Martin Luther King Day

Today the nation honors the memory of Martin Luther King - his courage, his leadership, his vision, and his sacrifice. I can think of no better way to understand why he's so highly regarded than to watch or read his I Have a Dream speech and/or his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Both are excellent windows into the soul of the man, and in them both we see that King was motivated and inspired by his deep faith in, and his understanding of, the message of the Christian Gospel. Here's his very powerful and very moving I Have Dream speech:

Reflecting on the history of the American civil rights movement and its roots in the American experience with slavery I was reminded of something I had read recently about contemporary slavery.

There are an estimated 27 million people in slavery today, most of them children. Thousands of boys hardly big enough to hold a gun are enslaved by militia thugs in Africa and forced to murder, maim and rape (See the movie War Dance). Thousands of Asian girls, barely pubescent, are sold as sex slaves, often by their parents. Millions of others are forced to work long hours, as many as twenty hours a day, shackled to machines and looms, or to toil as domestic labor.

One sometimes hears that the Bible endorses slavery and that American slave owners were often Christians. The first claim is not true. The Bible recognized that slavery was a fact in the first century Roman Empire and that there was little that a nascent Christian church could do to change it. Christian slaves were encouraged, therefore, to live so as to be a witness to God to a pagan world, to use their suffering to glorify Christ.

The second claim is technically true, but misleading. Early southern slave-owners were often nominal Anglicans whose religion had very little relevance to their moral lives.

In any event, the abolitionist movement, like the twentieth century civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King and his allies, was led by Christians who took the Gospel seriously - people like William Wilberforce and his Clapham group, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, even the misguided and possibly deranged John Brown. Add to these the thousands of lesser known Christians who participated in the underground railroad, who wrote editorials in newspapers and magazines, who preached from the pulpits of hundreds if not thousands of churches on the need for Christians to live up to their creedal beliefs that all men are God's children, created equal and in His image. It was this preaching and influence, it was this conviction of the equality of all men before God, that gradually persuaded more marginally committed Christians of the incompatibility of slavery and the Gospel.

Today it is the case that slavery flourishes mostly in those lands where Christianity languishes, or where Christians have little political clout. This is a fact that should be troubling to anyone concerned about human rights as our society grows increasingly secular and Christianity gets pushed further into the shadowy margins of our public life.

Western secularists would do well to ask themselves what grounds they will have to keep slavery at bay if their dream of a completely naked public square is ever realized. Once Christian theism ceases to be the ground, guide, and motivation for moral conduct, as it was for Dr. King, it will gradually, and inevitably, be replaced by an ethic of might-makes-right, and in such a world slavery will almost certainly make a roaring comeback. A completely secularized world will look very much, at least as far as human oppression is concerned, like those parts of the world today where Christian influence is minimal.

RLC

So Much for the Iranian Unit

IsraelNationalNews.com reports that the Israelis took only a day or so to all but wipe out a 100 man elite unit trained by the Iranians:

The so-called "Iranian Unit" of Hamas has been destroyed, according to Gaza sources cited Thursday by the Haaretz daily. The sources said most of the unit's 100 members were killed in fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood of Gaza City.

The terrorists had been trained in infantry tactics, the use of anti-tank missiles and the detonation of explosives, among other skills, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at Hizbullah camps in Lebanon's Beka'a Valley, as well as sites in Iran.

If the Israelis can so easily dispatch units trained by the Iranians the strength of the Iranian army itself is called into question. At the very least this is a huge embarrassment to Iran and Hizbollah. It also restores a lot of respect for the prowess of the Israeli Defense Force that had been diminished in the war in Lebanon two years ago.

In fact, one captured Hamas fighter said as much:

Two captured terrorists interviewed by Maariv/NRG say that Hamas was not expecting Israel's response to the escalation in missile attacks on Israeli targets that preceded Operation Cast Lead. One of them, a 52-year-old victim of a premature detonation who had already done time in an Israeli jail, said, "Hamas took a gamble. We thought, at worst Israel will come and do something from the air - something superficial. They'll come in and go out. We never thought that we would reach the point where fear will swallow the heart and the feet will want to flee. You [Israel] are fighting like you fought in '48. What got into you all of a sudden?"

Well, what got into them was that Hamas left them with no real alternative but to fight. Hamas may not have expected them to respond so vigorously, but what is the point of doing what Hamas thought they would do? A tit-for-tat retaliation solves nothing and only postpones the day when Israel will have to choose to dissolve itself or to eliminate Hamas.

In response to an e-mail from a friend asking me how I felt about the circumstances of the Palestinian people caught in the cross-fire, I replied that:

I feel deeply sorry for the Palestinian people. They have suffered terribly, and I wish their plight had some other solution. I know that most of them just want to live normal lives and raise their children and try to make a living. The whole situation is tragic. Yet I don't know what else Israel can do, given the leadership the Palestinians in Gaza have chosen for themselves. Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel, the deaths of Israelis, and the return of their land to Palestinian Arabs. That commitment is implacable. Given their determination I don't see how Israel can do anything other than follow one of several courses.

1. They can acquiesce to Palestinian demands and dissolve the Israeli nation.
   
2. They can try to cling to their security while establishing a border with Gaza something like we have with Canada.
   
3. They can seek to protect themselves from murderous Palestinians infiltrating into Israel by setting up checkpoints and building walls along the border.
   
4. They can seek to protect themselves from Palestinian terror by preventing them from getting the weapons the Palestinians use to kill Israelis.
   
5. They can try to eliminate the leadership of their implacable foe and hope that the Gazan Palestinians follow the example of their West Bank cousins and select somewhat less bloodthirsty leadership.
   

One and two amount to national suicide. Three, four, and five impose terrible hardships on the Palestinian people. Yet, I think that three, four, and five are the only options left to Israelis unless they're willing to dissolve their state and emigrate. The Palestinian people are caught in a terrible situation, but it's mostly the fault of their own elected leadership. Just as the leadership of the German and Japanese people had to go in the 1940s in order for there to be peace, so, too, must the Palestinian leadership go if their people are going to have any hope of a future. And just as removing the German and Japanese leadership cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilian Germans and Japanese, the removal of Hamas cannot occur without severe hardship to the people they govern. It's a terrible tragedy but no different than the tragedy suffered by the German and Japanese people during WWII.

Hamas has to go. If the Israelis end this offensive before they've excised the cancer it will only metastasize throughout the region and come back more virulently than ever. In the meantime, let us pray for the Palestinian people.

RLC

Hiccups

When it was discovered that Joe the Plumber had an outstanding tax debt of about $1200 there were cries of outrage from the left which was incensed that Joe had already committed the blasphemy of asking candidate Obama a question the answer to which caused Obama serious embarrassment. Joe asked the question. Joe had unpaid taxes. Joe must be a weasel.

Now it turns out that President-elect Obama's selection for Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner failed to pay almost fifty thousand dollars in taxes dating back to 2001 until he was about to be appointed to the position of chief tax collector of the nation.

Since he's an Obama appointee, however, that's okay, even if he's not being quite forthright about why the taxes are unpaid. Democrats have circled the waggons around Mr. Geithner calling his tax delinquency, which would have gotten you or I thrown in jail and did get Joe the Plumber's personal records rifled through by Ohio's bureaucrats, an "honest mistake." Well, according to the pieces linked to above it doesn't seem like an honest mistake.

It might be something to think about when Barack Obama fulfills his promise to raise the share of your income that goes to pay the salaries of such as Mr. Geithner that the obligation to pay taxes only applies to you. It doesn't apply to the members of his cabinet. If you don't want to pay higher taxes you are, in the words of Vice-President elect Joe Biden, "unpatriotic," unless of course, you're part of the Democrat elite in which case your deliberate failure to pay is just, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, a "hiccup."

It's ironic that Charlie Rangel (D. NY), the chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, the committee which writes tax legislation, claims he didn't know he had to pay taxes on several rental properties he owns, and that now the guy who will be in charge of raising the money to bailout our economy in the Obama administration claims he didn't know he had to pay taxes on income he made working for the International Monetary Fund - despite having received numerous notices from the IMF specifying his tax obligations.

One has to wonder whether these guys are dishonest or just incompetent. Either way it doesn't do much to boost one's confidence in the ability of the party that's promised to steer us through these difficult financial times. Nor does it do much to reinforce their image of themselves as the party of the little guy.

