil because hundreds of years ago we stole their land and slaughtered their people. It is what it is, the taking of land by force was en vogue at the time. Who can make heads or tails of it? The Native Americans are certainly not evil.

By the way, for context, I’m jewish. I have family that fought in WWII. I have family who are Holocaust survivors. I’m not some random non-jew American who just doesn’t like the jews and doesn’t care what happens to Israel. In fact I’ve visited Israel, and it’s an amazing place and I’d hate to see anything happen to it, and I do like the idea of a jewish state. But I don’t think American foreign policy should be pursued through the lens of treating Israel differently than every other country.

Imagine for a moment that Israel were not its own country, but in fact an American territory.

Would we risk WWIII defending a territory in a poorly-chosen location surrounded by hostile enemies? I know a lot of our foreign wars have been about oil, feeding the military industry, etc, etc, but if you take our leaders at face value, really, the majority of what we’ve done in the middle east over the last half-century has been justified by the need to support and defend Israel and make the region safe for them. Again I don’t buy that claim, but if you do, and even if you don’t, if Israel were an American territory, we would have given it up a long time ago, spent a comparatively small amount of money providing safe passage to its residents to America or wherever they want to go, etc.

As a further point, even if you want to be gung-ho about defending Israel at all costs and making the world safe for everyone, etc, the bottom line is that Iran is just simply not the threat it has been made out as being. Israel is well-prepared to defend itself (in part due to our past support). Iran is not going to start WWIII or nuke Israel. They are not going to hand a nuke off to Hezbollah because even if they could accomplish that, the result would be the same as if they nuked Israel themselves.

People here like to argue that there’s a huge danger in Iran using a nuclear weapon via surrogates and hiding behind plausible deniability. But this is a very silly claim given the foreign policy of the United States, especially over the past decade. We’ve already demonstrated that *mere suspicion* of WMD is grounds to have your country turned upside-down. Mere *desire* to have WMD is grounds too. We’re already sanctioning Iran and beating the drums of war even though there’s no evidence Iran is actively working on WMD.

In fact, to illustrate the lose-lose predicament Iran is in right now, think about this: what would they have to do to convince the United States that they’re NOT pursuing WMD? How do you prove a negative? They’re now wishing they already had a WMD because it’s the only way to ensure the United States will leave them alone.

>>>Paul?s eagerness to legalize prostitution

I’ll bet you can’t find a single speech, interview, or writing where Ron Paul brings up the topic of prostitution. The only time it comes up is when an interviewer brings it up.

Yes, Ron Paul thinks prostitution should be legalized. Saying he’s “eager” to do it and making it sound like it’s one of his big priorities is ridiculous though.

As for legalizing drugs — yes, it’s fair to say Paul is eager to legalize drugs, as he brings that topic up on his own accord quite often.

I forgot to connect the dot in my paragraph about Iran using a surrogate to nuke Israel. Where I was going with that is, given how low the bar has been for United States justifying the invasion of middle eastern countries, I think it’s safe to say that if there were a nuclear explosion in Israel, even if we had absolutely no evidence of who was responsible, retaliation against Iran would follow immediately.

In fact that’s the only good thing I can say about American foreign policy over the past half-century: the world has learned it can’t count on us being rational and level-headed and non-reactionary, and so we are much-feared not for being the strongest country but for being a really strong country that is eager to shoot first and ask questions later. Admittedly, this is a somewhat useful deterrant in situations like a “plausible deniability” scheme by the Iranians, because they know we can’t be counted on to be sure we’ve got the guilty party before dropping the bombs.

Having said that, what I just described is highly immoral and I can’t condone it even though I acknowledge a potential advantage to it. And I think in the end it will backfire and more than erase any advantages it once provided. A whole lot of people in the middle east hate our guts because of what we do over there. If there is such a thing as karma, I fear for this country.