Amira Hass: The one thing worse than denying the Gaza report

Now that international jurist and affirmed zionist John Goldstone has suggested in his UN report that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza, the denial machine amongst zionists worldwide has swung into overdrive.

The brilliant Israeli journalist Amira Hass explains the horror of this well in her latest piece for Ha'aretz:

. . .

Israel struck a civilian population that remains under its control, it didn't fulfill its obligation to distinguish between civilians and militants and used military force disproportionate with the tangible threat to its own civilians. Air Force drones and helicopters fired deadly missiles at civilians, many of them children; the Tank Corps and Navy shelled civilian neighborhoods with weapons not designed for precision strikes; soldiers received orders to fire on rescue crews; others fired on civilians carrying white flags; and others killed people in or near their homes. Troops used Gazans as human shields, soldiers detained civilians in abusive conditions, the army used white phosphorus shells in dense civilian areas and, on the eve of withdrawing, destroyed wide residential, industrial and agricultural areas.

There is only thing worse than denial - the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.

We don't understand Darfur. . .

And until we do, how can we intervene?

I recently had a couple of conversations with a Canadian advocate for the United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS). Well-informed and well-connected on all things related to "the responsibility to protect," one of his goals for the project, which is essentially a UN standby intervention force, was to create a mechanism whereby the UN would have both the mandate and the resources to intervene within a state where human security was being trampled.

Conventional wisdom has it that in Bosnia and Rwanda, the failure of the UN stemmed from the combination of opposing political interests in the UNSC and the unavailability of military resources to forcefully intervene. The failure of the international system in Darfur (not to mention the DRC) is often cited as the latest example of the UN's impotence in the face of brutality on the ground. The joint AU-UN force currently on the ground may have done some good, but it arrived late, was too small for the territory, and was criticised for its inability to guarantee human security (for a variety of reasons).

And so Darfur is invoked as a reason for why we need the UNEPS. I don't disagree with the idea. Once we have such a force, however, what exactly would its mandate within Darfur going to be?

"Stop genocide," obviously. The situation in Darfur, however, is not so straightforward. Omar El-Bashir, vile though he is, is not Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin. I have no problem laying the blame for at least some of Sudan's 1-3 (depending on the year) concurrent civil wars on his shoulders, and I hope that he is made to answer for at least some of what has happened in Darfur, in Southern Sudan, and in Eastern Sudan in front of the ICC. That said, however, he is not creating lists of people to be liquidated and marching them in front of firing squads or into gas chambers. His army is prosecuting wars, and either using violence against civilians as a tactic, or assisting other parties to do the same.

I began seriously following the conflict in Darfur in 2005. News wires from all the various agencies always spoke of some point in February 2003, or thereabouts, when Darfurian rebels took up arms against the government, because of "Khartoum's neglect" of their region. Beyond this, it was hard to figure out exactly what the rebels wanted, and what their politicial and military disposition was. As they fractured, and as their internal political differences were brought out by peace talks with the government, the way forward became even more difficult to see.

Fast-forward to the start of 2008, when the actors have all shifted to the point that the initial narrative no longer makes any sense. It isn't true anymore to say that "Arab Janjaweed militias are being helped by Khartoum to wipe out the Black Darfurians," if that even ever was true. This article, from the Lebanon Daily Star and Al-Arabiya, gives an account of just how fluid the lines are, and some idea of each party's interests.

Dealing with the Abdel Wahid "problem" by neglecting him is no longer an option. Nor can the Arabs of Darfur continue to be excluded from peace efforts, on the grounds that the government speaks for them. It neither speaks for nor cares for them. If groups like Hemeti's are engaged, Abdel Wahid is re-engaged and North-South war is averted, there is a chance that Darfur may eventually find peace and stability. If not, the players will take new partners - and the dance of war will continue.

Got it?

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Given an understanding of the political situation, the sloganeering around Darfur suddenly seems trite, like a hero-fantasy entertained by university students in rich countries. Yet, we know that there is great suffering, and to stand by and do nothing seems inhuman.

So before we do "something," we should have a clear idea of what we are getting into.

Mike Huckabee at the RNC: The Viet Cong stole your desks

Please do not judge your American friends by what you see on TV. Really, not all of them are imbeciles.