RLC

Dark Knight

"George Bush has been unjustly mocked, maligned, and misrepresented. Perhaps no president since Lincoln has been treated more unfairly and less charitably than President Bush." So says Andrew Breitbart in The Washington Times:

I have a dark secret to tell ... so that it's on the record. It's something that is difficult to say to certain friends, peers, family and, lately, many fellow conservatives.

I still like George W. Bush. A lot.

For starters, I am convinced he is a fundamentally decent man, even though I have read otherwise at the Huffington Post.

President Bush is far smarter, more articulate and less ideological than his plentiful detractors scream, and, ultimately, he will be judged by history - not by vengeful Democrats, hate-filled Hollywood, corrupt foreign governments, an imploding mainstream media or fleeting approval ratings.

George W. Bush is history's president, a man for whom the long-term success or failure of democracy in Iraq will determine his place in history. He may end up a victim of his own tough choices, but the cheerleading for his demise when Iraq's outcome is yet determined has hurt America and possibly set up the next president for the same appalling partisan response.

The fact that the United States has not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001, far exceeds the most wishful expert predictions of the time. Perhaps facing another al Qaeda-led barrage would have reinforced our need for national unity, caused us to recognize the gravity of the Islamist threat and fortified Mr. Bush's standing at home and abroad.

Yet, thankfully, that never happened. And Mr. Bush has been punished for this obvious success.

Indeed, he has. He's been vilified by a nation that he has struggled mightily to protect. Rather than expressing their gratitude that their children have not died at the hands of a terrorist attack since 9/11, rather than praising him for the work he's done on behalf of the poor around the world, rather than noting that he's the only president in history to actually liberate 50 million people from oppression, his critics shout that he's the worst president in history and that they will prosecute him for war crimes and for other dastardly deeds like listening to terrorists' phone conversations.

George Bush is the Dark Knight, despised by the very people he protected despite the damage it did to him personally. I wonder how many of his diminutive detractors would sacrifice their own popularity and approval ratings to protect people who would only despise them for it. Not many, I'll bet, but then not many of them have the character that Bush has.

There's much more from Breitbart at the link.

RLC

Obama's Epiphany

President-elect Obama seems to have come lately to a realization that most of the people listed in any phone book could have enlightened him about years ago. Closing Guantanamo Bay is going to prove a lot more difficult than just closing it.

During the campaign candidate Obama pontificated on our need to regain the moral high road and shut down a facility that had become a symbol of American peccability and a source of international dirty looks. Not wanting to incur the opprobrium of human rights paragons like Saudi Arabia and honorable people like the French, candidate Obama promised that he would close down Guantanamo Bay just as soon as he hung his coat in the Oval Office closet on Inauguration day. This sent thrills up the legs of lefties at MSNBC and HuffPo who, throughout the summer and fall, were heard bursting into spontaneous choruses of Adeste Fidelis.

Well, that was then when he needed lefty votes to get nominated and elected. This is now, and what was true about Gitmo then is not true now. The scales have fallen from the President-elect's eyes, he has to decide what to do with the barbarians housed at that facility, and he no longer has the option of voting present.

Indeed, what exactly will we do with a couple hundred hard-core Islamic Hannibal Lectors? Just let them go? Send them to their country of origin? Put them on trial (which for many of them will result in either letting them go or sending them home)?

Among those in Congress demanding that Gitmo be shut down there seems to be an epidemic of NIMBY (Not In My BackYard). Our pious congressional panjandrums insist that we bring these killers to trial or release them forthwith, except none of them wants them released in his or her district.

We could, of course, return the incorrigibles to their nation of origin, but Bush hasn't done that already, you'll be surprised to learn, because there they would be subject to real torture, not the kind of relatively innocuous coercion they experienced at Gitmo. What some who are calling for the closing of Gitmo fail to realize is that after a week in an Egyptian prison the detainees themselves will long for the days when the very worst that the very worst detainees had to endure was shackles, shivers, sleep deprivation, the sensation of drowning and being talked to crossly by female interrogators. This horrid treatment was, of course, sandwiched between sumptuous meals, daily prayers, and soccer games none of which they're likely to have much access to in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

If, on the other hand, we put these thugs on trial they'll be tried as criminals rather than as combatants which means the standard of evidence will be set high, and, as Obama told George Stephanopolous last Sunday, the evidence may be "tainted" if the detainees weren't advised of their Miranda rights by the Marines who apprehended them. The courts will then be obligated to drop the charges and these orcs would be free to go and fly more airplanes into more skyscrapers. Indeed, Reuters reports that the army believes that as many as sixty one detainees released from Guantanamo have already returned to terrorist activity.

Barack Obama sounds as if all of this is just beginning to dawn on him which makes one wonder if he's ever really thought about it before or whether he's just been parroting left-wing nostrums that he overheard at the knee of mentors like Jeremiah Wright. And if he hasn't really thought about this what else hasn't he thought about?

Happy Inauguration Day.

RLC

More on RJN

The other day I posted notice of the passing of one of the nation's most prolific and profound writers on culture and religion, Richard John Neuhaus. I admired him very much and his death is a great loss. So that you might understand a little more of the man than what was included in my previous post I invite you to read this column by David Brooks that my friend Stephen forwarded to me. All of it is worth reading, but this passage, where Brooks quotes Neuhaus describing an experience he had in the hospital while recovering from his first bout with cancer, was particularly interesting:

Much later, Neuhaus endured his own near-death experience. An undiagnosed tumor led to a ruptured intestine and a series of operations. He recovered slowly, first in intensive care, and then in a regular hospital room, where something strange happened.

"I was sitting up staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat," he later wrote in an essay called "Born Toward Dying" in his magazine, First Things. "What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two 'presences.' I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that ... .

"And then the presences - one or both of them, I do not know - spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: 'Everything is ready now.' "

That was the end of Neuhaus's vision, but not his experience. "I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known."

I encourage you to read the whole piece.

RLC

Cellular Machines

I suppose the systems and machines that you see in these animations could be the result of blind chance acting over a billion years of time, like the fabled monkey at the keyboard typing out a Shakespearean sonnet. On the other hand, I think it takes quite a lot of faith in the power of chance, time and natural selection to believe that such tiny marvels could have been constructed that way. It's the equivalent of believing that a series of hurricanes, stretched over a billion years, could assemble an automobile factory out of the wreckage in a junkyard.

This animation depicts DNA translation and protein synthesis:

This computer simulation describes the complexity of the bacterial flagellum - a molecular motor:

We know that purposeful, intelligent minds can produce wonders like these. We see it happen every day. What we never see happen is the construction of such marvels by blind physical forces. Yet we're asked to accept, actually we're told to accept, that it's much more reasonable to believe what we've never seen happen - the construction of tiny factories by chance and impersonal forces - than to believe what we always see happen - the construction of complex machinery by an intelligent engineer.

It's actually pretty bizarre when you think about it.

RLC

Culture of Death

A fascination with death is typical of morally exhausted, effete societies. The difference between radical Islamists and those elements of Western civilization still under Christian influence that the Islamists wish to destroy is that Islamists value death the way most Westerners, particularly Christians, value life. Listen, for instance, to the words of this Palestinian (courtesy of Hot Air):

I can't imagine a cultural divide greater than this. One culture considers murdering school children to be perhaps the worst possible crime, the other treats the killers as heroes. One culture treats death as a great evil, the other as a great good. One culture teaches that we should love our enemies while the other teaches that we should hate them with an all-consuming hatred. One culture wants to convert the world to Christianity through the persuasion of reason and the heart, the other is determined to convert the world to its belief through fear, intimidation and murder.

This is the existential challenge we and our children face in the 21st century. The great question of the next couple of decades will be whether we will have the will to resist a militant Islam that believes it has a divine mandate to spread its culture across the globe and kill all who refuse to submit.

RLC

Vanguard

Zombietime has a photo record of last Saturday's anti-Israel, anti-Jew protest rally in San Francisco. I wasn't there, of course, but judging from the pics there seems to have been an asphyxiating level of left-wing naivete on the street, and enough hatred and anti-semitism to warm the hearts of any Nazi.

It's distressing that people, even though they're not in great numbers, hold such simple-minded, unreflective views about such a matter as important as the kind of people who belong to Hamas and the extent of the oppression and terror they inflict, not just on Israelis, but on the Palestinian people.

