Archive for the 'The War Against The Guardian' Category

Apt phrase for a justified war

Published on February 8, 2009 in T.W.O.T and The War Against The Guardian. 0 Comments

Norman loves T.W.O.T.

Product naming is a really big money spinner these days so I’ve been kicking a few ideas around. I think Thalidomide would be a great name for a sedative, Hindenburg would a brilliant name for an airplane and last but not least there’s Titantic which has a lovely nautical ring to it, perfect for a cruise ship. Now, I know what you’re going to say. All those names I just mentioned are associated with some disaster or other. Well, yes but all of those happened ages ago and I’m sure noboby remembers them now. Anyway, here’s Professor Norman on why he thinks “The War on Terror” (T.W.O.T) is an apt phrase for a justified war.

In today’s Guardian David Miliband takes his distance from the phrase ‘war on terror’. While conceding that it had some merit, he now thinks that ‘the notion is misleading and mistaken’. Reporting on his piece elsewhere in the paper Julian Borger calls it a ‘comprehensive critique‘. If ‘comprehensive’ just means that the foreign secretary has assembled a few arguments against the phrase ‘war on terror’, then OK. But the trouble is, his arguments aren’t compelling.

The first of them is that talking about a war on terror gives a spurious unity to a number of disparate groups and thereby helps the efforts of those intent on unifying them. The only unity the phrase implies is the one that in fact justifies it: namely, that the groups concerned are terrorist groups, that they have adopted terror as a political method. Otherwise they can be as disparate as you want. The same reasoning as David uses here could have been used to discourage anyone talking about fascism (I mean real fascism) between the wars. Apart from this, there is a certain other unity behind much recent terrorism – Islamist politics. That doesn’t mean a total sameness, but it’s a feature hard to overlook.

Second, David says that the offending phrase ‘implied that the correct response was primarily military’. No, it didn’t. (a) If this were so, you’d have to believe that a war on drugs, or on crime, or on corruption, was primarily military – which people usually don’t believe. (b) Even if we take something closer to war in the standard sense, it doesn’t follow that non-military means of fighting it aren’t important. Wars of liberation from tyranny, for example – they could not be won without social and political measures, campaigns, forms of cooperation and persuasion.

Third, David writes:

We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society. We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad.

Indeed. But it is no part of the logic of the phrase ‘war on terror’ that we should compromise these values and practices. The war on terror can be fought while upholding them. And it is being fought on behalf of them.

‘Not to give in to darkness’

Published on February 6, 2009 in Afghanistan, Israel and The War Against The Guardian. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Norman and the moral highground.

Further to this, here’s a story of courage against moral barbarity.

One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside them on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.

“Are you going to school?”

Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.

But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others – students and teachers – was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.

Today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including even Shamsia, whose face was so badly burned that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well – about 1,300 in all.

It’s one to read in full. (Thanks: SC.)

Actually, I agree with Norm on this, throwing acid in a child’s face is an act of moral barbarism. However, I’m just wondering how one should describe a nation that rallies around pilots who do not feel a thing except a light bump to the plane when they drop bombs on entire families and crush them to death. And catchy little phrase for the following would also come in handy:

January 5 The Times reports that telltale smoke has appeared from areas of shelling. Israel denies using phosphorus

January 8 The Times reports photographic evidence showing stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells. Israel Defence Forces spokesman says: “This is what we call a quiet shell – it has no explosives and no white phosphorus”

January 12 The Times reports that more than 50 phosphorus burns victims are taken into Nasser Hospital. An Israeli military spokesman “categorically” denies the use of white phosphorus

January 15 Remnants of white phosphorus shells are found in western Gaza. The IDF refuses to comment on specific weaponry but insists ammunition is “within the scope of international law”

January 16 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters are hit with phosphorus munitions. The Israeli military continues to deny its use

January 21 Avital Leibovich, Israel’s military spokeswoman, admits white phosphorus munitions were employed in a manner “according to international law”

January 23 Israel says it is launching an investigation into white phosphorus munitions, which hit a UN school on January 17. “Some practices could be illegal but we are going into that. The IDF is holding an investigation concerning one specific unit and one incident”

Let’s have a party

Published on February 6, 2009 in Israel and The War Against The Guardian. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Norman Geras continues The War Against The Guardian.

