Category Archives: morality

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.

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.

Trust and Integrity

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Regarding the trade fast track authority bill that failed Friday’s House vote, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had been negotiating with Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) regarding the structure of the Trade Adjustment Assistance sub-bill that was a part of the fast track bill.

Over the course of the week she had helped negotiate a deal…designed to assuage Democrats’ concerns over how the workers’ assistance program would be funded.

Then Pelosi went onto the floor of the House and said this:

I will be voting today to slow down the fast track [measure], to get a better deal for the American people….

And she voted against the TAA that she’d agreed with Boehner.

With that performance, how can Boehner ever trust any other agreement Pelosi might say she accepts? How can Boehner, or any Republican, ever trust any other Pelosi commitment?

Cowardice

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A brief post about the movie Aloha. This is a movie I don’t intend to watch anytime soon because I don’t go to theaters to watch movies. I don’t need to see it, anyway, for this post; I’m commenting on the hoo-raw surrounding it.

One such is the bellyaching about the movie’s name. Not supposed to name a movie about a Hawaiian person “Aloha” because that word has special meaning to Hawaii’s special snowflakes. I guess that means no one better make a movie about a Texan and call it “Howdy.” Boy howdy.

Then there’s this:

Cameron Crowe has apologized for offending anyone over his casting of Emma Stone in a partially Asian, partially Hawaiian role in his film “Aloha.”

Never mind that Stone is, by all accounts, a fine actress. Never mind, either, that one of her character’s hang-ups was the lack of any outward sign of her Chinese/Hawaiian ethnicity; the character looked like a white girl. Like the actress who played her does. Mm, mm. Gotta whine about that, too. In response, Crowe’s being downright chicken. And in his cowardice, he’s throwing Stone under the Oahu Bus.

In the end, this is folks wasting their talent and energy looking for excuses to be offended. It isn’t pure cowardice, not by the whiners or by guys like Crowe; it’s worse than that. It’s insidious, it’s a running away from the truth of life.

Government Unions

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Elizabeth MacDonald had some thoughts in a three-parter for Fox Business.

Wouldn’t you like to have a job where you get paid to slack off, and no matter what, have a powerful authority to back you up, winning battles to preserve your salary, benefits, and your every demand if your boss tries to fire you?

It’s a fact of life for many government workers.

Here are some of the horror stories she’s discovered.

[F]ederal labor unions are winning fights against federal agencies who try to fire their union workers for letting mentally ill military veterans walk out the door of psychiatric units in Veterans Affairs hospitals, or for not catching things like a major rat infestation in a food factory. Instead, union lawyers are getting their members’ jobs, back-pay, and benefits reinstated, all at taxpayer expense.

Plainly, it’s not only the VA that doesn’t give a hoot about our veterans.

[D]espite the fact that cyber attacks on the government are on the rise, a federal union recently won a case that stopped Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from immediately blocking workers’ personal email accounts on government computers, like Hotmail or Gmail. Such accounts are often loaded with computer viruses or malware.

Instead, the union is forcing these security agencies to first enter into protracted collective bargaining over the use of personal webmail accounts, putting the government at risk of cyber-attacks at a time when security experts note cyber criminals, terrorists and nation states like China are increasingly trying to break in.

Just last week Russian cyber thieves were blamed for the hack into the IRS, where tax return data for 104,000 individuals was stolen in order to get fraudulent tax refunds, now estimated at $50 million. Hackers broke into the IRS’s Internet service that lets taxpayers access their past tax returns.

On top of that, the People’s Republic of China, it’s only just been discovered, has hacked into OPM to steal the personal data of 4 million Federal employees.

Then there’s this naked threat from a Federal union.

“We are a force to be reckoned with and we are a force that will open up the biggest can of whoop ass on anyone” who votes against the interests of federal unions, J David Cox Sr, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), recently said, adding, “every time the ‘fools’ in Congress try to hurt the federal workforce we get bigger. We get stronger, and we fight harder.”

RTWT. All three parts.

These are completely sufficient reasons to do two things. One is to generally shrink the physical and employee size of the Federal government along with its scope so as to make it far easier for We the People to monitor and control it. The other thing is to eliminate government unions. Their usefulness is long past, and they have become actively destructive of good government.