The always insightful and informative Andrew McCarthy explains why at The Corner:
I have an article coming soon which calls (among other things) for a complete reappraisal of what "international law" means in the context of the ongoing conflict. I argue that there is no international law of warfare because Israel, like the U.S., has wisely declined to join the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. It has therefore not consented to Protocol I's effort to convert warfare from a military campaign into a hyper-legal regulatory exercise that favors terrorist factions over national armed forces.Most of the world has signed on to Protocol I — including, regrettably, our NATO allies (the Brits ratified it in 1998, the same year Blair's government incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law). It is on the basis of this consensus — among countries that have either abdicated their national-defense responsibilities or stand to gain by Protocol I's tilting of the field toward terrorists and so-called "national liberation" movements — that Israel and the U.S. are now routinely accused of war crimes. But a set of obligations only constitutes "international law" if a country has agreed to be bound by it. Israel and the U.S. have not agreed to be bound by Protocol I. Consequently, there is no law violation in failures by Israel or us to meet its impossible terms (impossible, that is, if the objective of a military campaign is to be victory).
No number of loopy "disproportionate" reports by CNN, MSNBC and their stable of human-rights experts can change this. We should understand, moreover, that these are not simply reports; they are very purposeful efforts to advance a leftist antiwar agenda. If adopted, they would prevent the U.S. and Israel from pursuing vital national interests — especially national defense. We ought to be attacking the premise of these war-crimes smears rather than trying to finesse the matter for the purportedly greater good of harmony within the "international community." A community is a place where everyone is bound by the same law. We don't have one.
An article in which, toward the end, this notion -of a (non-existent) "international community" -- is discussed:
"The League of Nations was not a mess in the 1920s. It became a mess when, in the 1930s, it could not handle Mussolini or Hitler, and failed. The U.N. was not originally a mess when founded, with such tutelary spirits as Rene Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It became a mess sometime after Bandung, when more and more "countries" that were primitive despotisms became members. The only two blocs that came to matter were first the Soviet bloc (where Ukraine and Byelorussia also had votes) of the captive or subjugated (by Communism, backed up by the Red Army) nations of Eastern and Central Europe, and the Arab bloc which in turn manipulated and directed a larger Muslim bloc. That Muslim bloc bullied or threatened or inveigled even non-Muslim states (such as those of black Africa after the Six-Day War) into doing the Muslim bidding, under the guise of fake "third-world" solidarity. Thus did the fabulously rich plutocrats of Arabia present themselves, dripping with gold, as representatives of the "Third-World" -- a Halloween joke, a Ballo-in-Maschera fantasia.
The Soviet bloc is gone. For the past 30 years the U.N. has been steadily taken over by the Islamintern. The Arabs, the Muslims, the Islamintern international, controls levers and fills the lunchrooms and the corridors of power everywhere at the U.N., and at its constituent organizations worldwide. How else does the matter of "Palestine" fill up one-third of the time of the UN.? Apologists for Islam, by no means all of them Muslims, defenders of the Arab Muslim world-view and promoters of its political agenda, repackage the relentless Jihad against Israel as merely a conflict resulting from an "occupation" (nice neutral word, that, evoking -- quite inaccurately, given Israel's legal and historic claim to the lands that came into its possession in 1967 -- goose-stepping Nazis marching, eyes right, under the Arc de Triomphe). How is it that the behavior of tiny Israel has become the Central Question of the Age, while the Jihad is pursued in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Kashmir, the Sudan, the Balkans, Central Asia, West Africa, everywhere, everywhere, without a single resolution denouncing that Jihad, denouncing even within Islam the Arab supremacist ideology, the Arab imperialism, that lies behind and under and beside the vehicle of Islam and islamization?