Some of these protestors see themselves as the "vanguard" of a global revolution, but if they are a vanguard of anything, it's the vanguard of a world that has lost its mind.

RLC

Fun Game

If an existentialist designed a board game it might be something like this:

Thanks to Matt for sending the cartoon.

RLC

The No-State Solution

With Israel and the Palestinians locked in a perpetual, endless cycle of violence, a solution to the conflict seems remote and unlikely. The incessant fighting will end only if one side or the other were wiped out, but the Palestinians can't accomplish this and the Israelis wouldn't try. Diplomats have proffered other options, of course, the most frequently discussed plan is the two-state option wherein the Palestinians create a state that includes the West Bank and Gaza.

Neither party is keen on the idea, however, since the Israelis are frightened of the threat posed by a sovereign Palestinian state on their border and Palestinians want more territory from Israel than just the West Bank and Gaza. They also want the "right of return," the right of millions of descendents of those Palestinians who fled the region in 1948 when the Arab states surrounding Israel told them to get out of the way of their impending invasion of the nascent Israeli state. Of course, Israel would cease to exist if they were inundated by millions of poor, illiterate, and exceedingly hostile Arabs and could never grant such a right.

Another alternative being talked about is the "no-state solution" which is, I think, being pushed by people like Daniel Pipes. Here's Strategy Page's description of this plan:

Instead of continuing the arguments over the 1967 borders, why not go back to the 1967 politics. In short, convince Jordan to take back the West Bank (which it ran until 1967, and claimed as lost territory until 1988, when it ceded control to the "Palestinians"). Convince Egypt to take the Gaza Strip (which has been part of Egypt for most of the last few thousand years). Israel and Jordan work out a deal, perhaps with some international organizations, for running Jerusalem. Then get the Arab states to stop treating all the Palestinians like refugees, and absorb them (as Israel did for all the Jews driven out of Arab countries after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war).

Egypt might seem an unlikely host for 1.5 million Arab refugees in Gaza. But Egypt is well aware of the fact that Gaza is becoming a refuge for Islamic terrorists who direct their attacks at Egypt as well as Israel. If Egypt wants to deal with that problem, the best way is to make all those refugees Egyptian citizens, and subject them to Egyptian law (and counter-terrorism efforts, if need be).

And let us not forget how the problem started. The Arabs that left what-is-now-Israel in 1948 were convinced by the Arab countries to remain refugees for 60 years, on the promise that the Arab world would crush the new state of Israel. That didn't happen and isn't likely to happen anytime soon. The Arab world has been getting more and more impatient with the Palestinians and their inability to get along with each other, rule themselves, or work out a deal with Israel.

So let's just admit that the two-state solution isn't going to work, give the Arab refugees (actually, their children and grandchildren) a place to call home (the places where they are living now) and move on. The alternative is more head-butting by the Arab radicals (Palestinians, mainly) and misery for the refugees who, if they were treated like the 1948 Jewish refugees, would be a lot better off today.

No one is optimistic that the Palestinians, Jordan or Egypt will accept such a plan. Jordan and Egypt no doubt want nothing to do with trying to absorb and govern the fractious Palestinians, and the Palestinians will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel. The most realistic view of the Middle East, in my opinion, is to be a pessimist about peace ever breaking out in this region. Too much blood has been spilled and too much hatred exists for there ever to be peaceful co-existence between Israel and the Palestinians. At least not in our lifetimes. At least not unless there's a miracle.

RLC

Israeli Intelligence Ops

Strategy Page has an interesting piece on the Israeli intelligence operations in Gaza. The post includes this tidbit:

The Israeli attack on Hamas forces in Gaza on December 27th, hit fifty targets within 220 seconds. The fifty Israeli aircraft assembled off the coast, and delivered a well-rehearsed attack designed to take out Hamas targets before key commanders could get away. Israeli intelligence had discovered Hamas plans for such an Israeli attack, which involved key Hamas personnel immediately dispersing to hiding places. These included hospitals, where the Hamas men would dress in staff uniforms and blend in. Other safe havens included nursery schools, and other places where the Hamas officials would be surrounded by lots of civilians at all times. Thus the tight timing for the Israeli attack, intended to catch the key Hamas personnel before they could disperse.

It also explains why so many buildings were destroyed in the bombing attacks and the lengths Israelis go to in order to minimize civilian casualties:

The Israelis also make use of the phone system to avoid civilian casualties. For example, the bombing campaign after the initial attack was directed mostly at the thousands of rockets Hamas had stockpiled. Most of these were stored in civilian housing. This was a technique pioneered by Hezbollah in Lebanon. There, some homes would have a basement excavated, to provide more space for rockets.

Israeli intelligence is still identifying these storage locations. When one is found, the Israelis will phone the home just before the attack and tell the civilians they have a few minutes to get out before the place blows up. In at least one case, the civilians were defiant, and went to the roof, believing that the Israelis would not bomb with women and children in plain sight. In response, the Israeli fighter came in low and fired some 20mm cannon shells right next to the building. The panicked civilians fled the building and the place blew up shortly thereafter.

There's much else of interest at the link to anyone who might be curious as to how Israel is trying to stay ahead of the terrorists in Hamas.

RLC

Bad News, Good News

The bad news is that the Milky Way, the galaxy in which we live, is on a collision course with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Computer models of the collision reveal that our solar system will be thrust by the cataclysm to the periphery of the Milky Way where survival will likely be impossible.

The good news is that life will have long since disappeared on earth anyway by the time this collision happens billions of years from now. That should make you feel better.

What it'll look like:

RLC

Liberating the Palestinian People

Bernard Henri-Levy has an excellent piece in The New Republic about the need to eliminate Hamas as a functioning political and military entity:

I would like to remind everyone of certain facts:

1. No government in the world, no country other than the vilified Israel--dragged through the mud, demonized--would tolerate having thousands of shells falling on its cities year after year. The most remarkable thing in the affair, the true surprise, is not Israel's "brutality"; it is, to the letter, its restraint.

2. The fact that Hamas' Qassam and, now, its Grad missiles have caused so few deaths does not prove that they are artisanal, inoffensive, etc., but that the Israelis protect themselves, that they live burrowed in the caves of their buildings, under shelter: a nightmarish existence, suspended, with the sound of sirens and explosions. I have been to Sderot: I know.

3. The fact that, inversely, the Israeli shells create so many victims does not mean, as protesters have angrily proclaimed, that Israel is engaging in a deliberate "massacre," but that the leaders of Gaza have chosen the opposite attitude and are exposing their populations, relying on the old tactic of the "human shield." Which means that Hamas, like Hezbollah two years ago, is installing its command centers, its arms stockpiles, its bunkers, in the basements of buildings, of hospitals, of schools, of mosques. Efficient but repugnant.

4. There is a capital difference between the combatants that those who want to have a "correct" idea of the tragedy, and of the means to put an end to it, must acknowledge: The Palestinians open fire on cities, or in other words, on civilians (which is called, in international criminal law, a "war crime"); the Israelis target military objectives and cause, without aiming to, horrible civilian casualties (which is called, in the language of war, "collateral damage"--which, even though it is hideous, points to a real strategic and moral dissymmetry).

5. Because we must dot the I's, we will again recall a fact that, strangely, the French press has rarely reported and of which I know no precedent in any other war, or on the part of any other army: During the air offensive, the Israeli army systematically called residents of Gaza who live close to military targets and invited them to evacuate--an Israeli minister said 100,000 calls were made. That this does not alter the despair of families whose lives have been broken in the carnage, it is obvious, but this is not a detail totally deprived of meaning.

6. Finally, as for the famous complete blockade imposed on a starving people, who are lacking of everything in this "unprecedented" humanitarian crisis: Again, this is not factually correct. From the beginning of the ground offensive, the humanitarian convoys ceaselessly crossed the Kerem Shalom passage. According to The New York Times, on Dec. 31--in one single day--nearly 100 trucks carrying food supplies and medicine entered the territory. And I invoke, only to preserve the memory of it (for this goes without saying--but perhaps it would be better to actually say it ...), the fact that Israeli hospitals continue, even as I write, to accept and care for wounded Palestinians every day.

