RavenW
06-03-2004, 03:07 AM
Here are some article that worse reading...
EU vs. Hamas
Israel’s doing what so many other nations signed on to do.
By Joshua Muravchik
Israel's assassination earlier this month of Hamas chief Abdel Aziz Rantisi stirred gusts of indignation from European governments. As in previous cases, the critics largely rested their case on international law, a refrain also heard often from the continent's critics of American counterterror measures and of the war in Iraq.
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw asserted that "targeted killings of this kind are unlawful [and] unjustified." The French foreign ministry issued a statement saying that Israel's right to self-defense "should not be exercised against international law." The foreign minister of Ireland, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, declared that "extrajudicial killings are contrary to international laws." Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson called Israel's action "illegal and disgusting." Spokesmen for the governments of Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal, and Russia made similar comments.
If the law is what these Europeans say it is, then, as ****ens's Mr. Bumble put it, "the law is a ass" because the moral case for Israel's counterattacks on Hamas is overwhelming. But even in strictly legal terms, Israel's actions have sound justification. Ironically and shamefully, it is not Israel but these very critics of Israel who are in flagrant dereliction of their legal obligations.
Each of these European states is a party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Unlike, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the genocide convention is a treaty, with the force of law. It is one of the oldest, and perhaps the most widely subscribed piece of international human-rights legislation, and arguably the one with the soundest legal foundation, codifying what the Nuremberg tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly in its very first session found to be existing customary law.
Article One of the convention obligates every party "to prevent and punish" genocide as "a crime under international law." The convention goes on to define genocide as, inter alia, "killing" intended "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
By this definition, it is clear that Hamas is an organization devoted to genocide and has been working busily at this mission for years. Hamas's goal is the complete destruction of the Jewish state. As the late Rantisi himself affirmed: "By God, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine." Nor did Rantisi leave doubt about what would become of these Jews. Asked by an interviewer "what do you see ultimately happening to the people [of] Israel?" Rantisi replied: "They killed thousands of Palestinians.... so I think it is just to do with them as they did with us."
Nor are Hamas's intended targets limited to Israeli Jews. Hamas's covenant boasts: "HAMAS regards itself the spearhead and the vanguard of the circle of struggle against World Zionism [and] the fight against the warmongering Jews." It makes clear that there is to be no end of killing: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'"
In short, Hamas's and Rantisi's platform is as clearly formulated a project of genocide as we have had since Mein Kampf. And indeed, Hamas has expressed a solicitousness for Hitler's project. As Rantisi put it, to compare Zionism to Nazism is "an insult to Nazism."
Nor can this all be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Hamas sends a constant stream of bombers to blow up buses, restaurants, markets, any place, in short, where Jews can be slaughtered. For every one whose murderous deed is achieved, handfuls of others are stopped along the way by Israeli security.
What this means is that France, Sweden, and the rest are under a legal obligation to do what they can to destroy or cripple Hamas and to assist in the arrest and prosecution of its leaders and members. What have they done to fulfill this responsibility?
Until six months ago, the EU allowed Hamas to work freely in Europe, as if it were just another NGO. The rationale was a specious distinction between the organization's "political" and "military" wings, much like the distinction between Hitler's Nazi party and his storm troopers. (Indeed, this distinction was drawn, leading the Times of London to applaud the "night of long knives" on the grounds that Hitler was bringing the "radicals" in his movement to heel.)
Only late last year were French objections overcome in the face of a particularly deadly bombing, and Hamas was banned in the EU, its financial assets frozen. But under the genocide convention, Europe's legal obligations (and those of all the other parties to the treaty) go well beyond belatedly closing its own territory to Hamas operations. They include doing what can be done to bring a halt to the genocide and punish the perpetrators. By killing the likes of Rantisi and Yassin, Israel is doing what all the other nations ought by law to be doing, too. Since they are blithely indifferent to their own solemn undertakings, Israel is left alone to defend the law and itself.
— Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism and, most recently of, The Intifada and the Media.
People are beautiful, the world stinks
Dennis Prager (archive)
April 20, 2004
If you love goodness and hate evil, this is a tough time to stay sane.
