American aid to Israel

Moshe Feiglin interview posted on EconomicPolicyJournal.com

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

I helped set up this interview with Robert Wenzel of EconomicPolicyJournal. It’s good that American libertarians should start getting familiar with his name before he gets in power. I’m sure that many EPJ listeners will consider some of Moshe’s views scary, but the fact that he wants America out of the picture and left alone should make them pretty happy.

All in all, Wenzel was pretty courteous to Moshe throughout the interview, and though I suspect he thinks Moshe is a “warmonger”, the two can get along as they both respect the other’s space. That’s the beauty of noninterventionism and national independence where nobody funds anybody else’s issues. At the end he said he wanted Feiglin back on to discuss monetary policy. Very nice.

 

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The trillion dollar coin approach to middle east peace

rafifarber Economics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

There have been rumors and shmumors about America’s intention of minting a “trillion dollar coin” and sticking it in the Federal Reserve in order to bypass the so-called debt ceiling, which is more of a debt elevator. I couldn’t help but think of the Simpsons episode where the government prints a trillion dollar bill and Mr. Burns and Homer escape with it and somehow it ends up in the hands of Fidel Castro and the country survives on the wealth of the trillion dollar bill.

It is rare that I am dumbfounded, but this time I really am. I don’t know what to say. The mere possibility of the minting of a trillion dollar coin is so despicably absurd that I’m overloaded with a litany of potential sarcastic remarks that none of them can fit through the door of my mouth as they’re all crowding together simultaneously and are now jammed in the back of my throat and I can hardly breathe. Jon Stewart did a pristine job I must say.

Let me just start by saying that the source of this problem is that some primordial government, when it came in and seized the local mints and splayed the king’s face over all the coins, decided to give the monetary unit a proper name instead of a weight. For example, “dinars” instead of “ounces”. Then the Alice-in-Wonderland concept of “face value” was born, which doesn’t really exist. If instead of “dollars” the term for money was “grams” then money would be tied to weight instead of fancy shmancy names like “dollar” and the possibility of printing a gram of money or a “trillion gram coin” would be a lot more difficult for the government to do. So they had to rename the monetary unit to some imaginary term.

Two obvious questions are these, reductio ad absurdums, but it’s hard to engage in those when the premise you are attacking is itself so intensely absurd on its own:

  1. If you’re going to mint a trillion dollar coin, why not mint 16 of them and pay off the national debt?
  2. Why make it out of platinum? Why not elephant dung?

Better yet, you want mideast peace, right? And you love foreign aid and meddling. Then by God go all out! Why use it for such a petty thing as raising the “debt ceiling”? I say give the trillion dollar elephant dung to Israel, and then we can buy all of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt and every single Arab in the country, pay them outrageous salaries to tap dance for us, and give them each their own personal trained pet chimpanzee to give them manicures and shiatsu massages and build them all gold-plated ivory mansions so they’ll be happy and won’t have to do anything after the daily tap dance for the Jews? Everyone over here will be rich, obviously, and therefore at peace. And the chimpanzee population will have a big boon.

There’s only one problem. How are we doing to break a trillion to get all this done? The local Five and Dime? Or the Five and Trillion?

And you want to use it to get around your stupid debt ceiling?

My Lord the world has lost its mind.

And don’t forget, there is nothing qualitatively different between a trillion dollar coin, and a one dollar bill.

Responding to Likud Anglos’ Daniel Tauber’s “Freedom Agenda”

rafifarber Foreign Policy, Likud, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

I know and respect Daniel Tauber, head of Likud Anglos, despite my tone in this rebuttal. He has gotten farther than I have in politics, though I suspect that’s because I hate politics. We agree on many things, but foreign policy is definitely not one of them. This is my response to his Jerusalem Post article that can be seen here. My responses to each paragraph are in bold.

Not long after September 11, US president George W. Bush declared “a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” No longer would the US support dictators, but would actively push Arab states to become democratic.

So since 9/11, the US has not supported any dictators, but has instead actively pushed Arab states to become democratic? There are two problems with that statement, both of which have to do with reality. First, since 9/11, the US has supported almost every Mideast dictator with US taxpayer money. Both King Abdullahs (Saudi Arabia and Jordan) Qaddafi (when he did stuff Bush liked), Mubarak, Karzai in Afghanistan, who America basically installed by force of big bombs on airplanes (“democratically” I suppose), the guy in Qatar (a dictator who Bush really liked because they let him put bombs in their country to promote freedom in the Middle East), Bahrain, Kuwait, but I’m sure all this dictator support was in order to promote democracy and a free middle east.