Palestinians' worst enemies are the extremist leaders who have never wanted peace, have never wanted a State and never conceived of one for their people other than as an instrument and as a hostage....Either Hamas leaders re-establish the truce that they broke, and, while they're at it, declare null and void a charter founded on the pure rejection of the "Zionist Entity": In doing so, they will rejoin the vast party for compromise that has not ceased--God be praised--to make progress in the region, and peace will be established. Or they will only, obstinately, consider the suffering of Palestinian civilians in terms of its fueling of their annealed passions, their insane hate, nihilistic, beyond words. And if that is the case, it is not only the Israelis, but the Palestinians, who will need to be liberated from Hamas' somber shadow.

Israel has a golden opportunity to do both itself and the Palestinian people a great good: prosecute the war until Hamas is no longer able either to threaten Israel or oppress its own people. Unfortunately, much of the world, particularly in the West, will pressure Israel to stop short of eliminating Hamas and thereby leave in place the seeds of the next round of rocket attacks and violence in Gaza.

RLC

Playing the Media?

CNN has been airing this video of the alleged death of a young Palestinian boy, putatively at the hands of the Israelis, but several bloggers are convinced that the video is a fake:

The doctor's feeble effort at CPR certainly looks contrived, and there's not much evidence of wounds or damage to the rooftop consistent with a missile explosion. And why does the video stop before the boy is interred? I don't know if the film is a fraud or not, but it certainly is suspicious. It originated with Hamas, and there's no real evidence in it that the boy is actually dead or that, if he is, he was killed by Israeli fire. Nevertheless, an uncritical CNN swallows it hook, line, and sinker.

One might get the feeling that at CNN the working assumption is that if it makes Israel look bad it must be genuine.

James Lewis, in a strongly worded piece at The American Thinker, takes the media to task for what he calls their collusion with terrorism:

In fact, it is the media themselves who are criminally complicit in the internment of Gaza's civilians in the line of fire. They could stop the terrorists simply by headlining Hamas' responsibility for the plight of the Arabs of Gaza, over and over again. That's the real story --- if only they could headline the facts right in front of their eyes. But they don't.

Without the leftist media there is no payoff for terrorists. Shut off the oxygen of publicity and Hamas shrivels to a powerless gang of thugs.

Lewis is correct, but he goes a little too far, I think, when he accuses CNN and BBC of being just as guilty of the deaths of Palestinians as is Hamas. After all, Hamas deliberately kills its own people through brutal cynicism and malice whereas the media's complicity is due more to ideological blindness, naivete, and perhaps stupidity. Nevertheless, Lewis is right to hold them to account.

RLC

Atlas Redux

Stephen Moore writes in the Wall Street Journal that current government policy is eerily reminiscent of the disastrous government policies so skillfully parodied by Ayn Rand in her 1957 magnum opus Atlas Shrugged. For anyone who has read Atlas today's newspapers do carry the scent of deja vu. Here's some of what Moore says:

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as "the looters and their laws." Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the "Anti-Greed Act" to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel's promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the "Equalization of Opportunity Act" to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the "Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act," aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn't Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act" and the "Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act." Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan." This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion -- in roughly his first 100 days in office.

The current economic strategy is right out of "Atlas Shrugged": The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That's the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies -- while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to "calm the markets," another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as "Atlas" grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate "windfalls."

There's much more to the comparison to Rand's vision in Moore's column. Check it out, especially if you've read Atlas.

RLC

Proportionality in War

Recently we discussed the matter of Just War as it relates to the current conflict in Gaza. During the course of those discussions we had some things to say about the difficulties inherent in applying the principle of proportionality to this, or any, war. Critics of Israel frequently, and glibly, allege that the Israeli response to the Hamas rocket attacks has been "disproportionate" without giving us any indication how they know this or what metric they're using to determine it.

Now Michael Walzer at The New Republic weighs in with a fine essay on the matter of the difficulties inherent in assessing what constitutes a proportionate response. Here's part of his column:

Consider the example of an American air raid on a German tank factory in World War Two that kills a number of civilians living nearby. The justification goes like this: The number of civilians killed is "not disproportionate to" the damage those tanks would do in days and months to come if they continued to roll off the assembly line. That is a good argument, and it does indeed justify some number of the unintended civilian deaths. But what number? How do you set an upper limit, given that there could be many tanks and much damage?

Because proportionality arguments are forward-looking, and because we don't have positive, but only speculative, knowledge about the future, we need to be very cautious in using this justification. The commentators and critics using it today, however, are not being cautious at all; they are not making any kind of measured judgment, not even a speculative kind. "Disproportionate" violence for them is simply violence they don't like, or it is violence committed by people they don't like.

So Israel's Gaza war was called "disproportionate" on day one, before anyone knew very much about how many people had been killed or who they were.

Walzer concludes that because of the difficulty in assessing it, proportionality is perhaps among the least important of the Just War principles. Anyone interested in the ethics of the application of force should read his contribution.

Thanks to Byron for passing it along.

RLC

The Language of God (II)

In chapter 10 of The Language of God geneticist Francis Collins lays out for the reader his beliefs about how faith and science are harmonized (See here for the first part of this review). His position is usually referred to as Theistic Evolution (TE) although he prefers to call it BioLogos.

He begins by listing six propositions which define TE:

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness approximately 14 billion years ago.

2. Despite massive improbabilities the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life remains unknown, once life arose the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over long periods of time.

4. Once evolution got underway no special supernatural intervention was required.

5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.

6. But humans are unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature (e.g. the Moral law and the yearning for God)

In none of the first five assertions is there any explicit role for a creator. Collins says elsewhere that he believes that God created the universe and established the natural laws which govern it, but, as the materialist would point out, his belief is unparsimonious. If the world gives every appearance of having arisen according to the natural laws themselves then God is superfluous. There's no need to assume that there's anything beyond nature responsible for the world. Collins can say that God somehow got it all going and is necessary as an answer to the ultimate questions of life, but it's hard to see how this God is any different than the God of the deist. He certainly isn't the Christian God who acts in history.

Collins insists that we know by faith that God chose the mechanism of evolution to populate the universe with living creatures, and that he intentionally appointed this mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with him, and that these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral law. This all amounts to saying, however, that we know by faith that God intentionally designed human beings. It's just that he left no evidence of this activity for us.

Other than explicitly identifying the creator as the Judeo-Christian God there's nothing in what he writes here that's incompatible with ID. The difference is that IDers think that the universe and life display actual empirical evidence of intelligent input whereas Collins thinks that none of what we observe in the world can be construed as evidence of a designer's work. The most we can conclude from the empirical evidence is that everything is the result of chance and physics.

Proposition #4 is particularly troublesome coming from someone like Collins who believes the witness of Scripture. In order to discount supernatural intervention in the natural world one must, if one is consistent, reject, or at least adopt a position of agnosticism about, the miracle accounts in the Bible. An IDer (who is officially agnostic about who the designer is) could do this, but a Theistic Evolutionist who accepts the Biblical testimony about God cannot. He is committed to believing that God performs miracles, but must maintain that there's no empirical evidence of these miracles.

Collins would, I think, reply that miracles are religious events known by faith whereas the evolution of life lies in the realm of science, but if so, he's creating a dichotomy that really has no justification. The physical world is where miracles occur and as such they're just as much subject to scientific investigation as is the evolution of the human eye. For a miracle to occur God has to intervene in nature somehow, and if Collins believes that he intervened to raise a man from the dead why is he so opposed to those who believe that he has also intervened to create life, or consciousness, or the human immune system?

Nevertheless, Collins makes it clear on p.205 that he does believe God specified, and was intimately involved in, the creation of all species. It's just that from our perspective it all looks like random chance. But if God is behind the evolution of life then the appearance of random chance is an illusion, and Collins has denied a basic tenet of Darwinian evolution which emphatically insists that it's not an illusion. Darwinians hold that chance mutations and natural selection are the main engines of evolution and that there's no input from anything outside the realm of nature. Either God has had a hand in the process or he hasn't. If Collins says he does play a role then he comes close to affirming a basic tenet of ID and denies the naturalistic process that Darwinians proclaim is the cause of all that is. If he says he doesn't play a role then his God seems pretty much irrelevant to our lives.

Moreover, if from our perspective the world looks like the product of random chance then it's hard to see how Ps. 19:1* and Romans 1:20** should be understood. In any event, Collins goes on to say that:

"Unlike ID, TE is not intended as a scientific theory. It's truth can be tested only by the spiritual logic of the heart, the mind and the soul."

