When the mothers of the Israeli boys kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in the area of Gush Etzion, in “Israeli occupied” Judea, spoke before international bodies, many of the diplomats referred to them in their comments and questions as “settlers.” One is given to understand that, in their eyes, inclusion in that category means that they have no human rights and the world’s indifference to their fate is justified. In fact, the boys are not “settlers” but attend schools in Jewish towns in Judea, two of them in kibbutz Kfar Etzion and one in Kiriyat Arba. But let’s leave that aside and cut straight to the core of the issue of the legality of Jewish settlements outside the 1949 Armistice Lines.
There is only one International law concerning Israeli settlement that is binding and has never been superseded. The League of Nations, on July 24th, 1922, established the Mandate for Palestine, by unanimous vote, which included two Islamic states, Persia and Albania. The resolution stated, in part, “Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country….”
Note “reconstituting” their national home. The Jewish people was explicitly recognized as the long-exiled indigenous people of that land.
Moreover, Article 6 of the Mandate directs the Administration of Palestine to facilitate … “close settlement by Jews on the land….”
And Jews settled. And it was not contested that those settlements were legal under international law.
Large-scale fighting raged in Iraq on Monday, following Sunday’s proclamation of an Islamic caliphate over large areas of Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The jihadist group declared its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as leader of the new entity and its caliph, theoretically combining religious and state authority in the tradition of Muhammad’s early successors, across Iraq and Syria and beyond.
This development should not be dismissed as mere propaganda. For the first time since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in the aftermath of the Great War, there is a substantial state-like entity presuming to revive the mantle of Sunni Islamic universalism.
First of all, it is worth examining what exactly makes a state a “state.” Traditional international law postulates the possession of population, of territory, and the existence of a government which exercises effective control over that population and territory. To put it more technically, a state exists if it enjoys the monopoly of coercive mechanisms within its domain.
Some authors also postulate the prevalent loyalty of the population to the government, but recent legal practice does not support the assertion. In April 1992 the U.S. recognized “Bosnia and Herzegovina” in its Yugoslav federal boundaries, although its nominal government – led by the dedicated jihadist Alija Izetbegovic – commanded the loyalty of only two-fifths of its citizens who happened to be Muslims, and controlled at most a third of the territory. On the other hand, unrecognized state entities such as Transnistria, Abkazia, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh (like them or hate them) command their denizens’ overwhelming loyalty and exercise effectively undisputed control over their entire territory.
Finally, there are international jurists who cite the ability of the self-proclaimed state’s authority to engage in international discourse, but that is a moot point. The capacity to control a putative state’s territory and population almost invariably leads to such ability, regardless of the circumstances of that state’s inception: South Sudan is a recent case in point, and the creation of Israel in 1947 also comes to mind.
Three million girls between infancy and age fifteen are subject to FGM every year, and it is believed that 140 million women worldwide are suffering from the lifelong consequences of the practice.
The Muslim Council of Britain [MCB], the most prominent Muslim council in Britain, has declared that female genital mutilation is contrary to Islam: “FGM is not an Islamic requirement. There is no reference to it in the holy Qur’an that states girls must be circumcised. Nor is there any authentic reference to this in the Sunnah, the sayings or traditions of our prophet.”
“This is a terrible situation for young girls. So our strategy is to target the cutters. They are hurting a lot of people and making a profit from it.” — Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Commissioner, Metropolitan Police Service.
Thousands of schoolgirls in the United Kingdom are at high risk of undergoing female genital mutilation [FGM] during this year’s summer break, according to the British government, which is actively promoting several nationwide campaigns aimed at raising awareness of the spiraling problem.
The summer holiday—often referred to as the “cutting season”—is an especially dangerous time for at-risk girls, anti-FGM activists warn. Many families consider the summer to be a convenient time to carry out the procedure because there is time for the girls to heal before they return to school in the fall.
Mr. Tucker is the author of “Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey” (Bartleby Press, 2010).
It’s not too late to fix Jimmy Carter’s energy blunder of the 1970s.
The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a 645-page ruling whose basic aim is to cut coal plants out of the mix in producing the nation’s electricity. States will supposedly be given a choice, but the only real way to meet the agency’s demands for carbon-dioxide reductions will be to cut back on coal. All this will be a devastating blow to the Midwestern economy, driving up energy prices for everyone, while having only the slightest impact on global warming.
There is a great irony to this. In the early 1970s, coal was being phased out as the nation’s principal source of electricity. The initial concerns about air pollution had focused on coal, and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club were campaigning to lift the 20-year-old ban on imported oil so we could replace coal with low-sulfur oil from Libya and Indonesia.
All this came to a halt with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. It became clear that burning oil for electricity in the U.S. was a luxury we could no longer afford. But there was a salvation on the horizon. The nation was just embarking on a monumental effort to implement nuclear power, with almost 200 reactors on the drawing boards or in the pipeline. This would supplant both coal and oil and solve the problem of air pollution once and for all. (Concerns about carbon emissions had not yet arisen.)