If by “actively push Arab states to become democratic” Tauber means “actively push Arab states by force to do whatever America wants them to do” then he’s right.

The policy was based on two primary conclusions: first, that under authoritarian regimes, the Middle East “will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export”; second, the tenets of liberalism were universal and the “peoples of the Middle East” are not “somehow beyond the reach of liberty.”

The Middle East IS a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export precisely BECAUSE America cannot resist collecting oil fiefdoms and annoying Arabs with military bases on their land that they use to manage their ludicrous empire.

Inspiring words, but elections in Lebanon and in the Palestinian Authority (which Bush brought about) led to victories for Hezbollah and Hamas. While some advocates of the “freedom agenda” have hailed the Arab Spring as confirming Bush’s vision, in Egypt, Islamist parties won the parliament and presidency. But that doesn’t mean president Bush was wrong in principle.

Bush wasn’t WRONG in principle. Bush didn’t HAVE a principle. He was simply LYING. He didn’t care about liberty. He was just using the word “liberty” because he wanted to have Saddam Hussein’s handgun framed in the Oval Office as a war prize to show to his daddy so he’d be proud of him for finishing the job. It would have been cheaper to send him to a good shrink so he’d find his father’s approval in a way that wouldn’t cost $1 trillion and thousands of American lives for NO reason.

His argument was essentially a reformulation of the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” The “freedom agenda” merely applied US support for democracy abroad to the Middle East, where a pro-stability philosophy governed its foreign policy.

This one’s a real kicker. Yes, all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Like the right not to be bombed by foreign countries one did not provoke in any way. What the heck did Saddam Hussein ever do to the United States except unsuccessfully try to defend himself against them in 1991 and 2003? Sure he was a schmuck, but I can’t think of a single Mideast dictator that isn’t. The US has no pro-stability philosophy. If they did they’d leave other countries alone and just trade with them. They have not a pro-liberty philosophy, but a pro-empire philosophy, and will use any excuse to expand. 9/11 was a rather good one. Instead of going after Osama bin Laden directly with a few special forces, killing the guy and calling it a day, they followed the USSR’s example and obliterated all of Afghanistan and decided to make it a US colony.

For those who were indeed inspired by the “freedom agenda,” who, as liberals and humanitarians, still desire the success of democracy in the Middle East, the question is not whether democracy was meant to come to the region. The question is how, in light of subsequent developments, the “freedom agenda” could be modified to ensure that democracy is not merely the rubber stamp on an Islamist takeover.

The scholarly tone of this paragraph really drives me up a wall. Besides democracy itself being a horrible thing (the majority can always vote to kill the minority or take all their stuff in a democracy), no one who calls himself a liberal or humanitarian votes to promote liberal and humanitarian values by slaughtering innocent Arab children. NEVER forget that over half a MILLION Iraqi kids died after the first gulf war due to sanctions against the country that prevented food and medicine from entering Iraq’s borders. In the name of democracy I guess. Madeleine Albright called this a “worthwhile sacrifice” in an interview with 60 minutes in the mid 90’s. Does Tauber believe it was worthwhile as well? I can only assume so. No wonder Bin Laden was able to gather up so much support and enthusiasm for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

First, it should be recognized, as it has been by many, that elections alone do not establish democracy.

Yes, they do, and that’s precisely why democracy is evil. Tauber is confusing democracy with liberty. The latter is the ultimate good. The former is very bad. Democracy is effectively rule by the majority, which is precisely why pushing it in a culture that does not value individual life very highly is a sincerely stupid idea. In a country like the US where liberty is culturally respected at least in theory, democracy is less dangerous, though still pretty bad.

An election can be merely the one-time tool of an anti-democratic group in seizing power. Elections can also be rigged, either by outright electoral fraud or because those in power don’t allow for real opposition. The symbolic power of an election, which Bush realized could draw people to democracy, can also be misused as a method of legitimizing authoritarian regimes.

Yes, this is all true. Which is why Tauber’s “freedom agenda” is inane.

INSTEAD OF merely calling for or endorsing elections, the focus should be on establishing a democratic political culture by offering direct assistance to democratic organizations and pressing states, including new democracies – and pressing them hard – to establish and protect those institutions such as a free media and (non- Islamist) opposition parties.

If you want to press “new democracies” hard, why don’t you go do it yourself with your own money? How do you want to “press them hard”? By bombing them some more? More sanctions that will just end up killing more children? How much is this going to cost? Has it ever succeeded in history? Where is the money going to come from? The Federal Reserve? In case you haven’t noticed, America is the most bankrupt institution in human history.

