Wow. Wolf Blitzer had Ron Paul on for nearly 10 minutes yesterday and abstemiously juridically idiotically avoided the foreign policy issue/Israel/Iran. Meantime, Jonathan Tobin lays down the law at Commentary. The law of the lobby. Notice the emotional baseline at the end: Never again, the Holocaust. This is the neoconservative emotional baseline, and the ultraZionist baseline too, a sincere belief that we are threatened with extermination. I say it is a self-centered delusion, at this time in history, and indeed that Zionism is the greatest threat to the Jewish role in the human family. For as Tobin’s rant reveals, Zionism’s endurance requires a belief in a clash of civilizations with Islam. Tobin:

But Paul’s extremism goes farther than his opting out of the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus on aid. His view of America’s place in the world and of its Islamist adversaries — who also desire Israel’s destruction — is so skewed as to make his views indistinguishable from those voiced on the extreme left.

Paul’s isolationism is so hard-core that he sees America as a force for evil in the world and its adversaries, such as al-Qaeda, as being justified in their determination to fight us. Paul’s perspective is that of someone who has no quarrel with Islamists who are waging war against both the U.S. and Israel. Even in the GOP’s presidential debates, Paul has rationalized the Islamist regime in Iran and voiced opposition to any effort to stop their drive for nuclear weapons that pose an existential threat to Israel.

People like Ron Paul have taken the valuable libertarian creed of opposition to intrusive government and support for individual freedom and twisted it into a belief system that doesn’t view U.S. security abroad or the life of a besieged democratic Jewish state as something Americans should care about. Far from respecting Israel’s sovereignty, Paul is willing to watch with complacence as its very existence is called into question without the U.S. feeling obligated to lift a finger. His “respect” for Israel is little different from the sentiments voiced by an earlier generation of isolationists — the “America First” group — whose admiration of Nazi Germany and indifference to the fate of the Jews restrained the country’s initial response to both Hitler and the Holocaust.

…I’m sure there are gatherings of Islamists and anti-Semites where he would be welcomed with open arms.