Little in the years since 1967 has been done about any Muslim attacks on non-Muslims. Nothing was done, of course, about the Jihad against Israel, including attacks on schools (Ma'alot), schoolbuses, buses, airplanes, schoolgirls, the inhabitants of old-age homes in Vienna, Russian Jewish refugees coming by train to what they thought was a new life from the Soviet Union, Israeli athletes at the Olympics, Israeli diplomats in London -- no, not a peep from the U.N. except to denounce Israel. Nothing was done to come to the aid of the Christians of Biafra, subject to the genocidal assaults of the Egyptian pilots on Ibo villages, and of the Muslim northerners; 1 million people died. Nothing was done, despite the efforts of Rapporteur Gaspard Biro, to stop the 20-year effort by the Arab Muslim north to kill the animist and Christian blacks of the southern Sudan. Nothing was done when Indonesia took over Christian East Timor, to which it had no claim; nothing was done to protect those Christians until 1/3 of them, or 200,000 people, were murdered -- and then it was the Australians alone who rescued them.
Edward Mortimer the Director of Communications at the U.N. and Kofi Annan's chief speechwriter, is an exemplary figure of today’s U.N., joined by many others -- after all, just what kind of person nowadays would join the U.N.? This is no longer the U.N. that Rene Cassin had any part in founding, not the U.N. of Mrs. Roosevelt, not the U.N. at which Shirley Hazzard and Joseph Gessen (Hessen) could work. The personnel is different; the atmosphere is different; the ideals are gone; the whole thing is even worse than the League of Nations in its dying fall.
We continue to take this most corrupt and corrupting of institutions seriously, after so much failure, when it largely protects not only war-criminals (remember one Kurt Waldheim?), although now it is clearly an obstacle to the creation of a league of victims and opponents of the Jihad. Nothing will ever happen seriously in the U.N. to stop Sudanese activities in Darfur or anywhere else. Nothing will ever happen to stop the genocidal Jihad against Israel; instead, support will be offered the invented "Palestinian people." And nothing will be done to stop the Islamic Republic of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, any more than Iraq was being stopped back in 1981, or for that matter, in 2003, from doing whatever it could do (not always with success, but if at first you don't succeed....) to acquire the most dangerous kinds of weapons. It took other means, and it will, as well, with Iran.
Those who still take the U.N. seriously should be asked if they think the League of Nations was right to fold its tent when it could do nothing about Hitler in the Rhineland, nothing about the Fascists in Spain, nothing about Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, nothing about the Japanese invasion of Manchukuo. At a certain point, the farce has to end. That point has been reached, for sensible people who are paying attention (and in the hectic vacancy of life, it is harder to do so), with the United Nations. Only a fool nowadays would use a phrase such as "international community," which attempts to treat Syria and Iceland as the same kind of members, or Costa Rica and Saudi Arabia, as similarly situated and behaving. What nonsense. There is no "international community." There is no "community" which contains Iceland and Libya, Italy and Saudi Arabia, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Some of these are our enemies; they wish us ill, they do not wish us well. Infidels and Believers cannot -- according to Islam itself, according to everything about Islam -- form a community. There is only the umma al-islamiyya, the Community of Believers. All others must be kept at bay, inveigled, fooled, undermined, ultimately conquered, and conclusively subjugated. No other possible outcome, according to what is contained in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, is possible.
The phrase "international community" is telling. Those who use it are telling us something about themselves. And what they are telling us isn't flattering.
There are no "united" nations. There is an organization that has been undermined from within. It is now an obstacle to the wellbeing of all those who wish to see clearly what is at stake in the worldwide Jihad, and to preserve themselves, in Europe, in America, in Russia, and in the Middle East, from the imposition of a belief-system -- through being overrun, slowly but surely, by adherents of that belief-system -- that has left every place it has conquered intellectually impoverished, and in every other way as well. Taking the U.N. seriously is by now as absurd as, in September 1939, going to the League of Nations (or as those incurable salon-habitués, the French, liked to call it, la Société des Nations, the "society or community of nations"), to ask it to please, please, please deal with Mr. Hitler -- he is behaving so badly."