Second, the collapse of authoritarian regimes in the region tends to unleash extreme anti-Israel forces, which may have even been fostered by the former regimes. This is not just a threat to Israel. If democracy enables those forces to wreak havoc on their neighbors as well as their own citizens that democracy will be artificial and worthless.

All democracies imposed by guns and bombs on cultures that do not value liberty in principle, are ipso facto artificial and worthless. The biggest threat to Israel is actually America itself, while they are busy pissing off so many Arab countries and Israel sits there as the easier target to lash out against in response.

So as part of its push for a democratic culture, the US should make clear, to Egypt especially, that state institutions must be free of anti-Israel rhetoric, that anti-Israel terrorist groups must be eliminated, and that “reviewing” peace treaties, leaving Israeli embassies unprotected from violent mobs and arresting Jewish tourists as “spies,” are all unacceptable.

And how is the mighty United States going to enforce all this? With more bombs and sanctions that will cost the global economy, already in recession, hundreds of billions of dollars? Will taxpayers be forced to subsidize secret CIA and NSA forces in Egypt making sure no Egyptians say anything bad about Israel or they’ll be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, yet another outpost of the US Empire?

Third, the US itself must not feed the obsession over Israel with repeated attempts at reviving the peace process. This shifts regional attention away from the various states’ many internal problems. These misguided efforts also divert US attention and capital from actually promoting democracy.

Now THIS is a good paragraph. I agree with this paragraph 97.72%, given that there are 44 words in it and I only disagree with one of the words – democracy. Change it to “liberty” and I’m all with Tauber. If only he applied the same logic of America leaving Israel alone to leaving everyone alone who does not attack them, then we’d be in business. It is indeed sad that the only country Tauber wants America to stop meddling with is the very country Tauber himself actually lives in. What about everyone else? Don’t they deserve to not be meddled with as well?

The final and most important reform to the freedom agenda is shifting focus to Iran, the preeminent anti-democratic force in the region. During our conversation, Abrams said it would have been “ludicrous” to think about democracy in the Middle East with someone like Saddam Hussein “sitting in the middle of it.” It seems equally ludicrous to think about democracy in the Middle East when the mullahs are sitting on high in Iran.

Iran WAS a democracy that respected liberty before America decided to get involved in 1953 and depose their leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, due to an oil dispute with Great Britain and install the dictatorial and brutal Shah. It is ludicrous to think about democracy in the Mideast by forcing it with armies on cultures that do not value liberty.

It goes without saying that Iran must be prevented from developing nuclear weapons.

Yes, but what does this have to do with America? Has Iran ever threatened America? America has certainly threatened Iran. Iranian nukes are Israel’s problem. Israel is the one being threatened, not America. So let’s deal with it.

Whether or not Israel unilaterally strikes Iran and regardless of how much damage it does to Iran’s nuclear program, the US must ensure that sanctions are kept in place and be overtly willing to use force itself.

With WHAT money? Sanctions against innocent Iranians for WHAT? Have sanctions EVER stopped governments from doing what the US didn’t want them to do? Can he cite an example? One would be enough. Just one.

The sanctions and military, cyber, covert and other attacks will take their toll on the regime. The mullahs cannot hold out forever as their airplanes threaten to fall out of the sky for lack of replacement parts, food prices rise, their currency is devalued, they are unable to export their most lucrative commodity, and cannot insure their commercial shipping, while also silencing all opposition.

In case you haven’t noticed, food prices are rising everywhere, currencies are being devalued globally, and America doesn’t export anything except papers called “dollars” and “treasuries”. See the chart below. That’s the US trade deficit. What plugs up the hole to bring it back to zero? Paper. When everyone realizes that the paper is actually worthless because America is not good for its debts, the Empire will come crashing down and Tauber will have to follow my advice to leave everyone alone due to complete lack of any alternative.

The only way to get Jonathan Pollard out of prison

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

There have been murmurings lately that Pollard is in serious health trouble and that our brave heroic President, Shimon Peres, exercising brave heroics as he always does, has sent a brave heroic letter to their President Obama asking meekly and sheepishly to have mercy and let the dying man go pretty please, oh American master of all things, ruler of Israel, we are your people and you are our Protector in the UN, teach us to follow, obey your rules about spying on you to save ourselves, hear O Israel, America our Friend, America is One, now can we have him back please?