In other words, TE, as Collins describes it, is a purely intuitive, subjective hypothesis, but if so, how can Collins say it's preferable to Creationism or ID? One subjective hypothesis is no more nor less preferable than another. It all depends on the biases and predilections of the person who embraces the hypothesis.

The only difference between ID and TE that Collins has clearly draws is that ID claims with Ps. 19:1 and Romans 1:20 that there is indeed empirical evidence for a designer's handiwork in the creation. Collins says there is not, that the evidence is not empirical but is evident only through the eyes of faith. So Collins looks at biological information and cosmic fine-tuning and says that all we can conclude scientifically from what we see is that it's all a product of blind random processes, but we know in our hearts that somehow God was behind it. This sounds very much like wishful thinking.

The IDer looks at the existence of biological information in structures like DNA and sees the astronomically improbable fine-tuning of the hundreds of parameters, forces, and coincidences of the cosmic structure, and infers that an intelligent engineer was somehow involved. ID makes the scientifically falsifiable, and thus testable, claim that material processes are inadequate to account for life or those exquisitely precise calibrations.

Collins states that:

"I find TE to be by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying of the alternatives."

The claim that TE is scientifically consistent is a little peculiar since, as Collins has told us (p.204), TE makes no scientific claims. It's simply not possible for a view that makes no claims that can be scientifically tested to be inconsistent with science.

He then concludes:

"I do not believe that the God who created all the universe, and who communes with his people through prayer and spiritual insight, would expect us to deny the obvious truths of the natural world that science has revealed to us..."

Nor do I, but ID denies no obvious truth about the world that science has uncovered. TE, however, does. After all, the most obvious truth about the world is that it has every mark of having been designed. Even Richard Dawkins admits as much on the opening page of The Blind Watchmaker where he says that "Biology is the study of complicated things which give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."

Theistic Evolution may be true, but I find Collins' case for it unpersuasive.

* The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands.

** Since the beginning of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen, being seen through what has been made....

RLC

Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009)

One of America's finest minds and most prodigious writers passed away yesterday morning in his sleep at the age of 72. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the founder and long-time editor of First Things, one of the best journals on culture and religion in America today, had been wrestling with cancer for years. It finally overcame him.

Michael Novak writes that "Father Neuhaus was the most consequential Christian intellectual in America since Reinhold Niebuhr. He was the most consequential Catholic since John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Fulton J. Sheen. He was a worthy successor in a long chain of great witnesses."

This video, and others which can be found here, gives a good sense of the man:

For more on Neuhaus go to National Review and scroll down. His name has graced many of the posts on Viewpoint, and his wit and his pen will be greatly missed.

RLC

Learning Lessons

One aspect of any modern war that often determines the outcome is how well the Western media can be played by those who oppose Western forces. In the Israeli war against Hezbollah there were a couple of famous cases of how world opinion was turned against Israel by providing the media with footage of staged atrocities.

Israel's enemies also like to exploit funerals of the victims of Israeli attacks to show what savages the Israelis are, but one such attempt to deceive the Western press was foiled by an Israeli surveillance drone which caught the "funeral" on tape. Strategy Page recounts the story:

[The] famous Israeli UAV video, showed mourners approaching, with the deceased on a stretcher, held at shoulder height. Suddenly, one of those carrying the stretcher stumbled, and the "body" tumbled to the ground. The body then got up and laid back down on the stretcher, which was again raised to shoulder height and the funeral procession resumed its sad, but newsworthy, journey to the waiting reporters.

See the link for more on how the media is manipulated by Hezbollah and Hamas.

Strategy Page also has an interesting story on lessons learned by the Israeli Air Force from their experience in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah:

The Israeli Air Force learned its lesson from the 2006 campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Before 2006, the air force had convinced the government that it was on top of Hezbollah military preparations in southern Lebanon, and could take down the terrorist rocket stockpiles with air attacks. Ground troops would not be necessary, or would have little to do if sent in. The Israeli generals were wrong. In the first ten days of the 2006 operations, the air force took out 150 known targets. But it turned out that Hezbollah had a lot more on and under the ground than the air force intelligence knew about. The air force had a hard time finding those additional rocket stockpiles and bunkers full of Hezbollah fighters. The army had to be hastily mobilized and sent into a battle they were not prepared for.

Thirty months later, the Israeli Air Force had cleaned up its act, or so it appears. We won't know for sure until the Gaza operation is over. But in the first ten days of fighting in Gaza, the air force destroyed over 500 targets, using 555 fighter and 125 attack helicopter sorties. More importantly, a new intelligence approach, and new sensors, have made it possible for the air force to keep finding new targets. Part of this was due to the air force forming a tighter link with the other intel organizations (army, Mossad, Shin Bet and foreign nations), and increasing the speed at which intel is collected, processed, and passed back to the combat aircraft in the form of target information.

The Israelis are using more high resolution targeting pods, including some using high rez (SAR) radar for all-weather ground surveillance. This gave them more information, more quickly. This was aided by greater use, than ever before, of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). The Gaza battle areas have been under intense UAV surveillance 24/7 since operations began. This explains how the air force is now able to generate a constant supply of new targets. Hamas is suitably shocked, or so it appears from what Arab language reporters are broadcasting from within Gaza. There's a higher than expected use of faked bomb victim stories, which is largely attributable to the greater precision with which the air force is identifying and hitting targets. Hamas appears to be in disarray, having been hit with a more devastating attack than their Hezbollah advisors had endured. As a result, Hezbollah is getting nervous about what a second round of fighting in southern Lebanon might do to them.

The U.S. has supplied Israel with just about every smart bomb in the American arsenal. Not just to help out an ally, but so that American and Israeli air force planners can compare notes after this is all over.

And most importantly, we should point out, so that Israel can wage a more just war by pinpointing their targets and reducing the harm done to innocent lives and property.

RLC

Qualifications Don't Matter

Democrats have a funny relationship with the concept of suitability for public office. You'll recall that Sarah Palin, who was actually a governor of a state and a former mayor, was not deemed fit to run for the one office in government that really requires no particular qualifications, but Barack Obama, who had almost no public record, was deemed eminently prepared to be the leader of the free world.

Now we have Al Franken, whose primary qualification for high office is that he is a comedian and a tax cheat who professes to enjoy pornography with his twelve year-old son, being elected to the U.S. Senate by Democrats in Minnesota, the same people who once elected a man to be their governor whose only preparation was that he was once a professional wrestler.

We also have the spectacle in New York of a woman who can scarcely string together three words without interjecting a "you know," and whose chief claim on public office is that she's a Kennedy, being appointed by the Democratic Governor to fill the vacant Senate seat of another woman whose only qualification for being elected to that seat in the first place was that she is the wife of a former president.

We also have witnessed this week the appointment by our Democrat President-elect of a man to head the CIA whose only apparent qualification for that job is that he's "politically savvy."

During the Clinton years, when the President was fending off criticism for his various peccadillos, we were frequently reminded by Democrats that "character doesn't matter." Now they're telling us that qualifications don't matter. I can't wait to see what doesn't matter next.

RLC

Who Bears the Blame?

Question: Thirty civilians are killed by Israeli fire near a school in Gaza and the world is outraged by the tragedy, as well they should be, but at whom should the outrage be directed?

Hamas set up a mortar launch pad and http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Ttragedy_school_Jebaliya_6-Jan-2009.htm fired several rounds at Israeli troops from the midst of several hundred civilians milling around outside the school. The Israelis returned fire killing the mortar crew but also killing the civilians who were close by. Secondary explosions in the school, caused by exploding weapons and ammunition caches, apparently caused some of the casualties.

Who, in this instance, is responsible for the deaths of those people? Against whom should the world's outrage be directed? The Hamas mortar crew violated international law by using a U.N. facility as a base of operations and weapons storage facility. They violated international law by using civilians as human shields. But people are angry at the Israelis who violated no law by defending themselves against the Palestinian fighters.

Hamas is in a win-win situation with respect to the use of human shields. Either Israel refuses to return fire against them which gives Hamas a tactical win, or Israel does return fire and inadvertently kills civilians which gives Hamas a public relations win. Hamas, which has no sympathy for the notion of human rights, has every incentive to continue to use civilians as shields, and it's the world's media and popular opinion which affords them that incentive. Everyone who condemns Israel for the deaths of civilians placed in the crossfire by Hamas, and who fails to loudly and forcefully condemn Hamas for using this tactic, implicitly encourages their crime and bears at least some responsibility for their deaths.