Israel has killed Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas terror leader, and almost every nation in the world and the nations' theoretical embodiment, the United Nations, have condemned Israel for doing so.
World leaders and the world organization have said almost nothing about Communist China's ongoing destruction of one of the world's oldest civilizations, Tibet. World leaders have said almost nothing about the Arab enslavement and genocide of non-Arab blacks in Sudan. But they convene world conferences to label Israel, one of the most humane and decent democracies on earth, a pariah.
In order to retain my sanity, I ask the reader's indulgence as I use this column to express personal thoughts.
I have contempt for "the world." I cherish and admire countless individuals, but I have contempt for "the world" and "world opinion." "The world" has never cared about evils inflicted on human beings. The Communist genocides meant nothing to humanity. The Holocaust meant nothing. With almost no exception, the mass atrocities since World War II have likewise absorbed humanity less than the Olympics or the Miss World Contest.
I have contempt for the United Nations. It is one of the great obstacles to goodness and decency on this planet. Its moral record -- outside of a few specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization -- is almost entirely supportive of evil and condemnatory of good. It is dominated by the most morally backward governments in the world -- those from the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Communists during their heyday and African despots. It appointed Libya, a despotic, primitive state, to head its Human Rights Commission, whose members include China, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Neither the United States nor Israel sits on the Commission.
I regard the European Union with similar revulsion. With little opposition, Europe murdered nearly every Jewish man, woman and child in its midst, and a half-century later provides cover for those in the Middle East who seek to do to the Middle East's Jews exactly what the Nazis did to the European Jews. For the European Union to condemn Israel's killing of a Hamas leader, when Hamas's avowed aim is another Jewish genocide, is so loathsome as to board the incredible. For Germany and France (who, unlike America, have almost never shed blood for the liberty of others) to do everything they can to undermine America's attempt to liberate Iraq is similarly repugnant.
As for the international news media and journalists, I regard most of them as aides to evil.
This is not new. The 1932 Pulitzer Prize, American journalism's highest award, was given to Walter Duranty of the New York Times for reporting from the Soviet Union. In his reports, Duranty repeatedly denied Stalin's forced starvation of Ukrainians that led to the murder of more than 6 million of them. The same "newspaper of record" deliberately toned down reporting on the Nazi annihilation of Jews 10 years later so as not to appear "too Jewish."
The Soviet decimation of Afghanistan was so little reported in the international media -- especially radio and television -- that when I talked about its scope and horror on my radio show in the 1980s, listeners kept wondering if I was telling the truth -- they had never heard anything about it.
In the last years of the Saddam Hussein regime, according to John Burns of the New York Times, major news reporters refused to write stories about Iraqi mass murder and atrocities lest the Saddam regime remove their press credentials. For most journalists, and their newspapers and television stations, it was better to lie for Saddam and have a bureau in Baghdad than to tell the truth but have no Baghdad bureau.
And not one international news organization calls Hamas or any of the other Palestinian terror organizations "terrorists."
I love learning and revere the title of "professor," but with few exceptions, universities, too, merit contempt. The vast majority of professors who take positions on social issues are moral fools. They teach millions of students that America and Israel are villains and that the enemies of those decent societies are merely misunderstood victims who are often justified in their hatred. And they loathe the American Judeo-Christian value system that has made the United States the world's land of opportunity and beacon of liberty.
In sum, I feel that I am living in a world that is morally sick. Good is called bad, and bad is called "militant," "victimized," "misunderstood" and "the product of hopelessness," but rarely bad. Only those who fight the bad are called bad.
I am kept sane by the knowledge that there are hundreds of millions of individuals who can still tell the difference between good and evil; by the knowledge that there was never a time that humanity was particularly decent; and by a strong belief that a good God governs the universe even though He allows evil many triumphs. And I believe this God will judge Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac appropriately.