Wow, is Shimon Peres brave. And Netanyahu too. I mean, he went so far as to actually ask for Pollard back! Publicly! On the Knesset Podium! Once! In thirty years! Saying he was sorry we spied on America! Meekly and sheepishly! Just like a proud Jew should!

What a hero.

If we really, actually, in real reality, want Pollard out of hell, we must stop playing games now, or he will die in a prison hospital. We must understand why he has been in prison in the first place for so long.

Anti Semitism, Jew-hatred, is not simply a disease that bad people have and good people don’t. Everyone has it. Even Jews. It’s universal. The reason for it is the dissonance between the Jewish mission and the Jewish reality. The Jewish mission is to be the spiritual leader of mankind. The Jewish reality is that, right now at least, we simply aren’t, but for some reason we’re still around and no one can tell exactly why.

It’s obvious to most people that we shouldn’t be here according to natural law. This includes everyone from the most murderous anti Semites to the most outwardly friendly of Israel’s allies. So everyone knows we’re being preserved for a reason, and the reason is for that moment when we wake up as a nation and lead the world to spiritual enlightenment. Every second we don’t do this we are hated and challenged. The murderers will try to kill us off in an attempt to prove we are no leaders. Our allies, on the other hand, will keep us in a state of mental slavery, help us out outwardly, but only when it serves their interests, while making sure we know THEY are in charge, NOT the Jews.

The minute the Jewish nation starts to stand up for itself and act like a leader, take its destiny in its own hands and be independent, it will trigger a very harsh reaction from our allies in an attempt to test if we are actually taking up our leadership role. When America found out that the Jews were spying on them – well, a Jew who takes our money and begs and acts nice and slave like – that’s fine. But a Jew who spies on us and steals secrets for his own safety without asking us first? THAT cannot be tolerated.

What we have to do is quite simple. We have to stop asking nicely as if we made a mistake and Pollard should never have spied for us. We have to stop apologizing. If America or any other non Jewish country wants to test us and see if we are actually the leaders we are supposed to be, let’s welcome it.

Instead of Netanyahu getting up on the Knesset and groveling, he should get up and burst with righteous anger that Pollard was even arrested in the first place. That yes, America, we spied on you because we needed the information for our own safety and you were not forthcoming. Next time, just tell us, or we’ll do it again. Why? Because you were founded in 1776 and we were founded 3,000 years earlier. We’re older, and we call the moral shots around here. We deserve some damn respect.

So for every day you do not release our man, we will arrest an American spy over here, starting today.

You don’t like being spied on? Neither do we. So let’s just be honest with each other and cut the bull.

Not only would that get Pollard released. It would give us America’s true respect as their spiritual leaders, and will end the anti Semitism that is keeping Pollard in prison.

The more we grovel, the more we are condemning him to die in North Carolina.

Need I even mention that the only person with the Jewish guts to do this…is Moshe Feiglin.

Military interventionism and Keynesian interventionism are two sides of the same coin

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

The bedrock of Keynesian economics is that depressions and recessions can be avoided by the government printing and spending a bunch of paper. We can all live in a quasi-economic boom forever by the blessed gift of government intervention.

The key mistake made here as we have discussed in this blog before is hubris. Keynesians believe they have finally found the cure to economic downturns in government power. A “new economy” they spoke of before the dot com bubble burst. The “your house will never lose value” mantra of 2002-2006.  They always think they found the key to everyone being rich forever…until all the paper wealth evaporates and the fed has to find another sector to stick it in and tell everyone to go look over there and invest.

Imagine if sleeping were considered “recession”. Then a Keynesian would suggest downing caffeine pills at 3 am and celebrate the fact that you are still awake, though drooling, zombified, and shaking. But you’ve been “stimulated” and the recession of sleep has been countered!

Until of course you run out of caffeine pills and you collapse at high noon in your factory on the assembly line and get tenderized into a car part. That’s when the bubble bursts. So they suggest more caffeine pills and slap themselves on the back with a good raise in printed money salary.

But this post was about military interventionism. Just like economic interventionism, the military kind is based on spending insane amounts of paper money and assuming, with much hubris, that the government can keep the entire world balanced by handing out varying amounts of paper to different dictators and sending in the army all the way to Borneo as needed.

Just as government spending keeps economies in a quasi state of caffeinated zombishness, government spending on the military also keeps the entire world in a piss-offish caffeinated ready-to-strangle-each-other grip until the caffeine runs out and somebody starts WWIII.

Take my country, Israel. American government intervention here has brought us the Oslo Peace Process, which has kept both sides at each other’s throats for 17 years. Or more than that. If we weren’t pressured in ’67 to stop the war, there would be no conflict now. And every time there’s a flare up it just gets worse and everyone intervenes so nobody can win.

