El Páis of Madrid is a wonderful newspaper. In the lead editorial of today’s edition it fearlessly condemns the supposed assassination by Israel of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
As well as being legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable the policy of selective assassination, or to put it another way, the dirty war only contributes to the illusion that there are alternative solutions to the one that Israel will sooner or later have to face: an end to the occupation and the opening of talks with the Palestinians on the basis of a two state solution.
Stirring stuff. Spain is a member of NATO and has a large contingent of troops in Afghanistan. Those troops regularly kill members of the Taliban and - as do all troops faced with the challenges they are faced with - regularly kill civilians too. No doubt tomorrow’s lead editorial in El País will call for the immediate withdrawal of Spain’s contingent in Afghanistan on the grounds that its activities in that nation are legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable and are doing nothing to address the root causes of violence there.
Spain is an ally of the United States. As I write this post there are American UAVs prowling the skies of Pakistan and Afghanistan looking for leaders of the Taliban to assassinate. When such assassinations occur they are sometimes accompanied by large numbers of civilian deaths. No doubt tomorrow’s lead editorial in El País will call for an immediate end to Spanish acquiescence to the grisly and not-so-selective assassination activities of its ally on the grounds that they are legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable.
Despite decades of legal and illegal repression and the banning of political parties the Spanish government has failed to put an end to the Basque nationalist terrorist organization ETA. The time has surely come to have done with the legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable repression of nationalist Basques and to open immediate talks with ETA on the basis of a two-state solution. I’m certain an editorial on these lines will appear in El País in the coming days.
PS. For intelligent commentary on the assassination from a very recommendable blog see here.
The ETA analogy is particularly appropriate. And wasn’t Spain a fascist state until the late 70s? Shouldn’t El Pais be more concerned with the implications of this legacy rather attacking Israel daily?
If they weren’t obsessed “anti-Zionists”, El Pais might also be a trifle worried that HAMAS is schooling the kiddies to be committed to jihad to reclaim Al Andalus as holy Islamic soil.
The National:
In 2009, 44 predator strikes carried out by the CIA in the tribal areas of Pakistan struck only five of their intended al Qa’eda and Taliban targets, but more than 700 innocent civilians also died, according to Pakistani authorities. A senior Taliban commander said a suicide bomb attack that killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was an act of retaliation against the US drone attacks.
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported: “According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities,the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.
“For each al Qa’eda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”
The Wall Street Journal said: “A senior commander connected to the Afghan Taliban and involved with the attack against the CIA that left eight people dead said on Saturday that the bombing was retaliation for US drone strikes in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
Alan Dershowitz:
1. Israel has used targeted killings to protect civilians against war crimes, from an enemy sworn to its destruction. The US is using a far broader form of targeted killing, thousands of miles away from its civilian population, against an enemy that poses no immediate threat to its civilian population.
2. Drug traffickers are not direct combatants, thereby making an attack on them far more questionable under international law.
3. International law requires that any attack must be intended and tend toward the military defeat of the enemy. Israel has targeted those known to be directing terrorist attacks, whereas here it is less than clear that killing a drug trafficker would tend towards a military defeat of the Taliban.
4. Compounding this, the ratio of terrorist to civilian deaths for the Israel Air Force is better than 1:30 (Amos Harel, “Pinpointed IAF Attacks in Gaza More Precise, Hurt Fewer Civilians,” Haaretz, December 30, 2007.) - that is, 30 terrorists killed for every civilian, whereas that for the US is 1:14 (The UN Special Rapporteur on unlawful executions, Philip Alston, reported that as of 3 June 2009).
“El País” are hypocrites.
I don’t think you should conflate an El Pais editorial with the Spanish government. Whether the Spanish government has blood on its hands (and indeed it does) is irrelevant to the position of an editorial expressing a valid critique of Israeli assassinations. El Pais said it best:
“Además de legalmente condenable e inaceptable desde el punto de vista moral, la política de asesinatos selectivos o, dicho en otros términos, la guerra sucia sólo contribuye a prolongar el espejismo de que existen soluciones alternativas a la única que Israel tendrá que afrontar tarde o temprano: el fin de la ocupación y la apertura de negociaciones políticas con los palestinos sobre la base de la solución de los dos Estados. Cualquier otra vía sólo redundará en riesgos adicionales para su seguridad y en un mayor descrédito.”