The Academic Intifada?

geoffff

This is from an academic lawyer at the University of Edinburgh. 

As we know, the Clown of Ramallah recently accused the Jews of genocide thereby once again proving that Israel has no partner for peace. It is extraordinary to have to note that there are people in our universities who have been tasked to know about these things as a matter of law and who actually take this spiteful bad faith slur seriously.  

Look at this piece about "this summer's Israeli offensive".

That's the starting point. Anything before or to the side never happened and what ever misery came after is the result of a crime that only an expert can define. 

Not a word about the attack on Israel. The starting point is a military attack by Israel on civilians.  At face value there is no distinction between a Hamas fighter killed in a war launched by Hamas out of the blue and an innocent civilian caught in the backwash. Their role as "Palestinians" martyred in the war with the Jews defines them now. It is taken as read that the war was the Jews' fault. Or if the war was not their fault then they should not have defended themselves. Or they should have defended themselves more nicely; or something. 

Proportionate is the word of last resort. The last lie in the stitch up.

Define it please. They never do.

How Scotland would behave if suddenly confronted by a vicious army of trained zealots fuelled by some crazy Dark Ages ideology jumping out of tunnels at random while shelling the towns from the rear? 

It would not be a long dig back into Scottish history to note how Scots behave with a fraction of the provocation and none of the threat. 

If we cannot hold Scotland up as the standard on proportionality, with a straight face, who can we? England? Give us a break. Alan Dershowitz has asked Ed Miliband some fair questions that the British may feel  also have a right to know.   France? Sure. Ask the Rainbow Warrior. New Zealand?

New Zealand has pretty much evolved into a gutless excuse for a country with a moral spine bypass, so who knows,  NZ may be proportionate and allow its population to be terrified and murdered rather than respond, if faced like something out of Gaza.  

You can only daydream on what the NZ national defence strategy would be. Hand out Kiwi passports to the population of Gaza and register them  with the Australian social security system?

As NZ was among the first to respond to the war against the Nazis and fought on gamely until the end, on that account alone, the offspring have one free pass. 

Norway perhaps. It has form. The country managed to Quisling out of World War Two and there is every sign the Norwegians are once again leading the world fascist appeasement and surrender campaign.

Here is a definition.  Proportionate is what it takes to put an end to the violence and get the country back to normal as soon as possible and with the minimum impact on life and limb; especially life and limb of those in the forces deployed to end the violence, and the life and limb of civilians and most especially the country's own civilians. 

Operation Protective Edge is at the leading edge of the meaning of proportionate. Polls indicate most Israelis feel that Protective Edge did not go far enough. The opportunity could have been taken to root out Hamas once and for all, leave Gaza a vacuum doubtless to be warred over by the PA, Islamic Jihad ISIS and whatever else pops out of the ground like a jihadist killer on a mission.

That is proportionate.  It is about as proportionate as it gets.

It is a sad fact of history that the most inhumane thing to do to the "Palestinians" is to leave them to themselves. There is nothing else for it. 
  
The role of Hamas, the rockets, the threats, the attack tunnels and serviced bunkers so elaborate it would impress a James Bond villain, the actual attacks, the kidnappings, the Hamas ordered murder of those kids, the relentless rocket attacks, hundreds a day, the pain of everyday life under the dome, the call up ,... all of this not relevant as it does not fit the narrative and is immaterial to whatever manner of war crime the Israelis are guilty of by prearrangement of the Russell Tribunal, the "international law" industry  or whatever other abomination of the law that has been petrodollared out of near extinction for a purpose.

Not a word of course about the sixty six young men who lost their lives that summer defending their homes and homeland because one of the branches of raging Islamic imperialism decided that a sudden vicious attack on the Jews was the thing to do that summer and would do wonders for its self esteem, standing and survival. 

Not a word about the murdered civilians.

The starting point for this legal academic is the crime. But what crime? Take out self defence, as this legal academic appears to have done, or at least admits only partially and grudgingly, like a Glasgow condom, then anything short of submission to massacre is a war crime.   

There is a crisis in our universities. There is a crisis in the law. We see it everyday.

The full piece is here.

First a response as published on the thread. Note the IDF reckoning (the only source known not to by tainted by the Hamas propaganda machine) in excess of 2,100 Gazans were killed in the most recent Hamas attack of whom 55% were civilians. 

