Monthly Archives: June 2015

A UN Group May Have Committed War Crimes

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Joe Lauria’s article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal was headlined U.N.: Israel and Palestinian Groups May Have Committed War Crimes, but here’s the thing: the United Nations Human Rights Commission is accusing Israel of war crimes for defending itself against what its report is only willing to “strongly suggest” was the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist war against Israel.

Oh, wait: the UN doesn’t even address the Palestinian Authority in any serious sense—in only goes on about “Palestinian armed groups” as the ones committing the terrorism and the PA’s claimed inability to control its own territory. Never mind that the PA’s terror war was done explicitly under the auspices of the Hamas branch of the unity government that is the Palestinian Authority.

The UN did decry the toll,

In Gaza, the scale of the devastation was unprecedented. The death toll alone speaks volumes: 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians with 299 women and 551 children.

Never mind that the vast majority of these civilian deaths were from Hamas shooting from residential buildings from which the civilian occupants were prevented from leaving—they were shields for the terrorists and bodies for the publicity.

The UN’s report also had this:

In the cases in which attacks were directed at military objectives located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects, mortars are not the most appropriate weapon. The imprecise nature of mortars makes it difficult for an attacking party using this weapon in an area in which there is a concentration of civilians to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and the military objective of the attack, and to limit its effects as required by international humanitarian law. Therefore, the use of such weapons with wide area effects by Palestinian armed groups against targets located in Israeli towns and villages, and the possible indiscriminate effects, are likely to constitute a violation of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks.

The UN, though, carefully omits the reason those military objectives were “located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects” in the first place. The PA were using those civilians as shields and as body count.

Even though the Israelis were at pains to warn the occupants of these putative “civilian objects” prior to a strike, the report’s “investigators” were careful to trot out their witnesses who said there were no warnings. Except for a slip of the tongue by a UNRWA “witness.”

The UN, in its report, also made light of its own UNHCR storing many of the PA’s weapons for it and that when caught the UNRWA turned those weapons over to the PA. The report does decry Israel, though, for warning the UNRWA (that tongue slip) of an impending strike against a PA (the report says “Hamas”) arsenal staged below a cluster of UNRWA buildings—and then carrying out the strike.

The UN’s report goes on in this vein.

The UNHRC is complicit after the fact in the Palestinian Authority’s terror war fought from Gaza last summer.

The SEC and Judges

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The SEC doesn’t like it when the ones it charges with miscreancy object to the cases being heard solely by SEC administrative judges. One statement in particular in the WSJ article at the link, though, jumped out at me.

The SEC accused several defendants of “judge shopping” by trying to get a case heard in a particular court and in another instance asked one of its own judges to submit a formal statement about whether he has ever felt pressure to favor the agency.

Never mind that the SEC is demanding that defendants use the SEC’s own already shopped-for judges. Never mind, either, the SEC’s cynicism in trotting out one of its employees to speak favorably about that employee’s employer.

International Trade and Hillary Clinton

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Recall that the Democrats in the House of Representatives last week blew up their erstwhile favorite, a wealth transfer sub-bill to pay a bunch of money to American workers who would be “displaced” by the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade bill being negotiated by President Barack Obama and 11 other Pacific nations. This in turn blew up the fast track authority bill already passed in the Senate and of which the TAA was a part.

Hillary Clinton, late sitter in the Secretary of State’s chair and current Democratic Party Presidential candidate was asked at her subsequent Iowa campaign rally about that fiasco, and what she thought of the fast track authority and of the trade deal in progress. She said that Obama needs to “listen and work with” Nancy Pelosi to get “the best deal possible.”

The Wall Street Journal characterized her answer thusly:

It’s a classic Clinton non-answer.

The WSJ is being polite. What it really signifies is that Clinton is utterly ignorant of the economics of international trade, or she’s too disingenuous to say what her position is.

Either one means she’s not qualified to be President.

White Supremacy

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Baynard Woods, writing for The Washington Post, had some thoughts on this.

[I]t is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters we have allowed ourselves to become. It is time to stop making excuses. We have to stop hiding from the truth of race—that this country, and the state of South Carolina in particular, were created on the idea of white supremacy. We’ll never overcome that history unless we acknowledge it.

Trouble is, the rest of us already have. It’s how we’ve made all the progress we’ve achieved.

Though some members of my family casually referred to African Americans as “bears,” we were not racist by the standards of a city that flew the Confederate battle flag above the state capitol. We did not use the N-word.

Never mind the mindset here, declining to speak it aloud with a particular term makes it all good. To the Liberal.

His piece went on in this vein.

Trouble is, like all (or so it seems) Liberals today, Woods is projecting his own and his fellow Liberals’ shortcomings onto the rest of us, as though we’re like him. It’s the Liberals, though, who are the party of the murderously racist KKK; it’s the Liberals, in their guise as nascent Progressives, who resegregated the Federal government after the Republicans had been steadily integrating it since the Civil War; it’s the Liberals who attack anyone who disagree with them as being racist; it’s the Liberals who demand racist- and sexist-based affirmative action.

The rest of us have moved on from that. It’s certainly true that, as Senator and Presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (R, SC) said, we have much work yet to do on racial equality, but as Graham also noted, we have made great progress, too.

Guys like Woods, who wallow in the past and assume the rest of us are, too, hold us back from faster progress and from completing the task.

Personal Servers are Secure

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Sure they are. They were inside Hillary Clinton’s house, which itself was guarded by the Secret Service. Furthermore, we have it on the highest authority that there was nothing untoward on those servers. Clinton has said, after all,

I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.

Ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton had some thoughts on one thread of emails, and he disagreed with the UNCLASSIFIED marking at the bottom of the first email in the thread.

I think the information in the email is clearly classified. If I were engaged in the negotiation on that subject reporting back to Washington, my reporting cable would be classified.

They’re dealing with the possible US military operation, sensitive negotiations among NATO partners, talking about US objectives and political arrangements and possible objections to the deal from key partners so all of these at secretary of state level is extraordinarily sensitive.

Apart from hackers, the security of an email server is only as good as the security of the users of the email server. When folks send classified email, the server(s) handling it become classified, whether that was the intent or not.

Clinton is mistaken in claiming her personal server did not handle classified emails.