Palestinian revanchism is a recipe for endless wars
06 Aug 2014 8 Comments
in laws of war, Murray Rothbard, war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, irredentism, Murray Rothbard, revanchism, warmongering
Why are borders in 1861, 1919, 1945, 1948, 1956 or 1967 or any other time morally superior?
Palestinian revanchism is a recipe for endless wars. Revanchism is the desire to reverse territorial losses.
Revanchism is linked with irredentism, the conception that a part of the cultural and ethnic nation remains “unredeemed” outside the borders of its appropriate nation-state.
• A return of German revanchism would plunge Europe back into war as Germany marched to reclaim Western Poland and the Sudetenland lost after the massive ethic cleansing in 1945 and the moving of Poland 1/3rd to the left after Potsdam.
• The Balkans and Eastern Europe would be plunged into war to revise the 1945 and the 1919 boundaries.
• Irish revanchism and irredentism over protestant Northern Ireland led to war from 1922 onwards.
The just war doctrine of the Catholic Church found in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is a convenient summary as any on what is and is not a just war, lists four strict conditions for legitimate defence by military force:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition).
Hamas does not have any serious prospects of success in its attacks on Israel. Therefore any military action by Hamas is an unjust war
Why are the Hamas rockets so primitive and inaccurate?
05 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: dead baby strategy, Hamas
Hamas has always used inaccurate and primitive rockets. Quite clearly they and their sponsors don’t want to actually be any sort of real threat to Israel.
If Hamas actually had serious missile technology, Israel would have to take far more severe steps to prevent attack.
More importantly, those useful idiots who criticise Israel and support as we find it much more difficult to do so if the Hamas was starting to do serious damage to Israel and its cities. (Useful idiot is a term for people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.)
The pathetic state of their rocket technology and their dead baby strategy are all a media game, a media game where civilians die. Of course, as is well-known, 80% of the civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip in the present conflict are male; a majority of these male casualties are men aged 18 to 30 – young men of military age.
Why no International Criminal Court arrest warrants for the Hamas leadership for the war crime of using human shields?
04 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Hamas, human shields, International Criminal Court, Nuremberg trials, war crimes
Karl Student had a clever idea: use British prisoners of war as human shields for his advancing German troops in Crete in 1941. Six British prisoners of war died from fire from the British side of the battle. The use of prisoners of war as human shields was the subject of war crimes trials by the UK Military Court in the Student case in 1946 and the US Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in the Von Leeb (The High Command Trial) case in 1948.
Under the Statute of the Statute of the International Criminal Court ICC Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xxiii) , it is a war crime to
utili[se] the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations
In 1990 and 1991, Saddam held more than 800 Western, Japanese, and Kuwaiti nationals as involuntary human shields at strategic installations in Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam broadcast this picture of him putting his greasy dictator paws over some poor child he was holding hostage.
In the Karadžić and Mladić case in 1995 before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the accused were charged with war crimes for using UN peacekeepers as human shields.
The Gaza Strip is not a free country. Those that disobey the orders of the Hamas government to not evacuate and to not leave buildings in the case of warning missiles risk severe punishments including execution. in the Gaza Strip, it does not pay to give neighbours ammunition to settle old scores.
Why hasn’t the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrests of the Hamas leaders who have enabled the use of human shields?
The Palestinian Authority has previously sought to invoke the jurisdiction of the International criminal Court against Israel. The Palestinian Authority has already acceded to the Geneva conventions earlier this year.
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas would not only be able to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court, they would also expose themselves to war crimes prosecutions.
Israeli security forces make strenuous efforts to adhere to international law, while Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups are routinely engaged in war crimes, such as shooting rockets at civilians.
HT: icrc.org
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?
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waSPsI9-ge8
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.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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