Responses to Terrorism
Ending Hamas' campaign of terror
Misplaced sympathy has been generated for the "spiritual" leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was killed by Israel this week. The organization he founded and led promotes the murder of Israeli citizens and has a foundational charter that includes the paranoid delusional belief in a world Jewish conspiracy. He has been falsely described by some as a "moderate. " His own words in the Arabic newspaper Al-Ayyam in December 2002 indicate otherwise: "The jihad and suicide bombings will continue. It is therefore up to you [holy fighters] to be patient -- the Hamas takes upon itself the liberation of all Palestinian land from the sea to the river."
Still others argue that as the political leader of Hamas, Yassin cannot be held accountable for the actions of Hamas' military wing. This is misleading; international law states that criminal liability is not limited to the military chain of command, but applies to political leaders as well.
Indeed, the military wing of Hamas, which carries out the terror operations, is directly accountable to a political steering committee that included Yassin. In an interview in June 2001 with the London-based Arabic journal al-Mujallah, Yassin declared: "The political wing, not the military wing, drafts the policies of Hamas. The military wing implements the policies that are drawn up by the political wing." While refuting any responsibility for "planning" suicide attacks against Israeli civilians in the same article, he nonetheless did not deny authorizing such attacks.
By way of analogy, Osama bin Laden is seen by many as a "spiritual" leader as well. He has issued religious edicts (called "fatwas"), including one that calls for indiscriminate attacks on Americans, both military and civilian. Yet, there would be virtually no criticism in the American media if bin Laden were to meet the same fate as Yassin.
In the last three years alone, Palestinian terror groups have murdered nearly 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians, according to the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. Attempts continue every day, most recently with Palestinian children used by terrorist groups as human bombs. Hamas, under the guidance of Yassin, directly committed 425 terrorist attacks, killing nearly 400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and wounding more than 2,000, as documented in reports from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These attacks against civilians, aimed at killing and maiming as many as possible, are war crimes under any definition of international law.
Hamas attacks include: the suicide attack June 18, 2002, on a Jerusalem bus that killed 19, among them schoolchildren; the Passover massacre of March 27, 2002, in which a Hamas terrorist killed 30 people at a seder in an Israeli hotel; the disco attack in June 2001, which left 21 Israelis dead, mostly teenagers, and wounded another 120; and last week's suicide bombing in Ashdod, murdering 10 civilians.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel for violating international law after Yassin was killed. Citing international law is, of course, Annan's job. But we have yet to hear from the secretary-general, or any other U.N. body for that matter, about the application of international law against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups who routinely commit mass murder of innocent civilians in Israel. This represents the politicization of international law and a double standard against Israel.
Yet international law explicitly forbids the deliberate targeting and killing of civilians during war. Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds" when committed against people "taking no active part in the hostilities."
This applies not only to states, but also to nonstate actors, including armed factions and the Palestinian Authority. Some argue that because the Palestinians are engaged in "resistance" against Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, international law does not apply to "national liberation" movements. But international law unambiguously rejects this argument. Article 51(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention clearly and forcefully states that "[t]he civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population, are prohibited."
The role and responsibility of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority should not be lost in this discussion of such war crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other groups. According to Human Rights Watch, the Palestinian Authority has routinely failed to "investigate, arrest and prosecute persons believed to be responsible for these (terror) attacks, and did not take credible steps to reprimand, discipline or bring to justice those members of its own security services who, in violation of declared PA policy, participated in such attacks." Human Rights Watch assigns to Arafat and the Palestinian Authority a "high degree of political responsibility ... for the many civilian deaths that have resulted."
Given Hamas' ideology of radical religious fundamentalism that seeks Israel's destruction, the Palestinian Authority's refusal to instill law and order in the areas under its jurisdiction and its open collaboration with terrorist groups such as Hamas, Israel has determined that it has little choice but to act on its own to eliminate the dire threat to its citizens posed by a terrorist leader who spurs his followers on with promises of eternal "spiritual" rewards and earthly monetary rewards for the bombers' families.
Selectively citing international law in a biased and politicized manner, as do the United Nations and so many other international bodies, makes peace much harder to attain. So does whitewashing Yassin's past. He was among the world's deadliest terrorist leaders. Israel's actions to eliminate that threat may therefore improve long-term prospects for peace.
Natalie Berg is president of the Jewish Community Relations Council, based in San Francisco (www.jcrc.org).