How about you just let us go at it until somebody wins and decides what to do with the loser?

There’s some Austrian Economic Foreign Policy for ya.

Ron Paul 2012.

From Israel: Vote Ron Paul and Let My People Go!

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I sit here in my living room in Karnei Shomron, Israel, on the 8th night of Chanukah, wondering what other miracles lay in store on January 3rd and in the months ahead. The name Ron Paul is constantly at my fingertips. I’ve typed it in so many times the past month it’s insane. I’m experiencing an excitement I’ve rarely ever felt, and I don’t even live in America anymore. During the last Republican debate I woke myself up at 3am Israel time to watch an 8pm EST live stream on YouTube, with no fatigue whatsoever. I’m on overdrive, and I can’t calm myself.

I’ve only recently figured out what this excitement actually is.

I first got interested in the whole freedom movement when I heard that Ron Paul wanted to end all foreign aid, including to my country, Israel. This seemed like a spectacular idea to me. I hate the idea of taking American tax payer money I don’t need. The only reason we take it, by the way, is not because we need it. It’s that we don’t want to feel alone, and Jews always feel a deep existential isolation and loneliness. “As I see them from the mountain tops, gaze on them from the heights, this is a people that dwells alone, not counted among the Nations,” says Balaam of the People of Israel in Numbers 23:9. We still feel that loneliness. So we take the money. It’s shameful, it’s theft, it’s destructive, it’s morally wrong, and it makes people hate us for tying them into a conflict they have no business trying to solve. I wanted it to end and didn’t trust any Israeli leader to give it up on his own, so I looked up more about Ron Paul.

What I found was fascinating. On the forums, I learned of people who, back in ’08, literally gave their lives short of death to this man. Some poured money into his campaign they could not afford to give, and some even lost their marriages because of their single-minded insane dedication. This shocked me. I couldn’t yet understand it, but after a few days of listening to him, it began to click.

What is it about Ron Paul that inspires such extremes? Such maddening support on the one hand, and such fear and loathing on the other? I can give the answer in one word: Soul.

The essential soul of a human being is by definition free. The idea that men are free as determined by God is a concept that is foreign to most men. This is because most men want to control others, to take away their freedom. This is usually referred to as the drive for power. The drive for power is antithetical to freedom because power means the ability to control others. There is only one legitimate thing that power can and should be used for, whether it be military, legislative, or executive power. That is, to legalize freedom.

Ron Paul doesn’t want to be President to “give” me freedom. He doesn’t own my freedom and he didn’t give it to me. The only reason Ron Paul wants to be President is to stop punishing people for using their freedom that is rightfully theirs. He wants no power. This is clear to anyone who listens to him speak.

There are two kinds of human beings. Those who want power, and those who want freedom. You can tell which one’s which very easily. Those who want freedom are straight-edged. They are consistent, principled, and you can feel their human soul when they speak to you. There’s a continuum out there of human souls somewhere in spiritual cyberspace, and when you come into contact with one of these souls, you know immediately, because souls are by definition free. You sense sincerity, realness, consistency, a free human being. If you’re a man who seeks freedom and you come into contact with a real human soul, you become instantly addicted and you swallow up anything you can get your hands on. You want to unite immediately, no matter what you disagree on. There are people in the freedom movement that don’t exactly like Israel, especially me being a “settler” and I don’t care. If they want freedom, I sense it and my human drive for individualism suddenly turns into an intense desire to unite into a collective – but a collective of free individuals. It’s a beautiful dialectic, and it doesn’t matter what we agree or disagree on, as long as we agree on freedom.

You get hooked on Ron Paul and you desperately seek more and more, any video you can find from the past, any speeches you missed, anything he said that you haven’t heard yet, even though you’ve heard it a thousand times already in different words. You can’t help yourself. The voracious hunger to be able to use your God-given freedom takes you over entirely. It’s like you suddenly realize you’re human and the Divine Image with which God created you comes alive and catches fire.

But something else happens to you. Once you get hooked on Ron Paul, you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power, and you become instantly disgusted when they begin to speak. Before, they were just boring. Now they’re revolting. Listening to Romney or Gingrich or Bush or Obama makes you sick and you don’t know how Ron Paul gets through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that’s so transparent it’s like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you. You can’t bear it.

