Ron Paul supporter calls into question his Foreign Policy views

If they hate us for our Foreign Policy, than why is Western Europe and other nations besides the U.S. feeling the wrath of Islam?

PaleoConservative and Catholic writer Joe Hargrave seriously wonders why Ron Paul is taking the side of Islamists on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, and other issues surrounding Radical Islam. Hargrave wrote at the blog Non Nobis, "Islamification & The Libertarians: The Dutch Quandary":

Though I agree with Ron Paul and other prominent libertarians on a number of issues, and even take their side on issues over which they typically disagree with conservatives, such as the war on drugs or even the “war on terror” – if by that is meant the occupation of foreign countries by American troops and the formation of an domestic police state – when it comes to the challenges posed to the West by radical Islam, many of them are, to use the most accurate and charitable word possible, naive.

Islamists are attacking the U.K., Spain, Thailand, Phillipines and scores of other Nations besides the U.S.

I have heard Ron Paul, for instance, actually argue once that if Islamic terrorists hated the West for its values, as opposed to US foreign policy, they would be attacking countries besides the United States – as if they hadn’t carried out bombings in Madrid, London, Bali, Jakarta, or other places. Paul and other libertarians routinely deny that Islamic radicals hate the West for any reason other than foreign policy, or at the very least, that all hatred of the West can be reduced to that factor.

While I don’t doubt at all that US foreign policy has inflamed jihadism around the world, this reduction simply cannot explain what has been taking place in Europe for the past decades. The radicalization of Europe’s Muslim immigrant populations, growing sections of which declare their open hatred on a regular basis for democracy, free speech, and other Western political ideas, agitate for Sharia law, use the courts to try and silence critics, and even declare fatwas on them, cannot be explained by this analysis.

Nor can it explain violence in Chechnya, Kashmir, Nigeria, the Philippines, Thailand, or any number of places where Islamic insurgencies are threatening non-Muslim societies. It can’t explain why a supposed U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia, is financing radical Islamic schools all over the world in a manner similar to the Soviet Union’s funding of communist movements and insurgencies during the Cold War. To put it simply, there’s a whole lot of complexity to this matter that a simplistic reduction of the problem to American foreign policy cannot account for.

Ron Paul is a very principled politician, and I support him for that reason. But principles must constantly be tested and checked against reality. A man without principles isn’t worthy of respect, but a view that doesn’t take all of the realities of a complex situation into account isn’t very useful.

Geert Wilders of the Netherlands gets it right

Hargrave asks if it's all about Foreign Policy as Ron Paul posits, than what about the Dutch?:

I think it is high time that American libertarians begin to take this threat seriously, before it is too late. The most instructive example in this regard is that of the Netherlands, where this problem has become highly concentrated and reached violent dimensions in the last decade. If any society embraces at least some libertarian ideas in the extreme, it is modern Holland. Few countries have made tolerance and openness a part of their national identity as the way that country has in recent years.

And yet Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom, which is derided by the leftist press as “far right”, as “extremist”, as “racist” even, is growing rapidly in popularity and support among the Dutch. What happened? Are we to believe that this most open, tolerant society on the most open, tolerant continent in the world suddenly, overnight, for no reason, became a society of bigots and fascists? Or have real threats made certain countermeasures inevitable as a basic condition for national survival? The answer ought to be self-evident.