Tom Tancredo On Ron Paul
05/09/2011
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VDARE's Washington Watcher recently wrote an article, ”Worse than A Crime–A Blunder”: Ron Paul’s Tragic Turnaround On Immigration, about the distressing evolution of the Texas Republican's views on immigration policy, based upon Paul's recent book.

Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo currently has a one-hour radio talk show at 10 p.m. Mountain Time on KVOR AM, out of Colorado Springs. (You can catch it online here.) I was listening one night last week, probably on Wednesday, May 4, and heard Tancredo make some brief remarks about Congressman Paul.

As usual with Tancredo, he eloquently cut to the chase. While stressing that he and Ron Paul are friends, Tancredo said "He's got the wrong idea about immigration, I'll tell you. His new book essentially calls for open borders." Given the drastic change in Paul's positions on immigration, Tancredo even wondered if Paul had actually written the book.

Tancredo also criticized Paul for what Paul said in his book about our relationship with Muslims and the Middle East. Apparently Paul attributes the conflict to U.S. support for Israel and to our having "boots on the ground" in the several Muslim countries. Those factors might contribute, but Tancredo pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 — with all its ambitions to subjugate us infidels, worldwide — before such accusations about Israel's existence and about putative U.S. provocations had any relevance.

This is an important point, and it can be made much more strongly. I was first made aware of this in December, 2005 when I read Joshua London's article America’S Earliest Terrorists at National Review Online. Here is the salient excerpt from London's piece:

Although there is much in the history of America’s wars with the Barbary pirates that is of direct relevance to the current ”war on terror,” one aspect seems particularly instructive to informing our understanding of contemporary Islamic terrorists. Very simply put, the Barbary pirates were committed, militant Muslims who meant to do exactly what they said.

Take, for example, the 1786 meeting in London of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain. As American ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, Jefferson and Adams met with Ambassador Adja to negotiate a peace treaty and protect the United States from the threat of Barbary piracy.

These future United States presidents questioned the ambassador as to why his government was so hostile to the new American republic even though America had done nothing to provoke any such animosity. Ambassador Adja answered them, as they reported to the Continental Congress, ”that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Sound familiar?

The candor of that Tripolitan ambassador is admirable in its way, but it certainly foreshadows the equally forthright declarations of, say, the Shiite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1980s and the Sunni Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, not to mention the many pronouncements of their various minions, admirers, and followers. Note that America’s Barbary experience took place well before colonialism entered the lands of Islam, before there were any oil interests dragging the U.S. into the fray, and long before the founding of the state of Israel.

America became entangled in the Islamic world and was dragged into a war with the Barbary states simply because of the religious obligation within Islam to bring belief to those who do not share it. This is not something limited to ”radical” or ”fundamentalist” Muslims.

I'll bet Tancredo actually knew that, too, but didn't want to spend more time justifying his skepticism about Paul's presidential run.

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