Libertarian Congressional Candidate Mark Matthew Herd Defends Muslims

Since 9/11, even Libertarians have engaged in lunatic, Islamophobic Muslim-bashing. It is therefore refreshing whenever a Libertarian candidate or party official disavows such blind hatred.

Mark Matthew Herd is running for Congress in California's 33rd C.D. Here's an excerpt of what Herd says about Muslims:


"Charles Kurzman notes in The Missing Martyrs that there are remarkably few Muslim terrorists: less than 1 Muslim in 15,000 has even gone as far as attending a terrorist training camp, let alone engages in terrorism. Muslims have often provided the tips to arrest terrorists, and the intelligence needed to prevent or punish terrorists would undoubtedly be greater in a world where the US government didn't build up so much ill will. That is another sense in which current policy is unintelligent.

"We cannot indulge the ignorant desire to blame anti-American terrorism on a 'hatred of freedom,' '72 virgins,' or other such nonsense. After a suicide truck bomber killed 241 US Marines stationed in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, President Ronald Reagan wasn't justifying this massacre when he decided to withdraw American troops from the Middle East. He understood that people, all people, hate foreign armies on their soil.

"Unfortunately, his successor, George H.W. Bush, went back into the Middle East to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and his stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia after that war was specifically cited as the primary reason for Al-Qaida's declaration of jihad against America. Since then, of course, the US military has undertaken attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. If you were a Middle Eastern Muslim, might you think of some reason to hate Americans other than not liking freedom?

"The best form of anti-terrorism insurance is to remove all troops from the Middle East, stop attempts to either preserve or change their current governments, and end all government-to-government aid."


You can read the above text in full on Herd's website.