Soccer Dad points us to this fine essay by the Israeli philosopher Asa Kasher which demonstrates why Operation Cast Lead was a just war justly fought. Among the pertinent points Kasher makes:
Author Archive for Ben Cohen
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The Tehran Symphony Orchestra has been wending its way around Europe performing a piece nauseatingly entitled “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Entezami, and described - in a brilliant piece by Michael Kimmelman - as “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness.” As Kimmelman points out, protests did greet the orchestra in certain cities, but I’m not aware of Naomi Klein, Brian Eno, John Pilger or any other minor radical celebrity urging a boycott.
The repellent George Galloway turned up in Boston this week, raising money for Hamas. Via Solomonia, a video of the crowd greeting him.
Commenting on Human Rights Watch’s criticisms of the Jordanian government for stripping nearly 3,000 Palestinians of their citizenship, Elder of Ziyon makes the following observation: “…every Arab country is equally wrong by refusing to grant citizenship to people of Palestinian origin born in their countries - who now number in the millions. Not only is the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness being violated, but also the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Read it all.
“Anthony ‘Genius’ Julius, 39, is not a divorce lawyer but a specialist in media law, acting for Robert Maxwell and once employed by the Daily Mail. His background could not be further from the upper-class world inhabited by his opposite number. He is a Jewish intellectual and Labour supporter and less likely to feel restrained by considerations of fair play.” So wrote a reporter on The Daily Telegraph during the divorce proceedings between Princess Diana and Prince Charles. Read more from Anthony about the antisemitism which can surface in England’s elite here.
This article by Richard Landes is cross-posted from Augean Stables.
Judge Richard Goldstone spoke yesterday at Yale in the framework of the George Herbert Walker Bush Jr. Lecture in International Relations. Obviously a most prestigious platform for someone of stature, but inappropriate for a figure who is not only highly controversial, but has done much to marginalize himself, as Noah Pollak and Adam Yoffie pointed out the previous day in the Yale Daily.
Continue reading ‘The Coke-Lite of International Law: Goldstone Speaks at Yale’
This is a guest post by Modernity.
Stanley Kubrick’s marvellous film Spartacus was the inspiration behind the “I am Seismic Shock” campaign
This web Web phenomena, courtesy of the Streisand effect, was started to highlight how inappropriate it was for the British Police to visit a blogger and intimidate him into deleting one of his blogs.
Please take a copy and embed it in your blogs, as a reminder that the Police should not be involved in legitimate political criticism and discourse on the Internet.
This is piece by Kenneth Bandler of AJC is cross-posted from JTA.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is not likely to take a seat at the U.N. Security Council’s horseshoe table, but the Hezbollah terrorist organization he has led since 1992 now has a toehold inside the world body’s most prestigious room.
Continue reading ‘Hezbollah gains a toehold inside U.N. Security Council’
On February 1st, France assumes the Presidency of the UN Security Council with Iran likely to be the dominant issue. This morning, I interviewed Gérard Araud, France’s Ambassador to the United Nations, for AJC’s new internet TV show, Reality Check. He was refreshingly candid. Watch the video below for the key points he made.
According to Germany’s Spiegel magazine, Iran’s regime is being pressured “on the question of who exactly is responsible for the country’s nuclear program — and what this says about its true nature. The government has consistently told the IAEA that the only agency involved in uranium enrichment is the National Energy Council, and that its work was exclusively dedicated to the peaceful use of the technology.”
Ben Cohen writes: Stephen Sizer, the Iranian regime’s dutiful mouthpiece inside the Anglican Church, has been intimidating the author of the excellent blog, Seismic Shock, as you will read below. Both cowardly and odious, Sizer’s action underlines the fanatical determination of the pro-Palestine lobby in the UK to shut down open debate. So it’s time to declare that “We Are All Seismic Shock” - and communicate that same message to Sizer by emailing him here.
This is a guest post by Seismic Shock.
As some people have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet in blogging about the Reverend Stephen Sizer’s activities of late.
After all, what more can be said of a man forwards emails from Holocaust deniers, shares platforms with Holocaust deniers, and shamelessly flaunts his anti-Zionist theology before Iran’s apocalyptic Holocaust-denying regime? As Iranian pastors are arrested and house churches closed down, why is the Khomeinist regime translating Sizer’s book on Christian Zionism into Farsi? How many more times can I point all this out?
This is a guest post by Christian Tau of NIJ.
Norway FM Jonas Gahr Støre toured the Middle East between January 16th-20th, visiting Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Egypt and UAE. The topics of Støre’s meetings in the different countries as well as the manner in which he was received shows us a Norwegian foreign policy bathed in the gold sheen of hypocrisy. The manner in which the Norwegian media reports on Støre’s tour reveals how this hypocrisy is rooted in a bedrock of popular denial.
Here’s the first edition of a new internet TV show I’m editing - AJC Reality Check.
The bêtes noires of the far left - the US and Israel - have rushed to bring aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti. So it won’t come as a surprise to learn that the counter-attack against these imperialist dogs has begun, led by Hugo Chavez.
Speaking on his weekly television rant, “Alo Presidente,” Chavez claimed that the real goal of the US was the military occupation of Haiti. Addressing President Obama with the racist pejorative “chico” - “boy” - he issued the following instruction: “Obama, send doctors, boy. Do you understand me? Send doctors, rescue workers, medicine, water, instead of sending soldiers.” (Click on the “shotlist” tab in the previous link to see this quote.)
One pressing matter which Chavez didn’t address is the punishing debt of $167 million which Haiti owes to Venezuela. Last July, the Paris Club agreed to cancel $214 million of Haitian debt, but no similar announcement has been forthcoming from Caracas, even after the earthquake. Perhaps Chavez has earmarked those funds for Hamas.
Eamonn McDonagh adds:
That’s not the half of it. According to this story in ABC he’s now accusing the USA of actually having deliberately caused the quake. And why would the US do a thing like that? It’s all part of a plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran by means of an earthquake attack. I kid you not.
El Comandante is showing increasing signs of not being right in the head.
Here’s British parliamentarian Sir Gerald Kaufman on Israel’s operation in Gaza against Hamas: “”We have had a fuss in our country about the inability of certain Israeli politicians to visit Britain for fear of being arrested…Anybody who uses white phosphorus should be arrested and should be tried for war crimes.”
Sounds like a bold interventionist on behalf of human rights, no?
Here’s what Gerald Kaufman, then the Shadow (opposition) Foreign Secretary, said at the onset of the Serb onslaught against Bosnia, in June 1992: “The situation is far too confused for forcible intervention from outside to do any positive good…The Foreign Secretary is equally right to make it clear that the Serbs are not the only guilty party - that others share the guilt.” (Quoted in Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, Penguin 2001, pps. 297-98.)
And here he is again in early 1993, when the genocidal nature of the Serb campaign was becoming increasingly clear: “The European Community should have no military role in this conflict or indeed in any other. The need is not to extend the conflict but to maintain it [sic].” (See Brendan Simms, p. 298.)
To maintain it. To maintain, in other words, a state of affairs which enabled the punishing siege of Sarajevo, the concentration camps in which women were raped and men brutalized, the massacre at Srebrenica and myriad other atrocities.
Gerald Kaufman was perfectly content for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia to continue apace. So whenever you hear him delivering one of his inchoate, hateful rants against Israel, ask for the salt.
