Where did the anti-war movement go after Obama was elected?
28 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: anti-war movement, peace movement, voter demographics
Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas found that half of democratic party voters previously involved in anti-war protests under President Bush withdrew from the anti-war movement upon the election of President Obama:
The withdrawal of Democratic activists changed the character of the anti-war movement by undermining broad coalitions in the movement and encouraging the formation of smaller, more radical coalitions
Not even the loud, raucous and disruptive Code Pink stayed to its principle, and show themselves to be bunch of Democratic party hacks – Heaney and Rojas explain:
Code Pink: Women for Peace continues to speak out against war, but it has devoted a greater proportion of its energy to other issues, such as health care reform and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
After Obama’s election as president, their surveys of 5,400 demonstrators at 27 protests from January 2007 to December 2009 showed that Democratic party voter participation in anti-war activities plunged 37 per cent of anti-war protest this in January 2009 to 19 per cent in November 2009.
Ben Shapiro on BDS is just another form of of anti-semitism
27 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: anti-semitism, BDS, peace movements
Why isn’t Hamas firing missiles at Egypt for its on-going blockade of the Gaza Strip?
24 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Egypt, geography, Hamas
You don’t have to be too much of a geography nerd to notice that the Gaza Strip is not an enclave of Israel.
The Gaza Strip has a border with Egypt. Any blockade of Israel of the Gaza Strip is not grounds to attack Israel because it can always trade across its border with Egypt.
Egypt frequently blockades partially or wholly its border with the Gaza Strip. Hamas is not firing missiles that Egypt for this outrage? Why?
Military deaths in world war 2
21 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics, war and peace Tags: World War 2
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
The deliberate intermingling of civilians and combatants is a breach of the Law of International Armed Conflict
12 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
The value of a statistical life through time in the USA
06 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, environmental economics, health economics, technological progress, Thomas Schelling, transport economics Tags: Thomas Schelling, value of life
Thomas Schelling’s crucial contribution in 1968 at RAND was the notion of statistical lives—mortality risks—in contrast to valuing the lives of specific, identified individuals. His insight was that economists could evade the moral thicket of valuing life and instead focus on people’s willingness to trade-off money for small reductions in the risks they face.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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