Jus in bello: the IDF dropped this Arabic flyer warning residents of Shuja’iya to evacuate – Hamas told them to stay
21 Jul 2014 2 Comments
The double dealing, sanctimonious peace movement prefers not to discuss how Hamas fights its wars
17 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Alan Dershowitz, Hamas, Israel, laws of war, temporary doves, war crimes
Just war theory (jus bellum iustum) is split into two groups: “the right to go to war’’ (jus ad bellum) and ‘’right conduct in war’’ (jus in bello). Just war conduct should be governed by the principle of distinction:
Islamic militant terrorists — whether they are called al-Qaida, Isis, Hamas, or Hezbollah — all use similar tactics.
They target civilians while hiding among civilians in order to induce democracies to kill civilians so that the media will show gruesome pictures of dead children and blame these deaths on the democracy, rather than the terrorists who use children and other civilians as human shields.
The democracy is then put to the tragic choice of either allowing terrorist attacks against its own civilians or taking military action that risks the lives of enemy civilians.
…Israel has been very careful to try to minimize civilian casualties. They drop leaflets, make phone calls and even send noisemaking bomblets to warn civilians to leave areas to which rockets are being fired.
Mostly the civilians leave. Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, the Israeli military does not fire at the rockets, thereby putting their own civilians at risk.
Yet some in the media describe the current situation in Gaza as a “cycle of violence.” The reality, of course, is that there is no such cycle. It is a one-way street that Hamas has driven down precisely in order to create the illusion of a cycle with equal blame on both sides.
There is no comparison — legally, morally, diplomatically or by any other criteria — between what Hamas is doing and how Israel is responding. Hamas is wilfully and deliberately committing a double war crime by targeting Israeli civilians and using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
The deliberate targeting of civilians, as Hamas admits — indeed boasts — it is doing, is a clear war crime. Hamas has specifically aimed its lethal rockets at Beersheba, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. This is a war crime.
Moreover, it is firing these rockets from hospitals, schools, and houses in densely populated areas in order to cause Israel to kill Palestinian civilians. This too is a war crime.
Alan Dershowitz (2014)
Whose side is the peace movement on when it condemns warnings to civilians to evacuate immediately?
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Amnesty International, Hamas, human shields, Israel, laws of war, temporary doves, war crimes
The clip shows the small missile that strikes a building as a warning to get out.
This “knock on the roof” technique has been condemned by Amnesty International’s Philip Luther:
“There is no way that firing a missile at a civilian home can constitute an effective ‘warning’. Amnesty International has documented cases of civilians killed or injured by such missiles in previous Israeli military operations on the Gaza Strip,” said Philip Luther.
Google maps shows that much of the Gaza Strip is rural – ideal for Hamas missile bases away from civilians as required by the laws of war
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, war crimes
see the Google map at http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/google_map_palestine.htm which shows that much of Gaza Strip to be rural – ideal for Hamas military and missile bases away from civilians as required by the laws of war.The laws of war also call for uniforms and the carrying of weapons openly so the fact that compliance with these laws of law would make Hamas more exposed to air attack is beside the point.
PAT CONDELL: “Why I support Israel”
13 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, liberalism, politics, war and peace Tags: Israel, war crimes
John Rawls and war and peace and temporary doves
15 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in economics, laws of war, Rawls and Nozick, war and peace Tags: international law, John Rawls
John Rawls’ Law of Peoples had as its key point that the fundamental division is not between democratic and non-democratic peoples or liberal and non-liberal, but decent and non-decent or outlaw peoples. Decent peoples allow toleration and subscribe to eight principles:
- Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples.
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Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
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Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.
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Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.
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Peoples have the right of self-defence but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defence.
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Peoples are to honour human rights.
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Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.
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Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavourable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.
Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard define a just war thus:
· A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination; and
· A war is unjust, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.
A condition for a just war is force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted or are clearly not practical.
Most of all, save me from self-styled anti-war activists what Matt Welch called temporary doves. Temporary doves spit bile at those that support the wars they oppose – denouncing them as moral pigmies. The temporary doves then make exceptions for the wars they support and spite bile once again at those that question the whimsical nature and application of their values about just and unjust wars and the just conduct of wars.
The wars championed by the temporary doves can be equally or more bloody in civilian casualties as the wars they oppose either because of the reasons they were started or because of how these wars are conducted – civilian casualties In Iraq and Afghanistan.
Civilian casualties are put forward by the temporary doves as a moral trump card against the Iraq and Afghan wars and the atomic bombings. Many of the architects and champions of the NATO bombings in the Kosovo war opposed Gulf War II. Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, was described as a modern-day Hitler, eager to practice genocide against minorities and menace peaceful neighbours.
Is Bill Clinton a war criminal because he bombed Iraq and Sudan, but a human rights hero because he bombed Serbia? All of these bombings resulted in civilian deaths.
The supporters of both wars frequently invoked the Munich Agreement of 1938 and sought regime change. Perhaps less bloody but certainly slower social and political emancipation from oppression and mass murder is OK for the temporary doves for Iraq and Afghanistan but not for Kosovo. Temporary doves are just as prepared to wade up to their armpits in civilian casualties as the next warmonger, but they then put themselves forward as free of sin when they call for war crimes trials and citizen’s arrests of those that supported and conducted equally bloody wars.
Edward Luttwick argued that the Kosovo war proved that precision modern air bombardments can be effective as humanitarian interventions only in unique circumstances:
• An enemy sufficiently economically developed to offer targets worth bombing, and
• sufficiently democratic to respond to the inconvenience thereby inflicted on civilians at large; and
• yet sufficiently primitive and authoritarian to become the target of a humanitarian bombing campaign in the first place.
