We have received a number of queries from readers who are mystified that a newspaper like ours, which backs Israel and a strong American foreign policy, is offering support for Congressman Ron Paul in his campaign for honest money. Over the weekend we received a wire from a friend asserting that Dr. Paul is an anti-Semite. Producing a “puff piece” on him “because he has said a true thing about gold,” wrote our friend in respect of one of our recent references to Dr. Paul, “is like saying Ezra Pound was a great poet . . . even though he wanted us all dead.” The ellipsis is in the original.

By our lights, the analogy between Ron Paul and Ezra Pound fails to hold up. Ezra Pound, in his lifetime, stood formally accused of treason. He had made broadcasts from Italy that, during the time of Mussolini, gave aid and comfort to an enemy. Whether it could have been proved in court that Pound had been either “levying war” against the United States or “adhering” to an enemy, which is required under the Constitution for a conviction of treason, is unclear, as he wasn’t tried. But one can speculate that justice would have been better served had Pound gone not to a psychiatric ward but to the gallows. His animus to America was no doubt related to his hatred of Jews, which he expressed often and over a long time.

Ron Paul strikes us as nothing like Ezra Pound. Dr. Paul’s dissent from American policy may, at times, be as bitter as Pound’s was, but, in sharp contradistinction to Pound, Dr. Paul has never broadcast against America from enemy soil or done anything else even remotely comparable to treason. On the contrary, despite Dr. Paul’s dissent on policy, he has adhered to America and repeatedly sworn the constitutional oath. He served as an officer of the United States Air Force in a time of war. Since then he has made his career as a physician and as a congressman.

Dr. Paul, moreover, has a quality that we quite like. He “thinks constitutionally,” to use the phrase the editor of the Sun used, in a television interview, to describe the congressman. He may not be unique in that way, but he is unusual. He is fairly obsessed with following the plain language of the Constitution. Precisely for this reason he is coming in for a new look by many at a time when our country is in what we like to call a constitutional moment.

We are aware of Dr. Paul’s attacks on neo-conservatives, including several heroes for whom our friendship is abiding, and there is no doubt that his views on foreign policy are at odds with those of this newspaper. Yet we don’t believe that his views stem from a hostility to Jews. He is a libertarian and believes that war is a friend of the state, meaning that war invariably empowers the state over the individual. We don’t disagree about that, only about whether the costs of war are justified in the current conflict. Dr. Paul is opposed to foreign aid on constitutional grounds; we’re not so sure he’s wrong about that. His aversion to both war and foreign aid have put him at odds with those of us who support the expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan and also robust American backing of the Jewish state.

No doubt Dr. Paul’s views have won him hosannas from some who oppose Israel for base reasons, but it is well to mark that the congressman is no friend of Osama bin Laden and his ilk. He is the leading advocate of using against Mr. Bin Laden one of the bedrock war powers of the Constitution, the letter of marque and reprisal. That constitutional instrument — which authorizes private parties to commit acts of war — was used against the Barbary Pirates. Letters of marque have issued only rarely since, but were advanced for use against terrorists back in the 1990s by the Jewish Forward.

Dr. Paul unsheathed the constitutional sword within days of Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, introducing the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 to authorize private parties to go after Osama bin Laden. He has pressed continually since then for legislation authorizing the granting of such letters, delivering an eloquent exposition to anyone who will listen. Say what one will about that strategy, but after so many hundreds of billions of dollars of outlays on conventional war, letters of marque and reprisal seem less chimerical than when Dr. Paul first proposed them.

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Finally, a word about prejudice. The longer we are in the newspaper line the more we are disinclined to judge our public officials by their private prejudices. Harry Truman, as we have noted in these columns before, voiced privately the most astonishingly bigoted views toward Chinese, African-Americans, and Jews. Yet public life brought wisdom, and he went on to stand down opposition to recognition of the Jewish state, to integrate the Army, and to defeat the Japanese tyranny that menaced, among others, Free China. We have met Congressman Paul only in journalistic settings. But we have covered him on monetary matters for three decades. He sees the struggle for sound and honest money as not just a constitutional matter but as a moral question, and we agree with him. Let those who feel he doesn’t deserve our support step forward themselves to compete for the leadership in the campaign for the kind of monetary system our country deserves and the Founders envisioned.