Topic: WorldNetDaily
In her Aug. 3 WorldNetDaily column, Melanie Morgan misrepresented Ron Paul's claims about the relationship of American foreign policy to terrorism:
Quixotic presidential candidate Ron Paul explained on Bill Maher's left-wing cable show that we were responsible for the acts of violence by Islamic jihadists.
According to Paul and others, the bombing of the USS Cole, the 1993 World Trade Center attack and thousands – yes, thousands – of previous acts of terrorism by the jihadists are really our fault. These people are either ignorant of history or are intentionally dishonest in an effort to advance their misguided ideology.
In fact, Paul never said that "we were responsible for the acts of violence by Islamic jihadists"; he specifically assigned blame on the "blowback" of U.S. foreign policy to the policy itself. From the May 25 edition of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher":
PAUL: I think it's been known for quite a few decades that our foreign policy has what the CIA calls blowback. It has unintended consequences. You can go back to 1953, when we put the Shah into power, or us supporting Osama bin Laden and radicalizing the Islamics to go after the Soviets, and that comes back as blowback. Our support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. And this comes back to haunt us.
[...]
MAHER: I know that some people have tried to get you out of the Republican debates and to just make you go up to the blackboard and write a thousand times, "They hate us for our freedom."
PAUL: That's right.
MAHER: But you won't do that.
PAUL: But we have Mr. Giuliani studying tonight. He's home reading all those books. And he's going to come back and he's going to apologize to me. And he's going to say, "I'm sorry, Ron, I just didn't know that that's the way foreign policy works. I didn't even know that you just can't blame Americans for our foreign policy, that it's the policy that's at fault. It's not the fault of the Americans who are victimized by these evil, monstrous, murderous people who come over and kill us. It's the fault of the policymakers. It's policy that counts."
Morgan also curiously leaves out the fact that Paul is a Republican in an effort to tie him to "left-wing" Maher.