What’s so maddening about hearing Romney or Gingrich talk is that there’s someone standing there saying things, but there’s no soul in it. These are not free men. These are power men. Not that Romney or Gingrich don’t have souls. They do. They are men just like you and I. But they have practically forfeited their souls to try and attain power, to control others with spin and talking points and contradictory statements like “I want to cut the budget and expand the military!” and they’ll say it with a polished tone and a straight face, just like a soulless recording. Their humanity is so buried under the mountain of lies they have told themselves, that neither they themselves nor you can even sense their souls in the human continuum. The scene of a human body speaking but no soul communicating can drive a free man mad.

The reason that Ron Paul never goes down in the polls is that he’s not “convincing” people in the everyday sense that he’s right on whatever issue. He’s activating human souls, lighting spiritual fires one by one speaking about freedom. Once a soul gets activated, and the man realizes that he IS free no matter what people do to him or tell him, there is no turning back. The other candidates are trying to turn heads with snappy one-liners that sound cool. Slaves follow these one-liners like mobs, and follow each other from candidate to candidate. Slowly but surely, Ron Paul activates a few of the individual souls in the mob as they bob from snappy comeback to snappy comeback and he goes up in the polls.

Yet, we cannot expect every man woman and child to understand or get excited about the message of liberty. In fact, most just can’t handle it. Being truly free is as terrifying as it is electrifying. The Bible tells us this very clearly in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. When Moses finally accepts the role of deliverer from God, he was assigned to say the following to my great-grandparents the Israelites:

“Therefore say to the Israelites: I am God. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with amazing signs. And I will take you to be My people and I will be your God, and you will know that I am the Lord who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians.” (Ex. 6:6-7)

And what was my grandparents’ response?

“And Moses told this to the people, but they didn’t listen due to lack of spirit and cruel bondage.” (6:9)

Not everyone can handle the message of freedom. It’s too frightening for some people, and some are just too enslaved. Those are the people that despise Ron Paul, the same types who rebelled against Moses in the desert and attempted to go back to Egypt. Freedom is too much for them and they can’t handle the Divine gift. They want and need someone to control them. Their souls have been too battered by slavery, taxation, and wars.

But nonetheless, God forced my stiff-necked great grandparents to leave Egypt, and as a result I’m here today, preaching freedom once again, fighting not only for America’s freedom, but for my own from America’s influence in my own region.

Vote Ron Paul and let my people go! Stop meddling here and stop trying to buy influence by giving me money. Stop trying to be the all powerful Peace Maker and let us work out the problems here on our own! If we think Iran is a threat, we can handle it and we’ll take the consequences. It’s not America’s problem and you can’t afford another war.

Now I understand why people will give everything to this man. Whenever he’s asked the question, “Would you legalize heroin?” Ron Paul answers, “I want to legalize freedom!” Little do these people understand that freedom is a thousand times more addictive than heroin.

American Jews! Wake up! Set your brothers in Israel free! We were the first nation ever to be set free by God, and we brought the concept of liberty to the world when we left Egypt over 3000 years ago. It’s about time we set the example we were chosen to set.

The writer, Rafi Farber, is a member of Jews for Ron Paul and manages the website World of Judaica. Email him at settlersofsamaria@gmail.com

Glenn Beck – Wise up and Endorse Ron Paul

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

I saw a video of Glenn Beck discussing Newt Gingrich on Freedom Watch with Judge Nap. In it he basically ripped Gingrich for being a, basically, horrible fake of a human being, which is true. He doesn’t deserve any position of leadership. He said he would hold his nose and vote for Romney over Obama. Then he said he agrees with Ron Paul about everything except…

Israel.

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

I want to smack him. Really. I want to swing my hand back and snap it right across his face. He is going to throw out everything just because Ron Paul doesn’t want to give me three billion lousy worthless American dollars.

The question is why? The answer is simple. Jesus. It’s all about Jesus.

Beck came here in August because he believes he has to take care of the Jewish people himself. He thinks he’s my father. He thinks that if he doesn’t take care of the Jewish people, then we won’t convert and then Jesus won’t come back and give him a medal for facilitating the second coming. That’s why he will throw America down the tubes and vote for Romney. Because he thinks we have to convert to Jesusism and he’s self-righteous enough to believes he’s the one who has to do it by giving us a big Jesus hug.

Glenn Beck – leave us alone. I don’t want your money or your love. I have no one to rely on but my Father in Heaven, not you or your money. Go save your country from disaster and endorse Ron Paul. We’ll be fine over here and you can keep on believing in Jesus over there. But you’d be really stupid to make that belief be the only thing that stands in the way of your country healing itself or destroying itself.

