Another Fantasy World

Jeremy Rabkin of The Weekly Standard has an incredibly apropos commentary to the "tinfoil enema, fantasy conservative conspiracy hacks" I referred to in the post previous to this. But the fantasy world Mr. Rabkin refers to is the one which infests the southeast corner of Manhattan.

At the outset of the current war in Lebanon, governments in Europe protested that Israel's response was "disproportionate." The U.N. human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, endorsing this claim, spoke darkly of Israeli "war crimes."

Israeli is accused of war crimes where the IAF pilots endanger themselves to distribute leaflets to warn Lebanese civilian populations. But there is no mention of Hizbollah war crimes where civilian populations are targeted by crude missiles. The fantasy continues.

I asked one of them, who teaches military law at one of the service academies, what this talk about "proportionality" actually meant. The answer was prompt and succinct: "It means they don't like Israel."

Now the fantasy takes a familar turn into farce.

From the perspective of international law, it doesn't take much to condemn Israel. Year after year, for example, the old Human Rights Commission devoted more time to condemnations of Israel than to any other topic, while often ignoring atrocities elsewhere. That was one reason the U.N. abolished the commission last year, substituting a supposedly more sober Human Rights Council.

From Commission to Council is not much of a journey. As a matter of fact, it went no where at all but remained in familar anti-semitic waters.

In its first year, the new council decided to forgo other distractions and devote all its country-specific resolutions to condemnations of Israel.

Deju vu anyone? Second verse same as the first! These condemnationa are based on changes to International Law whereby...

"the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977) and the Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998).

The above are cited by international law experts as restraints upon the conduct of war.

The Additional Protocol was the first treaty attempting to set standards for military tactics and the overall conduct of war since the Hague Conventions of 1907. (The 1949 Geneva Conventions dealt with specialized matters such as the treatment of war prisoners, sick or wounded combatants, and civilians in occupied territories.)"

The United States and Israel are not signatories to these relatively new regulations. And for good reason.

Whereas previous Geneva Conventions had protected uniformed, disciplined armies that complied with the laws of war, the Additional Protocol sought to extend protection to guerrilla forces and terrorist groups.

Bingo. The seeds of future wars, future atrocities and future terror were negotiated almost thirty years ago. Right here. In the midst of American commerce, New York City.

Yasser Arafat's PLO was granted observer status at the negotiating conference and expressed satisfaction with the results, especially the embrace in the very first article of the treaty of "conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes"--understood by everyone in 1977 as a reference to Israel, given the recent U.N. General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with "racism."

This contemptible action was passed as follows:

on November 10, 1975 the United Nations General Assembly adopted, by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), its Resolution 3379, which states as its conclusion:

• Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.

The resolution also endorsed an August 1975 statement by the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries (Lima, Peru), that:

• ...severely condemned Zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperalist ideology.

And despite slaughtering tens of millions, Communism has never been singled out for condemnation the like such that Israel has received.

The Reagan administration, rejecting U.S. participation in this treaty, warned that the treaty would give special protections to terrorist groups.

Thank the Lord above that Carter was gone by this time.

And of course these international laws are applied equally without favoring one nation(s) over another...

"...it would be very hard to show that Israel's targeting in Lebanon was in clear violation of standards that are otherwise widely respected. (They certainly weren't by Russia in Chechnya or NATO in Kosovo.)"