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