EU vs. Hamas
Israel’s doing what so many other nations signed on to do.
By Joshua Muravchik
Israel's assassination earlier this month of Hamas chief Abdel Aziz Rantisi stirred gusts of indignation from European governments. As in previous cases, the critics largely rested their case on international law, a refrain also heard often from the continent's critics of American counterterror measures and of the war in Iraq.
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw asserted that "targeted killings of this kind are unlawful [and] unjustified." The French foreign ministry issued a statement saying that Israel's right to self-defense "should not be exercised against international law." The foreign minister of Ireland, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, declared that "extrajudicial killings are contrary to international laws." Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson called Israel's action "illegal and disgusting." Spokesmen for the governments of Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal, and Russia made similar comments.
If the law is what these Europeans say it is, then, as ****ens's Mr. Bumble put it, "the law is a ass" because the moral case for Israel's counterattacks on Hamas is overwhelming. But even in strictly legal terms, Israel's actions have sound justification. Ironically and shamefully, it is not Israel but these very critics of Israel who are in flagrant dereliction of their legal obligations.
Each of these European states is a party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Unlike, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the genocide convention is a treaty, with the force of law. It is one of the oldest, and perhaps the most widely subscribed piece of international human-rights legislation, and arguably the one with the soundest legal foundation, codifying what the Nuremberg tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly in its very first session found to be existing customary law.
Article One of the convention obligates every party "to prevent and punish" genocide as "a crime under international law." The convention goes on to define genocide as, inter alia, "killing" intended "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
By this definition, it is clear that Hamas is an organization devoted to genocide and has been working busily at this mission for years. Hamas's goal is the complete destruction of the Jewish state. As the late Rantisi himself affirmed: "By God, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine." Nor did Rantisi leave doubt about what would become of these Jews. Asked by an interviewer "what do you see ultimately happening to the people [of] Israel?" Rantisi replied: "They killed thousands of Palestinians.... so I think it is just to do with them as they did with us."
Nor are Hamas's intended targets limited to Israeli Jews. Hamas's covenant boasts: "HAMAS regards itself the spearhead and the vanguard of the circle of struggle against World Zionism [and] the fight against the warmongering Jews." It makes clear that there is to be no end of killing: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'"
In short, Hamas's and Rantisi's platform is as clearly formulated a project of genocide as we have had since Mein Kampf. And indeed, Hamas has expressed a solicitousness for Hitler's project. As Rantisi put it, to compare Zionism to Nazism is "an insult to Nazism."
Nor can this all be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Hamas sends a constant stream of bombers to blow up buses, restaurants, markets, any place, in short, where Jews can be slaughtered. For every one whose murderous deed is achieved, handfuls of others are stopped along the way by Israeli security.
What this means is that France, Sweden, and the rest are under a legal obligation to do what they can to destroy or cripple Hamas and to assist in the arrest and prosecution of its leaders and members. What have they done to fulfill this responsibility?
Until six months ago, the EU allowed Hamas to work freely in Europe, as if it were just another NGO. The rationale was a specious distinction between the organization's "political" and "military" wings, much like the distinction between Hitler's Nazi party and his storm troopers. (Indeed, this distinction was drawn, leading the Times of London to applaud the "night of long knives" on the grounds that Hitler was bringing the "radicals" in his movement to heel.)
Only late last year were French objections overcome in the face of a particularly deadly bombing, and Hamas was banned in the EU, its financial assets frozen. But under the genocide convention, Europe's legal obligations (and those of all the other parties to the treaty) go well beyond belatedly closing its own territory to Hamas operations. They include doing what can be done to bring a halt to the genocide and punish the perpetrators. By killing the likes of Rantisi and Yassin, Israel is doing what all the other nations ought by law to be doing, too. Since they are blithely indifferent to their own solemn undertakings, Israel is left alone to defend the law and itself.
— Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism and, most recently of, The Intifada and the Media.
People are beautiful, the world stinks
Dennis Prager (archive)
April 20, 2004
If you love goodness and hate evil, this is a tough time to stay sane.