Last question: Why does the world hold Israeli Jews to a higher standard of conduct than it holds Palestinian Muslims?

See here for more details on this terrible tragedy.

RLC

The Language of God (I)

Francis Collins is a world-famous geneticist and medical doctor who headed the team which worked out the sequence of nucleotides that make up the human genetic blueprint. Two years ago he wrote a book titled The Language of God in which he talks about his spiritual journey from atheism to Christianity. The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses how he came to believe that atheism was intellectually untenable and how a simple encounter with a patient set him on the road to Christ. Part II gives an overview of his work in discovering the gene which, when mutated, causes cystic fibrosis, and also some interesting material on how his team unraveled the human genome.

Part III lays out his view of how faith and science can be reconciled. In this section he offers a critique of atheism, Creationism, Intelligent Design (ID) and presents his version of Theistic Evolution (TE), or what he calls BioLogos.

This section is the weakest part of the book, in my view, for two reasons. First he seems to gravely misunderstand ID, and second, his view of TE seems either incoherent or almost indistinguishable from ID.

Let's look at what he says about ID. We'll consider his thoughts on TE in another post. He writes on p.183:

"ID places its major focus on the perceived failings of the evolutionary theory to account for life's stunning complexity."

This is simply not true. Many IDers are themselves evolutionists of one kind or another. Their problem is not with evolution, it's with the notion that natural processes are fully adequate by themselves to account for both the structure of the cosmos and the structures of living things. It is this view, a view called metaphysical naturalism, or physicalism, which ID proponents believe to be inadequate to account for life's stunning complexity.

Collins repeats his misunderstanding further down the same page where he states three basic propositions upon which ID rests:

1. Evolution promotes an atheistic worldview and therefore must be resisted by believers in God.

2. Evolution is fundamentally flawed since it cannot account for the intricate complexity of nature.

3. If evolution cannot explain nature's complexity then there must be a designer involved somehow who stepped in to provide the necessary components during the course of evolution.

Collins' error becomes clear as soon as one realizes that he is, perhaps inadvertently, playing a shell game with the terms evolution and evolutionary theory. He's using these terms as synonyms for naturalism, but they clearly are not synonomous with that view. Whether all organisms have evolved from common ancestors is simply not something upon which ID takes a stand.

To be sure, there are IDers who are Creationists (there are some who are agnostics and even a few who are atheists), but it's important to separate the person from the theory. We can no more infer from the fact that some IDers are Creationists that ID is creationism than we can infer from the fact that some evolutionists are atheists that evolution is therefore atheism.

Collins claims in this chapter that cases of sub-optimal structures like the eye demonstrate that these structures couldn't have been designed by an omniscient, omnipotent God. But this objection misfires for two reasons. First, it's irrelevant to ID. ID says nothing about who the designer is. It makes no claim that the designer is a God who can do anything at all. It only claims that the empirical evidence leads to the conclusion that many biological structures (as well as properties of the cosmos as a whole) bear the marks of intentional design. That a particular structure seems imperfectly designed is not sufficient grounds for concluding that it therefore is not designed any more than we could reason that because certain computer software runs imperfectly that the software must have been the product of purely natural forces and random chance. In other words, even an incompetent designer is still a designer.

Second, it is by no means clear that the structures Collins discusses are really sub-optimal. Michael Denton, an agnostic, takes up this question in his book Nature's Destiny and shows that in many cases what appears to be sub-optimal design is really a brilliant solution to an engineering problem that requires certain trade-offs. Indeed, he cites recent research that shows this to be the case with the human retina.

Even so, despite having failed to present a compelling case against it, Dr. Collins insists that ID "fails to hold up." He urges us to reject ID and embrace instead his version of Theistic Evolution to which we'll turn in Part II.

RLC

Valkyrie

Film buffs may appreciate a review of Tom Cruise's Valkyrie by William Doino at First Things. I know some readers will scoff and snicker, but I think Cruise is a pretty good actor. I admit he's played in some clunkers, but some of his stuff is very good. Doino mentions Rain Man, and of the relative few of his movies I've seen I would add Minority Report, Top Gun, and maybe Far and Away.

Anyway, Doino thinks Valkyrie is very much worth seeing. Check out his review at the link.

RLC

Natural Wonders

Yet another part of George W. Bush's legacy is his admittedly controversial environmental record. Like much else about the Bush presidency the record seems mixed, but here's one very significant part of it that you may not learn about from the six o'clock news:

In the largest marine conservation effort in history, President George W. Bush on Tuesday designated what he called "three beautiful and biologically diverse areas of the Pacific Ocean" as national marine monuments.

Bush cited moves by his administration to impose the strictest air quality standards in U.S. history and regulations on power plant and diesel fuel emissions; protect millions of acres of wetlands, habitats on farmland and federal forests; clean ocean debris; raise standards on fuel efficiency, lighting and appliances; invest billions in the development of alternative energy sources; and switch the global approach on climate change to one that includes developing economies like China and India.

"We have charted the way toward a more promising era in environmental stewardship," he said. "While there's a lot more work to be done, we have done our part to leave behind a cleaner and healthier and better world for those who follow us on this Earth."

It was be the second time Bush has used the law to protect marine resources. Two years ago, the president made a huge swath of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, barring fishing, oil and gas extraction and tourism from its waters and coral reefs. At the time, that area was the largest conservation area in the world. The three new areas are larger.

This is an astonishing contribution to conservation, and I urge readers to take a time out from throwing shoes at his picture to read the article about the biological and natural history wonders that Bush has preserved.

RLC

Bush Derangement Syndrome

No matter how old they get some people just never reach maturity. How childish, hateful, and mentally unstable do people have to be to derive pleasure from throwing shoes at a picture, or to be willing to take the time and trouble to set up such an event in the first place?

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Just War (II)

Yesterday I outlined some of the commonly accepted criteria of Just War theory. They included circumstances which must be satisfied before going to war (jus ad bellum) and principles that should govern how the war is actually fought (jus in bello). In any conflict it must be asked whether either party was justified in entering into the conflict, and if so, are they fighting it with due consideration to the requirements of Just War theory.

These are often difficult questions to answer, of course, because it's so hard to know what's going on both on the battlefield and behind the scenes in the offices of the leaders of the combatant parties. Even so, based on news reports we have of the current Israeli/Hamas conflict, I think the case can be made that, as far as we're able to tell, Israel is making a genuine effort to abide by the principles of Just War.

The first question which must be answered is whether the Israelis were justified in attacking Hamas. Did they have just cause?

Hamas has two objectives: To destroy Israel and to establish a hard-line Islamic state in its place. Since Israel left Gaza in 2005 Hamas has launched over 5000 rockets into Israeli cities and countryside killing dozens and terrorizing thousands. They've launched 3000 rockets in just the past year. Given these facts it certainly seems that Israel is acting in legitimate self-defense.

Meanwhile, as many observers have pointed out, Hamas is committing three distinct war crimes. They're deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, they're using their own civilians as human shields, and they seek the destruction of a member state of the United Nations.

The second question is whether the Israelis had just intention in entering into war. Their stated purpose is to remove the existential threat to their citizens which is a valid justification under Just War theory. Moreover the the war was declared by a legitimate authority - a freely elected government.

Next, is there a reasonable prospect of success? This is difficult to assess from this vantage, of course, but it certainly is the case that doing nothing would not have stopped the attacks. Israel will have been successful if it destroys Hamas' ability to make war, and if the world community is persuaded to take a more active role in monitoring the flow of weapons into Gaza.

Finally, is the Israeli offensive a last resort? Israel has been trying through negotiations since at least 2005, when they withdrew from Gaza and gave the territory to the Palestinians, to get them to stop their terror attacks. Nothing has worked. Not walls, not blockades, not talks. The most recent rocket barrage came as Israel was delivering relief supplies to Palestinians. When the border crossing was opened to allow the trucks into Gaza the Israelis cautioned Hamas that should they continue to attack Israel they would incur grave consequences. Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israeli targets anyway even as the trucks were delivering relief to the Palestinian people.