[Posted by Hugh at December 9, 2005]
OT
Eurabia alert. Jews shot in Danish shopping mall by "Middle Eastern looking men", read Muslims.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1230733116508&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A very good case can be made, and has been by Hugh, John Lewis, and others, that proportionality in a conflict is immoral and that governments have a moral duty to use overwhelming force, not only to defend their own citizens, but to limit casualties and infrastructure damage on both sides by ending the conflict as soon as possible. There is no obligation, for example, to sink one enemy ship for every one of ours that is sunk, which is proportional, but suicidal. The objective is to eliminate and to destroy the threat by any means. At one time, General Colin Powell, the "Powell Doctrine," and other political and military leaders understood this. Hopefully, the current crop of leaders also understands this basic truth.
Micheal Totten has some good thoughts on "disproportionate force" here:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/48542
"A single Israeli air strike is going to kill at least as many people as Hamas can kill in twelve months. Does that mean Israel should be given a “license” of one air strike per year to use in the war? If IDF commanders want to take out a target where they expect five Hamas leaders or fighters to be killed, do they have to wait until five Israelis are killed first? If the Israelis endure rocket fire until one civilian is killed, do they get a “kill one Palestinian terrorist” coupon?"
One of the 'MANY' things wrong with the UN, is that the power has been taken from New World Order Kufr Globalists, and given to Islamic globalists.
The UN has proved itself less than worthless under ideal conditions...Islam running things is far worse...
Proportionate response...Many people felt I made an inappropriate response, by beating my neighbor
with the shotgun I took away from him, when he threatened to shoot me and my dogs. Some felt dis-arming him was enough...
Maybe...but I never had a problem with that domestic terrorist again...
Cries "disproportionate force" are now found all over Democratic and Lefty blogpsphere. Their posters are enraged that the Israelis are fighting back after taking some 3000 missile attacks.
Oddly enough when it was just the Jews being killed they were stone silent. But when the Ummah and their precious terrorists started getting killed off only then did they become outraged.
A friend and I were having a sidewalk conversation in Yokohama, Japan. I had a motorcycle helmet in hand. Two young guys, one brandishing a knife approached us with the intention of robbery. My friend and I immediately separated to square off with them one-on-one. I managed to keep my guy at bay and maneuvered behind the guy with the knife who was facing my companion. I walloped the guy with the knife on the back of his head with my helmet and he collapsed unconscious on his feet before he hit the sidewalk. My friend and I hopped on the bike and took off.
I don't know if the guy I clobbered is dead, or alive with permanent brain damage and I don't give a damn. Was my action "disproportionate"? It was disproportionate only when compared to what these two thugs actually did to us but was not disproportionate to what they could have done and were threatening to do to us if we did not comply with their demands.
The Hamas charter specifically and unambiguously calls for the destruction of Israel. The Gaza inhabitants elected Hamas thugs to represent them and therefore the speech and action of Hamas is a reflection of the will of the people who elected them. Ergo, a proportionate Israeli response to the military actions of Hamas is the utter destruction of Hamas and the neutralization or extermination of its adherents.
Disproportionate is just a code word for the idea that Jewish lives are cheap.
That is, an all-out fight is disproportionate to the value of a Jewish life.
The U.N. must been seen through the other groups that work together with the U.N.
C.F.R., and the smaller arm T.L.C., works with the U.N. to set world policy. To ask who would want to join the U.N., without a clear understanding and discription of all three groups ties and agenda, will not display correctly the goals of the United Nations.
A look at the membership of C.F.R. will make one understand who would want to join the U.N., many are involved in these current world issues. A New World Order is the goal.
I can see Obama signing on to Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, it might just happen.
"purposeful efforts to advance a leftist antiwar agenda"
I do not accept that they do actually have an anti-war agenda. They have a pacifist facade. Their true agenda is to prevent the Israelis from winning, by prolonging the slow, relentless attrition of rocket attacks and virulent anti-semitic sentiment in the western press.