Israel has killed Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas terror leader, and almost every nation in the world and the nations' theoretical embodiment, the United Nations, have condemned Israel for doing so.
World leaders and the world organization have said almost nothing about Communist China's ongoing destruction of one of the world's oldest civilizations, Tibet. World leaders have said almost nothing about the Arab enslavement and genocide of non-Arab blacks in Sudan. But they convene world conferences to label Israel, one of the most humane and decent democracies on earth, a pariah.
In order to retain my sanity, I ask the reader's indulgence as I use this column to express personal thoughts.
I have contempt for "the world." I cherish and admire countless individuals, but I have contempt for "the world" and "world opinion." "The world" has never cared about evils inflicted on human beings. The Communist genocides meant nothing to humanity. The Holocaust meant nothing. With almost no exception, the mass atrocities since World War II have likewise absorbed humanity less than the Olympics or the Miss World Contest.
I have contempt for the United Nations. It is one of the great obstacles to goodness and decency on this planet. Its moral record -- outside of a few specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization -- is almost entirely supportive of evil and condemnatory of good. It is dominated by the most morally backward governments in the world -- those from the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Communists during their heyday and African despots. It appointed Libya, a despotic, primitive state, to head its Human Rights Commission, whose members include China, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Neither the United States nor Israel sits on the Commission.
I regard the European Union with similar revulsion. With little opposition, Europe murdered nearly every Jewish man, woman and child in its midst, and a half-century later provides cover for those in the Middle East who seek to do to the Middle East's Jews exactly what the Nazis did to the European Jews. For the European Union to condemn Israel's killing of a Hamas leader, when Hamas's avowed aim is another Jewish genocide, is so loathsome as to board the incredible. For Germany and France (who, unlike America, have almost never shed blood for the liberty of others) to do everything they can to undermine America's attempt to liberate Iraq is similarly repugnant.
As for the international news media and journalists, I regard most of them as aides to evil.
This is not new. The 1932 Pulitzer Prize, American journalism's highest award, was given to Walter Duranty of the New York Times for reporting from the Soviet Union. In his reports, Duranty repeatedly denied Stalin's forced starvation of Ukrainians that led to the murder of more than 6 million of them. The same "newspaper of record" deliberately toned down reporting on the Nazi annihilation of Jews 10 years later so as not to appear "too Jewish."
The Soviet decimation of Afghanistan was so little reported in the international media -- especially radio and television -- that when I talked about its scope and horror on my radio show in the 1980s, listeners kept wondering if I was telling the truth -- they had never heard anything about it.
In the last years of the Saddam Hussein regime, according to John Burns of the New York Times, major news reporters refused to write stories about Iraqi mass murder and atrocities lest the Saddam regime remove their press credentials. For most journalists, and their newspapers and television stations, it was better to lie for Saddam and have a bureau in Baghdad than to tell the truth but have no Baghdad bureau.
And not one international news organization calls Hamas or any of the other Palestinian terror organizations "terrorists."
I love learning and revere the title of "professor," but with few exceptions, universities, too, merit contempt. The vast majority of professors who take positions on social issues are moral fools. They teach millions of students that America and Israel are villains and that the enemies of those decent societies are merely misunderstood victims who are often justified in their hatred. And they loathe the American Judeo-Christian value system that has made the United States the world's land of opportunity and beacon of liberty.
In sum, I feel that I am living in a world that is morally sick. Good is called bad, and bad is called "militant," "victimized," "misunderstood" and "the product of hopelessness," but rarely bad. Only those who fight the bad are called bad.
I am kept sane by the knowledge that there are hundreds of millions of individuals who can still tell the difference between good and evil; by the knowledge that there was never a time that humanity was particularly decent; and by a strong belief that a good God governs the universe even though He allows evil many triumphs. And I believe this God will judge Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac appropriately.
Responses to Terrorism
Ending Hamas' campaign of terror
Misplaced sympathy has been generated for the "spiritual" leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was killed by Israel this week. The organization he founded and led promotes the murder of Israeli citizens and has a foundational charter that includes the paranoid delusional belief in a world Jewish conspiracy. He has been falsely described by some as a "moderate. " His own words in the Arabic newspaper Al-Ayyam in December 2002 indicate otherwise: "The jihad and suicide bombings will continue. It is therefore up to you [holy fighters] to be patient -- the Hamas takes upon itself the liberation of all Palestinian land from the sea to the river."