According to Reuters Israel reopened border crossings with the Gaza Strip on Friday, a day after Prime Minister Olmert warned militants there to stop firing rockets or they would pay a heavy price. Despite the movement of relief supplies, militants fired about a dozen rockets and mortar shafts from Gaza at Israel on Friday. One accidentally struck a house in Gaza, killing two Palestinian sisters, ages 5 and 13. Palestinian workers at the crossings said fuel had arrived for Gaza's main power plant and about a hundred trucks loaded with grain, humanitarian aid and other goods were expected during the day.

It's hard to imagine what more Israel could do that would placate Hamas, short of simply leaving the region like they left Gaza. Some have argued that the Israelis have established a naval blockade of the country which is causing hardship and that they should lift it, but the blockade was necessitated by the fact that Hamas was using shipping to import rockets and missiles with which to threaten Israel. To lift the blockade without having some way of supervising what flows into Gaza would be folly.

Few critics of Israel argue that they had no justification for initiating an attack on Hamas, but many have argued that the war does not meet the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality.

The principle of discrimination forbids doing intentional harm to civilians. Indeed, in my mind this principle calls into grave question the decision to carpet bomb German and Japanese cities in WWII. Those who think that Israel is recklessly killing civilians, however, just aren't thinking. Every dead civilian is a propaganda coup for Hamas. Why would the Israelis hand them such a gift if it could be avoided? The fact is what evidence we have shows that they're not recklessly killing civilians, and to get a sense of the lengths to which Israel is going to avoid civilian casualties consider this story from Strategy Page:

The Israelis have been using both leaflet drops and the phone system to avoid civilian casualties. For example, the bombing campaign after the initial attack was directed mostly at the thousands of rockets Hamas had stockpiled. Most of these were stored in civilian housing, a technique pioneered by Hezbollah in Lebanon. When a cache is found the Israelis will phone the home just before the attack and tell the civilians they have a few minutes to get out before the place is bombed. In at least one case, the civilians were defiant, and went to the roof, believing that the Israelis would not bomb with women and children in plain sight. In response, the Israeli fighter came in low and fired some 20mm cannon shells right next to the building. The panicked civilians fled the building and the place was then bombed shortly thereafter.

It's interesting to note that the Hamas tactic would not have worked against any but a moral attacking force. No one would have even thought to try it against the Russians in Chechnya or Afghanistan where civilians were slaughtered willy-nilly. Nor would such a tactic have been employed against their fellow Arabs who recognize no such distinction between civilians and combatants. The Hamas tactic of using women and children as human shields works only against a moral enemy who cares deeply about minimizing civilian casualties and Hamas knows it.

The most voluble complaints against the Israelis, however, have to do with what is claimed to be their disproportionate response to the provocation. A few dozen Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets, the reasoning goes, so an attack that takes the lives of hundreds is wildly disproportionate to the offense. This, however, misconstrues the principle of proportionality.

If the purpose of the principle were to establish a tit for tat retaliation protocol then Israel would be justified in killing one Palestinian civilian, and only one, for every Israeli civilian fatality. But this is absurd. Hamas would gladly sacrifice millions of civilian Palestinians if they could kill millions of Israelis.

Nor has proportionality ever been understood to be correlated with the deaths of combatants. It has to do with matching ends and means. Proportionality means that the steps taken to bring about a legitimate end must be the least destructive steps available which do not place one's own troops at significantly increased risk. It would have been disproportionate, for example, had U.S. troops leveled an entire neighborhood in Iraq in order to silence a single sniper.

If the terror attacks on Israel will not stop as long as Hamas controls Gaza then it's legitimate to degrade Hamas to the point where they can no longer cling to power, whether it takes the deaths of 100 Hamas fighters or 10,000. The deaths of Palestinian civilians are tragic, but as long as Israel has just cause to fight and is doing its best to honor the principle of discrimination, the ratio of dead Palestinian civilians to dead Israeli civilians is irrelevant to whether the war is being justly fought.

Many of the dead civilians, moreover, were killed because Hamas uses them as human shields. Nizar Rayan was a Hamas leader who sent his own son on a suicide bomb mission that killed two Israeli civilians and who had repeatedly swore to destroy Israel. Rayan was stockpiling weapons in his home, and the IDF called to warn the family to get out because they were going to destroy the weapons. Either the family (four wives and nine children) chose not to leave or Rayan wouldn't let them leave. In any event, they all died when the home was bombed. Given that Israel had a right to destroy the weapons, and urged the family to evacuate, who is responsible for the deaths of the innocent children?

In fact, Hamas has killed almost as many of their fellow Palestinians as the Israelis have. As of this writing some 40-80 Palestinian civilians have died from Israeli fire. Fearing that their rival political faction, Fatah, will use the chaos created by the war to topple Hamas, Hamas is killing or crippling whatever Fatah personnel they can find. So far, they've murdered about 35 and shot some 75 others in the legs. These civilian casualties are all no doubt attributed to Israeli aggression, but their deaths are the work of Hamas (See here for more on the murderous brutality of Hamas toward their own people).

Israel has adopted the Christian Just War standard in their fight against an enemy for whom there are no standards. It puts them at a serious disadvantage but one which they believe is worth assuming in order to avoid lapsing into the barbarism of their enemies. The shame is that so many in the West are so reluctant to give them the credit they deserve for trying to defend themselves in the most honorable way possible and are so quick to believe the worst reports about Israeli conduct in the war zone.

RLC

Sit Down and Shut Up, Comrade

According to this Human Events story Congressional Democrats, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, are trying to turn the U.S. into a one-party state by effectively making it impossible for Republicans to have any input on legislation before the House:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to re-write House rules today to ensure that the Republican minority is unable to have any influence on legislation. Pelosi's proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office.

Pelosi's rule changes -- which may be voted on today -- will reverse the fairness rules that were written around Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America."

After decades of Democrat control of the House of Representatives, gross abuses to the legislative process and several high-profile scandals contributed to an overwhelming Republican House Congressional landslide victory in 1994. Reforms to the House Rules as part of the Contract with America were designed to open up to public scrutiny what had become under this decades-long Democrat majority a dangerously secretive House legislative process. The Republican reform of the way the House did business included opening committee meetings to the public and media, making Congress actually subject to federal law, term limits for committee chairmen ending decades-long committee fiefdoms, truth in budgeting, elimination of the committee proxy vote, authorization of a House audit, specific requirements for blanket rules waivers, and guarantees to the then-Democrat minority party to offer amendments to pieces of legislation.

Pelosi's proposed repeal of decades-long House accountability reforms exposes a tyrannical Democrat leadership poised to assemble legislation in secret, then goose-step it through Congress by the elimination of debate and amendment procedures as part of America's governing legislative process.

And the Democrats used to complain that George Bush was a "divisive" president.

RLC

Uncle Jay Delivers the News

Uncle Jay, still in the Christmas spirit, recaps some of the major news stories of 2008:

Thanks to Jeanne for passing this along.

RLC

Just War (I)

Byron has suggested that it might be helpful to look at the current Israeli/Hamas conflict in terms of what philosophers and theologians call Just War theory. This is a fine suggestion so I'd like to devote a couple of posts to exploring what we know about the current conflict in the context of Just War thinking. First, though, some background.

From the time of Augustine (c.400 a.d.) many Christian philosophers and theologians have thought about the question of the demands and restrictions the Gospel imposes on the use of force. One result of that thinking has been a list of criteria that must be satisfied in any situation in which force, particularly military force, is contemplated. This is called jus ad bellum (justice in going to war). These criteria generally include the following:

1. Just cause. Examples of a just cause for the use of force include: Defense against an unjust invader; Protection of family, home, or other innocent victims from direct harm; Recovery of goods unjustly taken; Protection of constitutional rights and liberties from government encroachment; Defense of allies who have been unjustly attacked, etc.

2. Just intent. The purpose of the war must be to establish peace or to protect the innocent. Hatred, economic gain, or the exercise of power are all illicit reasons for using force against another.

3. Legitimate authority. The war must be declared/waged by a legitimate government authority. A war declared by a terrorist organization like al Qaeda is by definition unjust.

4. Reasonable prospect of success. Deliberately protracted wars or wars initiated with no reasonable hope of success are unjust.

5. Last resort. When it's clear that no measure short of the application of force will avail, or that an attack upon one's nation is imminent, war is justified provided the other criteria are met. This requirement is problematic in that it is always possible to imagine yet another set of peace talks, etc. that could be embarked upon and which would delay war indefinitely. Thus, governments have to exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether they have actually exhausted all practical options and have been left with no realistic alternative to war.

