Friday, May 3, 2013

Rand Paul Embraces Israel

So says National Review online in a column that is titled, Rand Paul Embraces Israel. In NRO, he also takes a further step in distancing himself from his father's foreign policy:
Rand Paul is describing an episode from his trip to Israel in January: “I went to a Shabbat,” he tells me, “it was the first time I’ve ever done that, and I had a wonderful time. I went to the yeshiva, and all the young men were singing and dancing, they had me dancing around the table. I hope I was singing something that was fine — it was all in Hebrew, so I had no idea what I was singing.”

If there’s any doubt that Rand Paul isn’t his father’s son on the issue of Israel, that trip and his posture afterwards should have ended it. He returned to the U.S. to tell Breitbart News, “Absolutely we stand with Israel. What I think we should do is announce to the world — and I think it is pretty well known — that any attack on Israel will be treated as an attack on the United States.”[...]

Being in Israel also developed in him “a sense of kinship” with the people. “The one thing I’ve said over and over again is that we should quit sending money to countries that are burning our flag, and that, you know, that’s the one thing I think you’ll never see in Israel is anyone burning our flag.”

He still maintains that foreign aid to all nations, including Israel, should end, though he argues for closing the spigot to America’s enemies first and then gradually reducing the funding for American allies.[...]

Though Paul discourages reading too much into his trip — “When you get to Washington, everyone asks you, ‘When do you want to go to Israel?’” — he acknowledges that he needs to strike out on his own, given his father’s well-known foreign-policy views: “I guess I don’t look at it in really a calculated way. I am my own person and as I move forward I have to and want to present to the public . . . in my state and elsewhere, who I am and what I stand for, but it’s not so much that I want to say ‘Oh, I’m different on this, this, and this,’ it’s really getting beyond the comparison just to being who I am.”

Why are all these neocon outlets doing puff pieces on Rand? Who is running Rand Paul?

2 comments:

  1. "...that’s the one thing I think you’ll never see in Israel is anyone burning our flag.”

    No, they'll just shoot at our Naval ships. Such as the USS Liberty in '67. They're, also, delighted to use our sons and daughters for military interventions that their country cannot do themselves.

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