I don't think Israel is the worst human rights offender in the world, and probably not in the Middle East either. But by no measure should they be thought of as respecting international law or human rights. In fact they should be condemned for disrespecting them. I've long talked on here about how s...

If by "civilized" you mean in accordance with Western practices of conquest, as we more or less agreed Israel qualifies for in our earlier discussion, then yes, they are the most civilized. But I personally find it hard to call "civilized" a nation that imposes collective punishm...

Vraith wrote:the fact is in general they respect international law and

I don't know how you could possibly substantiate this.

However, it's nothing short of hypocritical for the developed nations of the world to condemn Israel for doing what they all did. Well, more specifically what our ancestors did (which was wrong) and what Israelis are doing today (which is also wrong). There's a moral difference there as far as I'm ...

Look, past crimes are why we made international humanitarian law, precisely so we could avoid the kind of complacent attitude you're advocating in this conversation. Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and saying "This has been done before," we have the tools now to condemn it and stop...

Well, I happen to think that the principle of invading and occupying land and denying the persons living there rights and self-governance is a very bad one, yes. A lot of other people do too, which is why it's been codified that it oughtn't be done. That's the point of the international system (such...

Care to cite me a binding United Nations Security Council resolution telling the US to get off Indian territory? No? Then you're talking about apples and oranges. You're talking about legally meaningless counterfactuals. We're talking about codified international law which is on the books and which ...

"The inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" is enshrined in UN 242 (which calls for the withdrawal of Israel from the OT ) and countless subsequent resolutions, all of which state forcefully that the 4th Geneva Convention and other elements of international humanitarian la...

Cail, That's my point. It's disingenuous for Hamas to claim that Israel took "their land". The international community carved Israel out of the desert. It's a lot more complicated than that. Palestinians had no state at all as you say, but they did live in what is now the Occupied Territor...

Call it a "religious-ethnic" category rather than just "religious" if you like. It's an interesting question, but for our purposes here the distinction is meaningless. The point is that the expressed goals of the Israeli state -- as a home for the Disapora, a homeland for the Jew...

I'll quote Moshe Landau, Chief Justice of Israeli High Court, articulating in 1961 what is the legal consensus in Israel about its essential Jewish character: In light of the recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their state in Israel, and in light of the r...

I think the world should be behind another Islamic Republic. They've been nothing but a boon to the world. Indeed. While we're about condemning religious states, we should ask the Gazans and those living in the West Bank how they feel about a Jewish state which denies them their right to self-deter...

I think it may actually be against our own interests to be conducting global assassinations in this way, especially in places like Pakistan where our standing is already extremely tenuous to the detriment of our efforts to stamp out the Taliban, who are turned to by the local population as an altern...

Just another example of the unerring US support for democracy in the Middle East. When the only free and fair election in the region in the last decade goes the wrong way (Hamas, 2006), aid is cut off and the Gazans continue to wallow in misery. When the Palestinian Authority proposes to the United ...

I feel like this whole thread is the Kevin's Watch version of a social experiment, and Plissken is the sadistic psychologist in charge of conducting it. We are all chimps for his amusement. Greetings, LM. Nice to see you in these parts again. Likewise, Ex! I wondered where you'd been when I was mor...

I feel like this whole thread is the Kevin's Watch version of a social experiment, and Plissken is the sadistic psychologist in charge of conducting it. We are all chimps for his amusement.

*deep breath* Okay, so now that Obama is in office, three wars * is WAY too many (by the way, international interventionism is a live topic for debate now, and we all know which incumbent President can be blamed for it), partisanship can safely and without argument be laid at his doorstep and his al...

Hashi Lebwohl, Then I suppose, since inconsistency doesn't make an action incorrect, that the inconsistencies over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq make the military actions spearheaded by Bush acceptable? Or are Bush's inconsistencies different than Obama's inconsistencies? If s...

Hashi Lebwohl, I don't care how long you have been here--that is irrelevant. You may feel that gives you some sort of special privilege or rights but it really doesn't and we both know it. I'm not saying it accords me any privilege; I'm saying I don't know you very well... Don't feel badly, though--...

Hashi Lebwohl, Actually, it's a fairly accurate description of what has transpired. Where are the war protesters decrying Obama's war for oil? Oh, that's right--they were all Obama supporters, so everything he does is a-ok with them. You weren't a poster in the Tank when I posted consistently here, ...