How Ron Paul can get the Jewish Vote

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

I’m not sure that it matters so much since Jews vote mostly democrat, but here’s how Ron Paul can get the Jewish vote. This post is of course mostly directed to Paulians with Jewish friends who support Israel.

The first thing to understand about Zionist Jews in America is that they feel terribly alone and scared for their Jewish homeland. They feel they want someone “involved” in the “middle east peace process” and they want American aid more for what it symbolizes than for the actual money. It symbolizes the fact that America backs Israel and it makes them feel less alone. So if you want to break through to a Jew, you have to identify that loneliness and diffuse it.

Tell them that the Jewish State is the strongest in the region and can handle any threat on its own. Tell them that Congress is the most Zionist legislature in the world (it actually is) and if Congress decides to declare war against Iran or join the fight if war breaks out, then Ron Paul would fight it. Paul as president would have no constitutional authority to just fight a war, but if Congress declared one, he would be constitutionally required to fight. This is all true. They have to know this.

About the “peace process” tell them that Israel should be in charge of it, not America. Israel should feel no pressure from the UN or from the US or anyone else, which is why Ron Paul wants to cut off US funding for the UN, leave the UN and butt out of the “peace process”. Tell them you believe Israel is grown up enough to make her own decisions with what she wants to do with the Arabs, and America shouldn’t be involved.

About the money, tell them that Israel won the 6 day war without American aid and she can do it again.

And most importantly, tell them that both Ron Paul and Israel share the value of liberty and mutual respect, and in that sense both will always be friends and Israel will never be alone. That’s in bold. Emphasize it. Let them know you understand this point, and they just might start listening.

How would a Ron Paul victory affect Israel’s leadership?

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

As we get closer and closer to the Iowa caucuses on January 3, this is a question I’ve been asking myself with more and more intensity. The prospect that Israel will finally be cut loose and will no longer have an “American Father” but rather a true American friend excites me deeply for both countries.

Israel, both its leadership as well as the Jewish people at large, are so mentally dependent on America that they cannot imagine not being constantly backed by our father in the Western Hemisphere. A Ron Paul victory would be such a mental shock to Israeli society that the Jewish people would be in a type of frenzy, worrying about the future of the Jewish State and predicting doom once foreign aid is cut off.

There will be much confusion here among the leadership as one of the main objectives, if not THE objective of Israeli political leadership has been to secure American friendship so we don’t feel alone. The better they are at being friends with America, the better the Prime Minister of Israel is considered to be. This is why Ariel Sharon was so popular, whereas Netanyahu is at most tolerated, but nobody here really likes him like they liked Sharon.

So what would happen would be similar to a junkie losing his supply of cocaine. Israel would go into something of an existential frenzy, though she wouldn’t be in any real danger, much like an addict isn’t in any real danger when he runs out of blow.

With Israel off the American dime, the people will be able to look in other, more important directions than the American direction. They will seek out new leaders with new paradigms, start to work on the country like it is actually independent.

I believe that it is no coincidence that the Republican primaries and the Likud primaries are happening around the same time. As Ron Paul rises to prominence and the American people start to undergo a mental paradigm shift, Moshe Feiglin will rise in Israel, speaking the Israeli equivalent of the libertarian message, and the Jewish people will undergo the same sort of revolution, waking up from decades of political depressants.

By the time the 2012 elections come around, this could be a very, very different world.

Why Jews should Support Ron Paul

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,
Ron Paul wants to set Israel free of Washington meddling, just like he wants to set America free, too.

For those Paulites finding this blog through a Google alert, this is my first attempt to reach out to all you news-obsessed Paul junkies and say that, yes, I am one of you. I’m probably the only one, however, who lives in what you guys would call the “West Bank”. Hence, a “Settler” of “Samaria,” which is the Jewish term for the upper piece of this land generally thought of as Occupied Palestine. I was born an American Citizen, continue to hold that citizenship, and yes, I am voting by absentee in the Florida primary for Ron Paul.

There are so many reasons why Ron Paul is the absolute best candidate for Israel of any presidential candidate out there. Paul has a serious problem though in presenting his Israel case to the Jews. I will write future posts on how he can win the rest of my stiff-necked people over to his cause, but for now, I will try to explain why Israel needs Ron Paul.

The worst thing Israel can possibly do for itself is to continue to take foreign aid from America. Aside from any other of Paul’s positions, his ending foreign aid would be the best thing for Israel since…I don’t know…sliced pita. There are three reasons for this. The first, and least important, is economic. The second, more important reason is psychological, which perpetuates the middle east conflict. The third, and most important, is moral. Let us deal with the least important first.