Work on more than 50 reactors had already begun when the effort hit a snag. With the new administration of President Jimmy Carter, environmentalists gained a foothold in the government for the first time. They were opposed to air pollution but they were more opposed to nuclear power. At the same time, Mr. Carter was under tremendous pressure to find a replacement for foreign oil, so environmentalists came up with a solution. Theorists such as soft-energy guru Amory Lovins argued that coal could be cleaned up through new technologies—the fluidized bed, for instance, which pulverizes coal for nearly complete combustion. This would allow coal to serve as a bridge to the coming legions of wind, solar and other renewable energies that would be ready to take over completely somewhere around 2025.
Obama’s Dependent States of America — on The Glazov Gang
A disturbing report card on how a Radical-in-Chief’s domestic and foreign policy is crippling America.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-dependent-states-of-america-on-the-glazov-gang/ –
A culture that celebrates kidnapping is not fit for statehood.
In March 2004 a Palestinian teenager named Hussam Abdo was spotted by Israeli soldiers behaving suspiciously as he approached the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank. Ordered at gunpoint to raise his sweater, the startled boy exposed a suicide vest loaded with nearly 20 pounds of explosives and metal scraps, constructed to maximize carnage. A video taken by a journalist at the checkpoint captured the scene as Abdo was given scissors to cut himself free of the vest, which had been strapped tight to his body in the expectation that it wouldn’t have to come off. He’s been in an Israeli prison ever since.
Abdo provided a portrait of a suicide bomber as a young man. He had an intellectual disability. He was bullied by classmates who called him “the ugly dwarf.” He came from a comparatively well-off family. He had been lured into the bombing only the night before, with the promise of sex in the afterlife. His family was outraged that he had been recruited for martyrdom.
“I blame those who gave him the explosive belt,” his mother, Tamam, told the Jerusalem Post, of which I was then the editor. “He’s a small child who can’t even look after himself.”
Yet asked how she would have felt if her son had been a bit older, she added this: “If he was over 18, that would have been possible, and I might have even encouraged him to do it.” In the West, most mothers would be relieved if their children merely refrained from getting a bad tattoo before turning 18.
“It would behoove U.S. policy makers to stop impotent regrets about the loss of a “united, democratic, progressive Iraq,” which ever existed only in their own minds. Rather, they should get used to the region’s new map and demand of Sunni-stan’s sponsors in the Gulf that they guide it to getting along with its neighbors.”
Sunni fighters from around the Muslim world, having failed to conquer all of Syria from the Assad regime’s Alewites (a branch of Shia Islam) have been pushed eastward into majority-Sunni areas. These extend from east-central Syria into north-central Iraq. A wholly artificial border divides them. In recent days, they have established control over Sunni-majority areas of Iraq, from Fallujah and Mosul to the edges of Tikrit and Samarra. Our foreign policy establishment’s illusion that world events are principally about the United States, and its reflexive commitment to existing international borders, has led it to misunderstand that the region’s wars have been about re-drawing the unnatural borders imposed by the Wilsonians who subdivided the Ottoman Empire in 1919.
Our establishment, having neither ideas nor means for stopping this re-drawing, has reacted by hand-wringing (e.g. “the fall of Mosul” WSJ 6/11). Herewith, some suggestions for understanding these events’ implications for U.S. interests.
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, regardless of U.S. motives, made it possible for all of the region’s peoples to set about forcibly securing the political arrangements they desired. In the war that followed Saddam’s overthrow, the U.S. government believed that the issues were moderation versus extremism, democracy versus autocracy, and modernity versus the Middle Ages. But the folks who were actually doing the fighting had other things in mind.
The objective of Iraq’s Kurds, unequivocally, was to establish Kurdistan — with its own excellent army (the Peshmerga) its own language, flag, and institutions. They achieved all that, have invited Kurds living inside Syria, Turkey, and Iran to join them, and have mostly watched the region’s other peoples fight among themselves.
Thus the “Iraq War” pitted local Sunni Arabs, supported by the entire Sunni world, against local Shia Arabs, supported by the one and only Shia power, Iran. (The Americans’ practical objective, to tamp down the fighting, made them targets for both sides.)
http://acdemocracy.org/the-islamist-plague/?utm_source=The+Islamist+Plague&utm_campaign=The+Islamist+Plague&utm_medium=email
The Islamist Plague
Rachel Ehrenfeld
Many Western commentators have adopted the narrative that al Qaeda and its ilk are the exception to the “religion of peace” — Islam.
However, the rise of “political Islam,” the brainchild of the Muslim Brotherhood, is more akin to a highly infectious disease. No vaccine is available; its spread can only be halted by identifying and eliminating the sources of infection. Yet, despite the mortal danger posed by the increasingly violent global jihadist movement, willful blindness persists in the United States and the West.