Still others argue that as the political leader of Hamas, Yassin cannot be held accountable for the actions of Hamas' military wing. This is misleading; international law states that criminal liability is not limited to the military chain of command, but applies to political leaders as well.
Indeed, the military wing of Hamas, which carries out the terror operations, is directly accountable to a political steering committee that included Yassin. In an interview in June 2001 with the London-based Arabic journal al-Mujallah, Yassin declared: "The political wing, not the military wing, drafts the policies of Hamas. The military wing implements the policies that are drawn up by the political wing." While refuting any responsibility for "planning" suicide attacks against Israeli civilians in the same article, he nonetheless did not deny authorizing such attacks.
By way of analogy, Osama bin Laden is seen by many as a "spiritual" leader as well. He has issued religious edicts (called "fatwas"), including one that calls for indiscriminate attacks on Americans, both military and civilian. Yet, there would be virtually no criticism in the American media if bin Laden were to meet the same fate as Yassin.
In the last three years alone, Palestinian terror groups have murdered nearly 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians, according to the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. Attempts continue every day, most recently with Palestinian children used by terrorist groups as human bombs. Hamas, under the guidance of Yassin, directly committed 425 terrorist attacks, killing nearly 400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and wounding more than 2,000, as documented in reports from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These attacks against civilians, aimed at killing and maiming as many as possible, are war crimes under any definition of international law.
Hamas attacks include: the suicide attack June 18, 2002, on a Jerusalem bus that killed 19, among them schoolchildren; the Passover massacre of March 27, 2002, in which a Hamas terrorist killed 30 people at a seder in an Israeli hotel; the disco attack in June 2001, which left 21 Israelis dead, mostly teenagers, and wounded another 120; and last week's suicide bombing in Ashdod, murdering 10 civilians.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel for violating international law after Yassin was killed. Citing international law is, of course, Annan's job. But we have yet to hear from the secretary-general, or any other U.N. body for that matter, about the application of international law against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups who routinely commit mass murder of innocent civilians in Israel. This represents the politicization of international law and a double standard against Israel.
Yet international law explicitly forbids the deliberate targeting and killing of civilians during war. Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds" when committed against people "taking no active part in the hostilities."
This applies not only to states, but also to nonstate actors, including armed factions and the Palestinian Authority. Some argue that because the Palestinians are engaged in "resistance" against Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, international law does not apply to "national liberation" movements. But international law unambiguously rejects this argument. Article 51(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention clearly and forcefully states that "[t]he civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population, are prohibited."
The role and responsibility of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority should not be lost in this discussion of such war crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other groups. According to Human Rights Watch, the Palestinian Authority has routinely failed to "investigate, arrest and prosecute persons believed to be responsible for these (terror) attacks, and did not take credible steps to reprimand, discipline or bring to justice those members of its own security services who, in violation of declared PA policy, participated in such attacks." Human Rights Watch assigns to Arafat and the Palestinian Authority a "high degree of political responsibility ... for the many civilian deaths that have resulted."
Given Hamas' ideology of radical religious fundamentalism that seeks Israel's destruction, the Palestinian Authority's refusal to instill law and order in the areas under its jurisdiction and its open collaboration with terrorist groups such as Hamas, Israel has determined that it has little choice but to act on its own to eliminate the dire threat to its citizens posed by a terrorist leader who spurs his followers on with promises of eternal "spiritual" rewards and earthly monetary rewards for the bombers' families.
Selectively citing international law in a biased and politicized manner, as do the United Nations and so many other international bodies, makes peace much harder to attain. So does whitewashing Yassin's past. He was among the world's deadliest terrorist leaders. Israel's actions to eliminate that threat may therefore improve long-term prospects for peace.
Natalie Berg is president of the Jewish Community Relations Council, based in San Francisco (www.jcrc.org).