"Looking into the mind of a perpetrator is difficult, if not impossible. Take the attacks on civilians and civilian objects in Gaza. That they occurred is a matter of fact. But the motive is far from clear. Sometimes military considerations were invoked (Hamas had reportedly used residential areas and even hospitals as launch sites for rockets). Sometimes the attacks may have been accidents. Sometimes no clear explanation was provided. This makes it difficult to satisfy the requirement under international law that genocidal intent had been the “only reasonable explanation” for the perpetrators' acts."

The allegation of "genocide" against Israel for defending her civilian population from determined terrorist attack should be deeply concerning for those worried about the rate of erosion of core values in the West; especially it seems in the universities. It is such a travesty of truth, justice, language and the law that it is actually obscene.

Here is what should be the starting point. The truth.

Cut away the hysteria and war propaganda and you will see a landmark achievement. The IDF took out a sophisticated, heavily armed, experienced and intensely trained militia, equivalent to two divisions of the Iranian army, dug into a vast complex of serviced concrete tunnels and bunkers carefully positioned in and under residential blocks, schools, mosques, hotels and especially under the Israeli built hospital.
Hamas et al had stockpiled tens of thousands of missiles and rockets, vast quantities of war materiel, with human shields in place by the thousands and with the strategic advantage of knowing that Israel must supply them with all the food, water, power and drugs they need out of an overriding humanitarian imperative for the civilian population that for all purposes Hamas was holding hostage for their lives.

The IDF achievement is miraculous. About 1800 "palestinians" had their lives thrown away by their war criminal bosses out of which likely about 1000 were jihadist killers armed and in the act. Among them was an astonishing number of the war criminal bosses themselves.

Of the approximately 800 civilians it is certain that most were killed by Hamas et al , mostly by reckless accident but also by execution, often in public.

And there are people in out universities who are examining the ISRAELIS for war crimes?

This is obscene. Is there any wonder that once again our universities have come under grave suspicion of nurturing bigotry, genocidal racism, and irrational violent ideology especially whenever anything to do with Israel and the Jews is on the agenda (which is pretty much all the time).

The University of Edinburgh has one of the worst reputations in the world in this regard. Jewish students have been forced from their courses by the festering rank hostility they are expected to endure apparently with the acquiescence at least of their professors. Academics attached to the faculty would be better utilised researching why and how such a thing has come on so quickly and so close to home, rather than in some spurious search of the boundaries of language and decency in a determined if ultimately failed bid to fit up the Jews on a fake and perfidious charge of genocide.

1. 

   Paul Behrens

   Lecturer in International Criminal Law at University of Edinburgh

What did this summer’s Israeli offensive amount to? EPA

When, in armed conflict, civilians are killed on a large scale, when schools are attacked and children are orphaned, charges of genocide are often not far behind. In discussions about Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli military attack on Gaza earlier this year, accusations of genocide have therefore played an important role.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, recently accused Israel of carrying out a “war of genocide”. The National Lawyers Guild of America raised the charge of genocide in a letter to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting that the matter be investigated. Genocide was also investigated in a special session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which resulted, a few weeks ago, in one of the most detailed assessments of Operation Protective Edge to date. It is a crime for which the international authorities can impose a sentence of life imprisonment (as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda did on several occasions following the 1994 atrocities in that country).

Tribunal gathering

The Russell Tribunal was originally set up by Bertrand Russell in the 1960s to investigate allegations of US crimes in Vietnam. It is not a court of law, but its jury contains prominent legal minds (including Prof John Dugard, Prof Richard Falk and Michael Mansfield QC), as well as people who have made their mark in other fields of life (including the film director Ken Loach, the writer Paul Laverty and the author and activist Christiane Hessel).

Ken Loach and Roger Waters EPA

Click to enlarge

I was invited to address the tribunal on the legal elements of genocide (but was not involved in the drafting of its findings). For some, it may have been a somewhat surprising presentation. Lawyers have traditionally given genocide a very restrictive interpretation – and a good part of my talk thus dealt with the reason why applying it to the situation in Gaza is not straightforward. To my mind, “genocide” is simply not the correct term for the Israeli offensive.