Sen. Rand Paul’s (R., Ky.) office deleted a "student reading list" that promoted anti-Israel books from his official Senate website this week, shortly after the Weekly Standard published an article last Friday highlighting the controversial recommendations.
Paul’s Senate website has advertised the list of 17 books as "suggested titles for a student, or anyone else interested in learning more about freedom and the role of government in a free society" under a "students" section since 2011.
While most of the recommended titles focus on economic policy, the list also included books that claim the "Israel Lobby" controls U.S. foreign policy, call for the United States to cut ties with the Jewish state, and argue that support for Israel is anti-Christian and anti-American.
One of the recommended titles, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency by Patrick Buchanan, has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for containing "anti-Semitic rhetoric."
In the book, Buchanan accused "the Beltway Likud" of plotting the war in Iraq "long before 9/11."
"President Bush no longer sits at the head of the negotiating table, but directly behind [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon," Buchanan wrote.
Buchanan also compared former Bush adviser Richard Perle with "Fagin," the villainous, anti-Semitic caricature in Oliver Twist.
"Perle's depiction of his delight at first meeting the future president [George W. Bush] reads like Fagin relating his initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist," he wrote.
Another book on the list, A Foreign Policy of Freedom by former Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas), described President George W. Bush’s foreign policy as a "Christian-Zionist-oil crusade against the infidels."
"It is amazing that the clamor of support for Israel here at home comes from men of deep religious conviction in the Christian faith who are convinced they are doing the Lord’s work," Ron Paul wrote. "That, quite frankly, is hard for me as a Christian to comprehend."
The book also claimed that the real motivations for the Iraq war were "oil, neoconservative empire building, and our support for Israel over the Palestinians."
Also included on the was Michael Scheuer’s 2004 book Imperial Hubris, which suggested that U.S. support for Israel could be explained by "habit, the prowess of Israel’s American lobbyists and spies, the half-true mantra that Israel is a democracy … and a misplaced sense of guilt over the Holocaust."
Scheuer also described Israel as a "faraway, theocracy-in-all-but-name of only about six million people that ultimately controls the extent and even the occurrence of an important portion of political discourse and national security debate [in the United States]."
"Objectively, al Qaeda does not seem too far off the mark when it describes the U.S.-Israel relationship as a detriment to America," Scheuer added.
Scheuer has more recently come under fire from the ADL for describing the pro-Israel community as an "identifiable fifth column" that has "dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States."
Several of the books on Paul’s list also blamed U.S. foreign policy for the Sep. 11 attacks and suggested a moral equivalence between U.S. military action and terrorism.
David Adesnik, who reported on the list in the Weekly Standard last Friday, told the Washington Free Beacon that it was still available on the senator’s website as of Monday. The list has since been removed, although it appears in a Google cache version of the website from July 9.
Paul’s Senate office and political action committee did not respond to requests for comment.