The Guardian publishes pro-Palestinian pieces which clearly makes them self-hating-Judeo-Islamo-fascist-liberal anti-semites. The fact that they print just as many if not more pro-Israeli articles is surely just a ruse to cover their tracks. Thankfully, Professor Norman, an intellectual titan of our times, is on their case. Today, eagle-eyed Norman found evidence in an article by Afua Hirsh that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she too is a self-hating-Judeo-Islamo-fascist-liberal anti-semite. She wrote a sentence mentioning Israeli war crimes without also mentioning Palestinian war crimes. Thirteen Israelis were killed during this war and Israeli cats and dogs were severely traumatised. Compared with this horror, the death of one thousand two hundred and eighty five people in Gaza, who were all quite clearly guilty of being Palestinian, pales into insignificance.

Remember Peter Preston – and the Guardian as exemplar of the pursuit of unbiased understanding? Well, take a look at this letter to the paper. It’s from a number of international lawyers and says that the government ‘has a duty under international law to exert its influence to stop violations of international humanitarian law in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas’. It urges the government, in particular…

…to condemn publicly attacks by the parties to the conflict that target civilians directly, or fail to discriminate between civilians and combatants, or which are expected to cause disproportionate injury to the civilian population.

You may have noted: ‘the parties to the conflict’ and ‘target[ing] civilians directly’. Now check out this report by Afua Hirsch from the same edition of the paper. Observe how the communication from those international lawyers is rendered by her:

The letter argues that Israel has violated principles of humanitarian law, including launching attacks directly aimed at civilians and failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants. [Emphasis added by me - NG.]

The ‘parties to the conflict’ have been reduced to the single party, Israel; and ‘attacks directly aimed at civilians’ from… ohhh, Gaza into Israel, have departed the scene. This is perhaps meant to illustrate the meaning of the idea that facts are sacred. But reporting sure the hell is free.

Resistible confusion

Published on January 28, 2009 in The War Against The Guardian. 0 Comments

We are Norm. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Norman uses an article in The Guardian as a starting point to ruminate on the rights and wrongs of resistance. He concludes: “[N]othing …  entitles those resisting tyranny or occupation to murder the innocent”. It’s worth noting that in listing possible motives for resistance:  psychological release, national identity, a sense of not being defeated, Norm neglects to mention perhaps the most important: resistance to tyranny. Also missing is any explicit statement of the obligations  of a state resisting resistance. Shouldn’t what’s good for the goose be good for the gander? Israel has laid virtual siege to the entire population of Gaza denying them food, fuel and freedom of movement. She has also dropped hundred tonne “smart bombs” in “targeted assassinations” and used munitions containing white phosphorus and flechettes on the densely crowded streets of that territory. It seems pretty obvious that these actions will, as Norm puts it, result in murdering the innocent. So to ask one side to play by the rules while the other does as it pleases seems, at the very least, to be the height of hypocrisy.

Here’s an exercise in making what is already a difficult subject into an impossible one – impossible because now hopelessly muddled. It’s a piece by Peter Beaumont, and it begins by looking at the complex motivations involved in Palestinian resistance: psychological release, national identity, a sense of not being defeated. This is apropos, among other things, the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. Beaumont then goes on to ask, ‘when do we regard armed resistance as being acceptable?’

In the traditions of political and legal philosophy, there is a widely-recognized right of resistance against tyranny (or oppression), and this is matched by a right against foreign domination or occupation, as one variant of tyranny. The correlate of this right to resist are the rights to freedom and national self-determination. There are difficulties of application. How bad does non-democratic rule have to be to count as the kind of tyranny against which armed resistance is justifiable? Are there other viable roads to change? What are the chances of success? But, in any case, nothing in any of the several rights aforesaid entitles those resisting tyranny or occupation to murder the innocent. And according to well-established international norms governing military conflict, deliberately targeting civilians is a crime; it is a form of murdering the innocent.

Therefore, to write as Beaumont does as if armed resistance and targeting civilians were one and the same is to bury the discussion within a central, unhelpful obfuscation. Along with one or two other confusions which I shall bypass here (he considerably loosens Michael Walzer’s concept of ’supreme emergency’), Beaumont arrives, finally, at no conclusion:

None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance.

You end up not only without any answer to the question Beaumont posed, but without the intellectual resources – widely available on this subject – to think about the question clearly.

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