When the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) excluded Texas Congressman and Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul from its daylong forum earlier this month, RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks said that Paul was “so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization,” and said the RJC “rejects his misguided and extreme views.”
Most observers assumed that Brooks was talking about Paul’s libertarian stance that the U.S. should eliminate all foreign aid, including foreign aid to Israel. But now Paul, who has been rising in the polls in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, which are less than two weeks away, is working to avoid having his Presidential bid derailed by some even more “misguided and extreme views” that appeared in newsletters he published.
Here’s a sampling of the incendiary contents of the Ron Paul Political Report, as reported in the New York Times:
A 1992 passage from the Ron Paul Political Report about the Los Angeles riots read, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” A passage in another newsletter asserted that people with AIDS should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva”; in 1990 one of his publications criticized Ronald Reagan for having gone along with the creation of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which it called “Hate Whitey Day.”
This isn’t a new story—an article in the New Republic covered this ground in 2008—but with Paul rising in the polls, he is now being forced to once again distance himself from the newsletter’s content, which he says he did not edit.
According to an article from the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, the newsletter also contained numerous anti-Israel comments:
No foreign country was mentioned in the newsletters more often than Israel. A 1987 newsletter termed it “an aggressive, national socialist state,” and another missive, on the subject of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, concluded, “Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.” In 1990, the newsletter cast aspersions on the “tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise.”