In most cases, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Zaire and from Rwanda to Sierra Leone, there were no identifiable, high-value, and relevant targets. In Bosnia, the post-heroic behaviour of almost all peacekeeping troops in UN service ranged from doing little or nothing to protect civilians while engaging in every possible form of misconduct, from black-market trafficking to cowardly passivity in the face of mass murder.
The detention of combatants in wartime
28 May 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Gitmo, The war against terrorism
The UK Attorney-General got really worked up after 9/11 about the detention without trial in Gitmo of British terrorists captured in the field of battle by the USA.
The British had internment without trial from 1971 to 1975 in Northern Ireland. The UK Attorney-general accidentally forgot about this when getting prim and proper over the detention of British terrorists abroad:
- Internment without trial was not new as the Northern Ireland Government had used special powers acts from time to time since 1922; and
- The 1971 internments were under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (1922) (Northern Ireland) on August 9, 1971, and then the Detention of Terrorists (Northern Ireland) Order 1972.
Antiterrorist laws in the UK from the 1970s onwards allowed suspects to be held for 7 or 14 days without charge, and now allow for 42 days detention without being charge.
Canada interned 450 Quebec nationalists without trial during the October crisis in 1971 after two kidnappings and a history of bombings and several murders dating from the early 1960s. That left-wing hero Trudeau was the dirty rotten scoundrel behind this human rights abomination. Canada uses a memory hole for the October crisis when it rides its own high horse over Gitmo
Australia and the UK had interment of enemy aliens in World War 1 and 2:
- During the First World War, 6,890 Germans were interned, of whom 4,500 were Australian residents before 1914. In NSW the principal place of internment was the Holsworthy Military Camp. Shame Labour shame!
- Australia interned about 7000 residents, including more than 1500 British nationals, during World War II. A further 8000 people were sent to Australia to be interned after being detained overseas by Allies. At its peak in 1942, more than 12,000 people were interned in Australia. Shame Labor shame.
Canada and the USA interned Japanese citizens and aliens by the hundreds of thousands in World War 2.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the civil war. He did not consult Congress.
Roosevelt had several German saboteurs that landed in the USA quickly executed after brief trials before military commissions in 1942.
The detention of captured enemy combatants is incidental to the conduct of a war.
Was this detention without trial wrong? Did these soldiers have a right to a trial? Did they have the right to bail? The right of access to a lawyer?
There would need to have been a lot of lawyers because 11 million German and Japanese soldiers were detained by the Allies by the end of the war in 1945.
The Anti-War Left and the purpose of the International Humanitarian Laws of War
25 May 2014 Leave a comment
in economics, laws of war, war and peace Tags: international humanitarian law
When it comes to the raison d’être of international humanitarian law, a stout ignorance infects the Renegade Left.
The purpose of international humanitarian law is to ensure a strict differentiation between civilians and combatants and provide for the detention and treatment of captured combatants.
The prospect of humane detention until the end of the conflict increases both the incentive to give quarter and to surrender when a military position is hopeless.
The purpose of this wartime detention of combatants is not to punish them, but to prevent return to the battlefield. Some of the detainees who have been released from Gitmo have returned to the battlefield.
The strict requirement under the Geneva conventions for combatants to carry their weapons openly and to dress in a uniform recognisable at a distance is to ensure that combatants are easy to distinguish from afar so that troops do not get trigger happy around civilians and refugee columns.
This is the fundamental purpose of international humanitarian law: saving civilians from the fighting.
In return for many legal protections from being harmed by the hostilities, civilians are strictly forbidden from engaging in hostilities.
If civilians directly engage in hostilities, they are considered unlawful or unprivileged combatants or belligerents. They may be prosecuted under the law of the detaining state. Both lawful and unlawful combatants may be interned for the duration in wartime, and they may be interrogated and also prosecuted for war crimes.
The severest of punishments are allowed for spies, saboteurs, infiltrators, francs-tireurs and guerrillas. Not carrying weapons openly and not dressing in a military uniform that is recognisable from a distance is a self-inflicted death sentence.
In the Battle of the Bulge, the English-speaking Nazi infiltrators dressed in American uniforms lost all interest in their missions once the first few who were captured were court-martialled in the field and immediately shot. This was the standard practice of every army at the time.
The Hostages Trial at Nuremburg dismissed some murder charges against some German commanders because partisan fighters in Europe could not be considered lawful belligerents under Article 1 of the 1907 Hague convention. The Tribunal stated:
We are obliged to hold that such guerrillas were francs tireurs who, upon capture, could be subjected to the death penalty. Consequently, no criminal responsibility attaches to the defendant List because of the execution of captured partisans…
The term combatant denotes the right to participate directly in hostilities. Lawful combatants cannot be prosecuted for lawful acts of war in the course of military operations even if their behaviour would constitute a serious crime in peacetime.
The term unlawful combatant was first used in US law in a 1942 United States Supreme Court decision in the case Ex parte Quirin.
The Supreme Court upheld the jurisdiction of a U.S. military tribunal over the trial of several German saboteurs in the US. This judgment states:
By universal agreement and practice, the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants.
Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful.
The criteria from a just war include "serious prospects of success" and "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
Neither applies to the firing of missiles from the Gaza into Israel after the 2005 disengagement.
When was the last time the Progressive Left denounced Hamas as war criminals for targeting civilians in Israel and intermingling with their own civilians for cover. Both are war crimes
This Google map shows much of the Gaza Strip is rural. There is plenty of rural land that is ideal for Hamas military bases this away from civilian centres as required by the laws of war.
The laws of war do not make it safer to be a combatant.
The laws of war are designed to reduce the chances that civilians are attacked because they are near military targets and of soldiers unlawfully intermingle among them for cover.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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