Once the Soviet Union imploded and Islamist fundamentalism exploded, Muhammad replaced Marx and Lenin, and radical Islam replaced the socialist-nationalist doctrines of the Arab revolutionaries. The collapse of the Soviet Union served as the catalyst for an alliance between radical Sunni and Shiite movements that helped to revive Islamist fundamentalism. The spread of the Islamist ideology was paid for by the oil-rich Arab/Muslim states, which also used their money to buy Western “opinion makers,” including businessmen, politicians, the media, and academics.
New communication technologies allowed the increasingly vitriolic Islamist rhetoric to spread instantaneously. Instead of taking measures to stop the instructive incitement for murder, the West sank further into appeasement, thus encouraging the spread of the jihadist agenda.
While the bloody attacks of ISIS and Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria are portrayed as a Sunni vs. Shiite struggle, the role of Ayatollah Khomeini, as the leader of the “Islamic Revolution,” should not be forgotten.
The West wasn’t pregnant in August 1914, only constipated.
Rather than give birth to the future, it emptied its bowels of rancor. No disaster in world history was more predictable or longer in preparation. Robert Musil’s great novel The Man Without Qualitiesdepicts Vienna’s elite in the months before the war, pursuing petty concerns unaware that their world was about to disappear. It is the great European anti-novel because its self-referential premise – the protagonists do not know what every reader knows – forbids an ending. There are no right choices because nothing can prevent this bubble of a world from popping. After Musil – meta-Musil, so to speak – comes the great evacuation. The novel is considered a masterpiece in the German-speaking world. Few Americans know it, and fewer of these can make sense of it.
As the hundredth anniversary of World War I approaches, we will hear endless variations on a lament for Western Civilization. All of them go more or less as follows: At the height of its prosperity, scientific discovery, and artistic achievement the nations of Europe inexplicably plunged into a mutual slaughter that prepared the ground for the greater slaughter of 1939-1945. That is simply wrong. Europe had done this sort of thing twice before, first in the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 and again in the Napoleonic Wars of 1797-1814.
French casualties in the Napoleonic Wars were comparable to World War I in proportion to population. France lost between 1.4 and 1.7 million men under Napoleon out of a total population of 29 million. Men aged 17 to 49 typically made up about one-fifth of the 18th century population. The total military manpower pool of Napoleonic France was less than six million men, which means that casualties came to 23% to 28% of total manpower, more than in World War I. Vast numbers died from other nations; of the 500,000 soldiers in the polyglot army that Napoleon marched into Russia in June 1812, only 16,000 returned. The events of 1914-1939, Winston Churchill said aptly, were “a second Thirty Years’ War.” In fact, the first Thirty Years War was in some ways worse. It killed nearly half the people of Central Europe and emptied great swaths of Spain and France.
Beguiled as we are by the Enlightenment’s idea of progress, we play down the precedent for our own problems. In the enlightened reading, the Thirty Years War was a religious conflict, the last blood-orgy of medieval superstition, before the Age of Reason swept away the cobwebs of fanaticism. That is entirely false: after the initial, abortive revolt of the Bohemian Protestants against the Austrian Empire, the Thirty Years’ War became a Franco-Spanish conflict, fought by fanatics on both sides who believed that their nation was chosen by God to be his agent on earth. It was a religious war, to be sure, but a war between two perverse, nationalistic readings of Catholic Christianity. The same ethnocentric megalomania impelled the nations of Europe into 1914.
Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That event is supposed to have caused World War I, which was commonly labeled “the war to end all wars.”
I say supposed to have caused the war because if we look at what actually happened, we can gain a far better understanding of the lessons the world should have but never learned from World War I.
We know the vast scale of the number of dead, wounded, and missing. There were more than 200,000 Americans, three million British, six million French, seven million Germans and nine million Russians among them.
Ignorance of the lessons of World War I is a commonplace. The first among the lost lessons is: contrary to what we are told by an endless string of movies and novels, great wars cannot be begun by accident or by relatively small events such as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
Belgium’s independence began in 1830, and nine years later, Germany, England, and France entered into a treaty that guaranteed its neutrality, promising not to engage in war within its borders. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany had other ideas. He saw Britain, under King George V, as trying to encircle Germany and prevent it from becoming the great power Wilhelm believed was its destiny. He pushed German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck from office and his military leaders, led by Field Marshall von Schlieffen, had by December 1905 drafted secret plans to invade Belgium with a massive force and sweep south to conquer France. Germans of that era often toasted to “der Tag,” the day that Germany’s conquest of Europe would begin.
German planning for the war, over the nine years from 1905 to 1914, was developed in the most minute detail. The Schlieffen plan included the movement of armies down to the mobilization of each unit of two million troops, equipping them and sending them by rail (with each locomotive planned to move specific cars and leave at a specified minute) to the points of disembarkation to invade Belgium.
Bismarck predicted that the next great war would start with “some damned foolish thing” in the Balkans. When Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, a month of diplomacy ending in ultimatums sent between France, Germany, and Russia provided Wilhelm with the spark he chose to begin the long-planned war.