-----
Transcript:

"...And with that, she went to the door of her classroom and motioned, and in walked over 20 veterans, some of them still wearing the uniforms from days gone by, every one of them carrying a school desk. And as they carefully and quietly arranged those desks in neat rows, Martha said, "You don't have to earn your desk, because these guys, they already did."

(APPLAUSE)

These -- these brave veterans had gone halfway around the world, giving up their education, interrupting their careers and families so that we could have the freedom that we have. Martha told them, "No one charged you for your desk, but it wasn't really free. These guys bought it for you. And I hope you never, ever forget it."

And I wish, ladies and gentlemen...

(APPLAUSE)

I wish we would all remember that being American is not just about the freedom we have; it is about those who gave it to us.

(APPLAUSE)

And let me remind you of something. John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom and the school desk that we had. John McCain helped me have a school desk.

And I want to tell you: I pledge myself to doing everything I can to help him earn a desk, and I'm thinking the one that's in the Oval Office would fit him very, very well..."

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In a nutshell, American prosperity is guaranteed by the use of aggressive military force against 3rd-world nations.

This is what Huckabee, along with the great white horde, were essentially celebrating: how else to explain the link between John McCain's service in Vietnam and the school desks in an Arkansas classroom. Were the VC stealing school desks from American schoolchildren? Was there a Vietnamese armada striking out for Americas shores (NB: fleeing refugees do not count)?

"We had to destroy the town to save it, and to get our desks back."

It may be an unwitting admission - but the fact that the crowd cheered so enthusiastically tells you something about the way many Americans view brutal military aggression - not even as a necessary evil, but as the guarantor of their way of life, and something to cheer about.

No righteous ones

I was thinking of writing something about the recent conflict in Georgia, but Uri Avnery, of Gush Shalom, said it pretty well already in a very insightful article:

. . .
This is the historical background to the recent spat between Georgia and Russia. There are no Righteous Ones here. It is rather funny to hear Vladimir Putin, whose hands are dripping with the blood of Chechen freedom fighters, extolling the right of South Ossetia to secession. It's no less funny to hear Micheil Saakashvili likening the freedom fight of the two separatist regions to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. ...

I am not entirely certain if the peoples, writ large, of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia actually wanted full independance from Georgia. Everything I've read and heard over the past few weeks seems to indicate that, but I don't have a familiarity with the politics to really tell.

Let's pretend he's not a war criminal

That is, however, the key to the conflict. No matter what a vile, evil, unspeakably brutal murderer Vladimir Putin is, the morality of the enterprise rides on that - if the people of South Ossetia wanted independence, and were indeed being violently oppressed by Saakashvili's army, then all the hand-wringing from NATO is either irrelevance or hypocrisy: they can't castigate Russia for intervening in Georgia when America is sitting in Iraq.

A good month for International Law?

Has July been a good month for international law?

Today the Serbian government, to its credit, arrested Karadzic. Reconciliation in the Balkans will be important for the peace of the entire world, being seen as it is, as the fault line between the Muslim and Christian worlds. For Karadzic, however, there needs to be a harsh penalty - the man attempted to drive a literally defenseless nation of people into extinction, and nearly got away with it.

Last week, the prosecutor of the ICC (unfortunately not the same body that will try Karadzic, but then again the Rome Statute wasn't built in a day) indicted Omar El-Bashir, the serial killer in charge in Khartoum. He is the second sitting African head of state with an international warrant against him, the first having been Liberia's Charles Taylor.

Which civil war did they indict me for?

Shamefully, the Arab League, itself a cesspool of repressive tyrants and foreign puppets, is trying to stall. The African Union, hopefully for less self-interested reasons, is doing the same.

I applaud both the indictment and the capture, but I have mixed feelings about the entire project of public international law. How can you have criminal law without a monopoly on force? The rule of law means nothing if the brute force to circumvent it is readily available. Moreover, whom could we entrust with such a monopoly on force?

The entire project will prove its validity when we see an indictment passed not against defeated Balkan fascists or thuggish African dictators, but against sitting heads of powerful states. Currently, the evidence exists to charge the presidents of both Russia and the United States with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Is there any principled reason not to?