Category Archives: morality

Another Failure in Foreign Policy

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The United Nations Security Council called for an immediate halt to fighting in the Gaza Strip at an emergency session Sunday evening….

And

A press statement issued by the Security Council expressed “serious concern at the escalation of violence,” called for the protection of civilians under international humanitarian law, and said it was troubled by the growing number of casualties.

This is disgusting, and it’s…sad…that the Obama administration approved this—recall that the US could have vetoed this travesty.

There can be no useful cease fire with terrorists—the PA will simply use the time to regroup, rearm, and resume raining rockets on Israeli civilians and children. The PA will simply use the time to replace its combat casualties, retrain them, and do a better job of tunneling and then infiltrating under the Israeli border to wreck mayhem in Israeli kibbutzim and towns and cities. The PA will simply use the time to better target their rockets to resume their efforts at nuclear terrorism.

Furthermore, the crocodile tears over the Gazan civilian casualties wholly ignore the fact that the Israelis are at pains to avoid civilian casualties, using a three-step process to attack a target where civilians may be at risk. First, the IDF makes phone calls to the civilians in the target building, and it drops leaflets in the area, warning of the impending attack. The second step is to fire a small explosive onto the roof of the target building—a roof knock—to warn that the attack has become imminent. Only then is the building targeted with operational rounds. Further, the IDF waves off missiles in flight when civilians are discovered to be in the area after launch.

All of this, of course, allows terrorists to escape among those civilians in order to try again. Those crocodile tears also ignore the fact that the PA actively use their Gazan civilians as shields to protect their terrorists and their weaponry, concealing rockets in homes and mosques, preventing the civilians from leaving the area when warned, and so on.

The UN resolution also ignores UN complicity in the PA’s terrorism: 20 PA rockets were found secreted in an “unused” UNRWA school.

But President Barack Obama approved that UN resolution.

Moral Equivalence Pollution, Second Installment

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The Obama administration accused Israel on Thursday of failing to do all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza during cross-border attacks.

Of the Gaza beach attacks that killed four cousins on Wednesday, [Jen] Psaki called the attack “horrifying.”

“The tragic event makes clear that Israel must take every possible step to meet its standards for protecting civilians from being killed,” Psaki said. “We will continue to underscore that point to Israel.”

Asked whether the US believes Israel has not done enough to prevent civilian casualties, Psaki said: “We believe that certainly there’s more that can be done.”

Never mind that Israelis, openly and publicly, are warning the civilians in the area that an attack is imminent and encouraging them to leave. Never mind that this also gives the terrorists warning and allows those who were in the target zone also to leave and so to survive to attack Israel again, a few hours later.

Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the Palestinian Authority terrorists didn’t use them for shields, didn’t hide their weaponry in civilian buildings—homes and mosques, for instance—or didn’t fire their rockets from within those civilian buildings. Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the PA didn’t insist on attacking Israel.

Not to be outdone, the UN is adding to this moral equivalency sewage.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urged Israel on Thursday “to do far more to stop civilian casualties,” calling the killing of four boys on a beach in Gaza City “appalling.”

On the other hand, maybe the UN really isn’t engaging in moral equivalence. They’ve been utterly silent about the PA’s rocket firings against the Israeli nuclear power plant in Dimona, even though the UN itself defines attacks on nuclear facilities as nuclear terrorism. This bit of naked terrorism is fine, apparently.

Flagrant UN Treachery

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Some 20 rockets were found Wednesday in a school in Gaza operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the organization confirmed Thursday.

Israel is being generous in its characterization of the situation. Yigal Palmor, of the Israeli Foreign Ministry said this:

Yet again, Gaza terrorists abuse UN facilities to carry out their violent activities. Hamas and other terror groups are determined to put civilians in harm’s way and will respect nothing in their violent frenzy. We expect the UN and the international community to condemn and to act strongly against this brazen violation of international humanitarian law, which endangers children and UN humanitarian activities.

Of course.

But larger questions remain unanswered: how could those missiles have been placed without UN complicity? How could those missiles have been placed without UN knowledge? It was the UN’s facility, after all.

And the UNRWA is the same agency that, during the last Israeli entry into the Gaza in response to then-Hamas terrorist rocket attacks, falsely claimed Israel had murdered Palestinian children in a hospital.

“Inversions”

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US corporate income is taxed at the highest rate in the world. “Inversion” is the process of American companies packing up, usually through merger with foreign entities, and reincorporating (if not physically relocating) in a foreign country in order to avoid US corporate income taxes.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew wants the inversions stopped. Writing to the Senate and House tax-writing committees, he said he said those two bodies “should enact legislation immediately…to shut down this abuse of our tax system.”

His letter went on:

What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together. We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Prior to that,

the Obama administration in its budget…proposed tightening the rules to substantially limit inversions.

Of course, it’s utterly inconceivable to this administration that the abuse is our tax system itself. It’s utterly inconceivable to this administration that what is patriotic is lowering tax rates.

More fully, and contrary to the nonsense Lew is spouting, the proper tax action for preventing inversions is to lower corporate income, and related, taxes so as to remove the incentive to go overseas in the first place. Lowering the current rate to 20% would be a good start, especially if done with a view to eliminating corporate income, and related, taxes altogether in just a couple more years.

I’ll ignore, for now, the New Nationalism, Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism in Lew’s letter.

One Face of Terrorism

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Just as soon as Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire Hamas fired 47 rockets killing one Israeli citizen.  Anyone who has followed the conflict could have predicted this with certainty; the point of a ceasefire—for a terrorist organization—is to break it for exactly the same reason it purposely attacks women and children.

Dr Anna Geifman expanded on this:

[C]hildren are the last consecrated absolute. …militant nihilism strives to ruin first and foremost what their contemporaries hold sacred.

And

Random, en masse brutality against civilians—emblematic for the 20th-century terror—culminated in a spectacular act of apocalyptic destruction on 9/11.

And today, the Palestinian Authority’s avowed goal is the spectacular act of apocalyptic destruction of Israel.

This is what Israel is facing today from the Palestinian Authority’s terrorism. This is part of what makes the UN’s call for equal parts of “restraint,” as though the PA’s terrorism were of a piece with Israel’s self defense efforts, so reprehensible. This is part of what makes the moral equivalence that the Democrats in the White House, in the State Department, and in the Senate espouse with their insistence on even-handed treatment of Israelis and PA terrorists so despicable.

h/t Belmont Club