Economic: Israel’s annual GDP is over $200 billion. We have a population of about 7 million people. To compare this with the largest Arab country on the planet, Egypt, with a population of 83 million, their GDP, with a population 12x the size of the Jewish State, is less than ours at about $190 billion. They are in recession. We are in a boom. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic, but Israel is the richest country by far in the region per capita.

The amount of money we get from America is a paltry $3 billion in loan guarantees, 70% of which is not even real money. It’s monopoly money called USAID dollars that can only be spent in America to buy spare F16 parts. The reason America gives us over $2 billion in monopoly money that we can only spend in the US every year is that they want to keep those jobs at Lockheed Martin so Obama can say “look at these unemployment numbers!” (Which stink anyway and are double our own.)

As a result, we can’t develop our own airplanes which we certainly could do if left alone, and they’d be better than anything Lockheed could produce. Then we could export them to America, or better yet, give the Americans some monopoly shekels they could only spend in Israel and secure some more jobs here! (No, I wouldn’t advocate that, but you see my point.)

The point is, accepting American aid which totals a measly 1% of our GDP damages our fighter plane industry. But that is the least of our problems.

More importantly, the psychological issue. Jews are still mentally in exile mode even though we have our own country again. We think we’re dependent on everyone and fear pure independence. 2000 years wondering from slaughter to massacre will do that to a nation. Almost everyone here believes American aid is absolutely essential and it makes us feel weak and pathetic even though we are by far the strongest country in town here in the Middle East.

A Jew who thinks he is weak and pathetic is willing to cower, and a Jew willing to cower gets his brothers and sisters killed. Every time a rocket falls on Sderot or Beer Sheba, we feel we have to cry to America instead of take care of the problem. Every time there is a terrorist attack, we have to call up the White House to see what we’re allowed to do about it.

If you are an American and you’re reading this, imagine that after September 11 you had to ask Israel what you could do about it. It is emasculating and sad, but this is what we do because we feel we need free American airplane parts. We don’t, but we want to feel like we have a father, and we certainly don’t want to be on our own. We take American money not for any real economic need. We take it because we want a cultural father. Read more about this here.

Imagine, for a second, that there were no foreign aid in this region. Foreign aid makes up 80% of the Palestinian Authority’s GDP. 80%. It’s hard to even call that GDP. It’s not product. It’s just stolen American taxpayer money. Palestinians don’t produce anything. It’s hard to produce anything when your entire national aspirations are negative, i.e., get the Jews out.

Without foreign aid, the Palestinans have nothing. What would happen then? They’d just leave, especially if we paid them to do so. We have enough money to pay every Palestinian family $100,000 just to get up and out and move to Dubai who are desperate for people to build their oil-driven skyscrapers. Talk about solving the conflict. All we need is the will to do it. And to get the will, we need independence. And to get independence, we need liberty. To get liberty, we need to stop taking free money from anyone.

If we need weapons, we should buy them or build them. No charity.

Imagine being able to accept or reject a deal based on our own calculations instead of Washington’s. Imagine that the next time Hamas bombs our cities, we can go in and actually finish the job and destroy them, and Ron Paul will get the call on his red phone in the oval office and say to Netanyahu, “Why are you calling me? Do what you want!”

The most important reason to stop taking American aid is that it is simply immoral to do so. America is in so much debt that debt has lost all meaning there. Israel is the only Western country on the planet left that has a balanced budget and isn’t bolted down to a currency union made up of debt drunk PIIGS.

We are the last bastion of fiscal responsibility left on the planet and we’re taking money from American taxpayers?

This is wrong, it’s immoral, and it must stop. Whether we like it or not, the world always looks to us, the Jewish people, for moral guidance. If we don’t provide it, we are hated. It’s as simple as that.

If we are hated, the world loses spiritual direction. When that happens, things get dark and gloomy.

Ron Paul is the only candidate running truly driven by real moral principles. His biggest moral principle is that of liberty given by God and not Government. The concept of God-given liberty is something that the Jewish People brought to the world when we had our little thing called the Exodus from Egypt when God came down, fought the Egyptian government Himself, and told Pharaoh that governments cannot enslave nations. Without the Jewish Exodus, the founding fathers of the great nation of America would have had absolutely nothing to work with.

We brought liberty to the world. Ron Paul understands that well. That’s why he wants us, the Jews, the Israelis, to be free. So lets stop taking their money.

Ron Paul stands for the Jewish value of Liberty. And so should we.