Just War theory also requires that wars not only be warranted by stringent criteria (jus ad bellum) but that when fought they be conducted according to certain guidelines (jus in bello: justice in war). The two chief criteria of jus in bello are:

1. Discrimination. Civilians should never be deliberately targeted. This follows from the Christian imperative to be compassionate and merciful. It entails that prisoners not be mistreated and that property and livelihoods not be unduly or unnecessarily damaged.

2. Proportionality. The means employed must be no more brutal or violent than what is necessary to secure victory. It would be unjust to slaughter defeated and retreating enemy soldiers if they no longer pose a threat. It would be a disproportionate response, and therefore unjust, to respond to a cross-border raid with nuclear weapons.

As is no doubt obvious, the heat and stress of war and incipient war may create a lot of gray areas for those seeking to hold to the criteria of Just War, and there's often much room for differences in interpretation. Nevertheless, those who wish to wage war justly will strive to hew as closely to these principles as the exigencies of war permit.

Tomorrow I'll try to explain why I think Israel is conducting itself quite in accord with the requirements of Just War theory. For now, though, I close by observing that whatever the case with the Israelis, it's certainly clear that Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their Iranian masters care nothing at all about these requirements, but then, of course, Islam has no just war tradition to speak of.

It is also the case that secularists who condemn Israel for the war in Gaza have absolutely no basis for so doing. The secularist must piggy-back on the Christian understanding of morality in order to make their condemnations, but that understanding rests on belief in God. If there is no God then howling about alleged Israeli transgressions against moral behavior is foolish nonsense. The secularist simply has no grounds whatsoever for condemning anyone or any nation. All they can do is insist that they don't like that Israel is killing Hamas fighters and destroying buildings.

RLC

Giving Peace a Chance

A recent Rasmussen poll shows that:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of Republicans back Israel's decision to take military action against the Palestinians, but only half as many Democrats (31%) agree. A majority of Democrats (55%) say Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution first, a view shared by just 27% of Republicans.

This is hard for me to understand. What do the people who think that Israel should have tried "a diplomatic solution first" think has been going on in that region for the last thirty years? How much effort must be expended in seeking a diplomatic solution while a nation's citizens are being daily terrorized by rocket attacks before the nation is justified in resorting to military measures to stop the terror?

It would have been helpful, I think, if Rasmussen had asked it's respondents to explain who Hamas is and where Gaza is. The answers the pollsters got to those questions might go a long way to explaining that 55%.

RLC

The Test of Loyalty

Think what you will about George W. Bush's policies, he has, in my view, set a standard for character that every president will henceforth be measured against. Despite being the object of continuous and reprehensible insults President Bush never once responded publicly in kind to any of his detractors. He has never shown the slightest animosity or desire to retaliate against his political foes. He ran a decorous White House which, despite the best efforts of his opponents to uncover some scandal, never really got embroiled in anything that in a less crassly partisan era would be thought to be trivial.

Notwithstanding enormous pressure to cave on Iraq, Bush refused to yield to the temptation to try to salvage his popularity and cast about instead, like Lincoln, for a general that would win the war for him, and he found one. He performed many acts of compassion both at home and abroad, especially in Africa, to little fanfare because he didn't want to be seen as exploiting the suffering of others for his own political aggrandizement. Unlike his predecessor's staff, which trashed the White House upon leaving it, the Bush/Obama transition has been handled, like everything the Bushes did, with class and courtesy. He always, as far as I could tell, did what he thought was right and not what was politically expedient, even though he would invariably get pummelled for it in the press.

He's a good man who is nearly universally loved by those who worked for him and who knew him best. Byron York at National Review writes a piece about just this affection and loyalty that almost everyone feels for him. It's a remarkable thing, maybe the crucial test of a man's character, and it speaks louder than any carping left-wing blog or sour New York Times editorial ever could of the man's inherent integrity and strength.

One reason so many hate him, perhaps, is that lesser people are often driven to rage when their own flaws are illumined by the light of a better person's virtue. Their weaknesses and paltriness are indicted by the superior man's opposite qualities, and their jealousy at having the dark places of their souls exposed by the comparison throws them into fits of irrational hostility. They're not infrequently overcome by an irresistible urge to deride and scorn the man in whose presence they themselves seem so puny and base.

George W. Bush didn't always make me happy, but I admire and respect the standard he set as an American and as a man. I hope Barack Obama follows his example.

RLC

Growth and Prosperity

A week or so ago I recommended a series of short lessons on economics by Chris Martenson. I was listening to one of them the other day in which Martenson said something I wish every township supervisor and county commissioner would take to heart: Growth does not equal prosperity. He was talking about economic growth, but what he said got me to thinking about the belief that land "development" is good for the economic well-being of a region.

I could never understand the argument that erecting more housing developments, more shopping malls, more apartment complexes, etc. makes a community more prosperous. In fact, I never could see how it doesn't have exactly the opposite effect. The more people who crowd into an area the more services - police, fire, schools, highway maintenance, etc. - that are needed to support them. This not only requires higher taxes, but it also results in an inevitable erosion of the quality of life that comes with more traffic, more crime, and fewer open spaces.

The rejoinder is, of course, that the more businesses there are in an area the more jobs it creates for the residents, but how is this so? If job opportunities increase, the expanded opportunities will simply draw people looking for work who will move in from elsewhere to fill the openings, and that just results in a demand for even more housing, more traffic, more services, higher taxes, etc. Yes, we are told, but with more people in an an area the businesses do better, but if a business profits it isn't long before more of the same type of businesses start up and the profit just gets distributed over more competitors.

Growth is often a wash, a treadmill. Whatever advantages accrue from having more people living and working more closely together are cancelled out by the higher costs they impose. The more growth there is in an area the more there is of everything else that diminishes those qualities which made a community a great place to live in the first place. This is, in my opinion, true of the county in which I live, York Co. in Pennsylvania, and I suspect it's true everywhere. Some people have benefited from the development of York Co. over the last thirty years, to be sure, but I don't see how the county as a whole is a better place to live today than it was, say, in 1970.

RLC

Ground War

DEBKAfile outlines Hamas' strategy against an Israeli ground invasion and occupation of Gaza. They hope to wear the Israelis down by inflicting steadily mounting casualties until Israel can no longer muster the political support to maintain its occupation and are forced to withdraw. Read how they hope to accomplish this at the link.

Israeli sources claim that Hamas' apparent eagerness to engage an Israeli ground assault is bluster intended to boost morale and that, in fact, Palestinian forces are scared and ill-prepared to face a modern armored attack.

The Times Online is reporting that the ground invasion is expected tonight.

There's lots of interesting information on this conflict at all of the above links.

RLC

Pre-emption

Hamas militants are videotaped loading rockets onto a truck to transfer them to launch sites where they would be used in an attempt to kill Israeli women and children. Fortunately for the intended victims, but unfortunately for these particular terrorists, the taping was being done by a missile-armed UAV. Things end badly for the terrorists.

RLC

Protest Roundup

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has a roundup of many of the protest demonstrations launched in the wake of the Israeli attacks on the terrorists in Gaza. It's disturbing to see how much irrational antipathy there is among American Muslims and left-wing anti-war people for Christians, Jews, and America in general, and these were demonstrations held in American cities. Evidently (read some of the comments at the link), it's far worse in Europe where Arab populations are greater and anti-semitic hatreds are once again becoming fashionable.

What is particularly disturbing is the prevalence of the view that it's a shame, essentially, that one person keeps shooting bullets into his neighbor's house, but that if his neighbor, frustrated that no one makes the shooter stop, chooses finally to fight back, he's guilty of an atrocity.

Given the failure of the rest of the world to do anything effective to stop Hamas from terrorizing Israelis, and given Hamas' obvious goal of killing as many Israelis as they can until they have destroyed the Jewish nation, Israel has no recourse but to destroy Hamas or to commit national suicide. Much of the rest of the world, apparently, wishes they would opt for suicide, and they despise Israel for not going along.

RLC

The Difference Between Them

Hamas has, according to some reports, prevented many Palestinians in Gaza from fleeing to Egypt for medical care, but the hospitals in Gaza are already overfull from the Israeli bombing, so where are injured and sick Palestinians going for care? Israel. One wonders how many Israelis would ever be treated in a Palestinian hospital.

RLC