International law redux

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I wrote this post on international law back in 2006. I think it’s time for a re-post (slightly edited). And please note the 2006 event that sparked the post. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]

The International Red Cross has said that Israel’s response in Lebanon violates the “proportionality” principle of the Geneva Conventions (see this for my views on proportionality). The group has also issued the following statement about the terrorist group Hezbollah:

Hezbollah fighters too are bound by the rules of international humanitarian law, and they must not target civilian areas.

I’m sorry, but what’s the International Red Cross been smoking?

Earth to International Red Cross: Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. They exist to target civilians.

Furthermore, there’s a general principle involved, one that should be readily apparent to anyone with a modicum of sense:

To be “bound” by a certain law, one (or both) of two things need to be true: (1) the “bound” entity has to agree to the authority of those administering the law; (2) the authority has to have the power of enforcement over that entity.

The International Red Cross has neither over Hezbollah at this point. The only way it would get that power–and it could never obtain #1, only #2–is by a military defeat of Hezbollah, a capture of its leaders, and the act of subsequently bringing them before an international tribunal.

And, of course, to defeat Hezbollah would require a response the International Red Cross already has already condemned as violating the principles of proportionality, since Hezbollah is well aware of the value of hiding behind civilians, and does so purposely and frequently. So, how in heaven’s name would any international court ever get authority over Hezbollah, except to try them in absentia? And a fat lot of good that would do, except as meaningless theater.

The remark by the International Red Cross about Hezbollah being “bound” by the Conventions made me think of a popular comeback when I was a kid. When someone would say, I’m gonna make you do it, the usual retort was Oh yeah? You and what army?

Somehow I think that’s exactly what Hezbollah would say.

Germany reduces penalties for child porn possession

The New Neo Posted on by

Not a good sign. Germany has downgraded possession of child porn to a misdemeanor:

German lawmakers justified their action by arguing that decriminalization gave “necessary flexibility” to deal with the “large proportion of juvenile offenders,” and would also protect parents and teachers who discover child porn on the devices of young people and pass them on to the relevant authorities.

There are ways to make exceptions for those things, without downgrading possession as a whole. Young people sharing naked pictures of each other with other young people is a different thing than adult consumption of child porn, and can be treated differently. But that’s not what happened in Germany. And of course, the pro-pedophilia groups are very encouraged by this, as well they should be.

Children are children, and limits must always be placed on the adult use of children for sex. Children cannot give such consent, period. I have written about this many times before.

From the article:

According to this corrupted way of thinking, nothing more than consent is required for a sexual relationship to have legitimacy. The logic goes like this: Because minors are autonomous persons with human rights, any restriction on activities to which they consent is unjust.

Child porn is child exploitation, and while its makers are obviously exploiting children, its makers also depend on child porn consumers to make their money. What of child porn that involves cartoons – in other words, no living children were harmed in making it? Not as clear-cut. But that’s not what this law is about.

The article points out that one of the goals is to undermine the family and parental authority. True; we’ve seen that in so many ways.

This is depraved and Orwellian:

“The taboo of pedophilia must finally be broken at all levels of society,” Gieseking [an offender and pedophile activist] once said. “If a pedophile can come out without fear of exclusion or even demonization, then this is the best prevention against child abuse.”

Rewarding the terrorists: Why do many people believe in the 2-state solution at this point, and want to reward Hamas with a state?

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many answers: leftism, Jew-hatred, neo-Marxism, ignorance of history, and plenty more.

But in this post I want to focus on one part of the answer, which can be summed up in this way: the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Like the Gorgon, the actual face of evil and a situation so stark is a difficult thing to look at directly and contemplate deeply. The Go-Pro videos, the statements about wanting to kill Jews and commit the atrocities of October 7 over and over, the jihadi desire to take over the world, the tremendous brutality, and the approval of much of the Palestinian population for such barbaric violence not only is acutely painful to observe, but all the possible solutions are awful.

Much better to believe that we all want peace and that there is some sort of negotiated solution possible without so much violence. But it is crystal clear that it is a fantasy, even if it wasn’t quite as clear many decades ago.

This is the cold-eyed face of evil:

The 47-year-old Hamas terrorist Jamal Radi, accompanied by his 18-year-old son Abdallah, confessed to raping and killing several women as they wreaked havoc through the southern Israeli Kibbutz of Nir Oz, video footage of the Israeli interrogation obtained by the UK newspaper Daily Mail shows.

Jamal, the father of seven captured by the IDF inside Gaza, showed no remorse during the interrogation. “She was screaming, she was crying, I did what I did, I raped her,” he told Israeli interrogators, confessing to one of many rapes and murders he committed on October 7 with the help of his son and other Hamas attackers. …

These crimes committed by Hamas, much like those previously by the Islamic State, were in accordance with the doctrine of jihad warfare. Mass rape, beheadings, mutilation of corpses, and taking of hostages on October 7 were part of Hamas’s meticulously planned attack. Hamas ordered the terrorist intruders to ‘kill, behead, rape,’ a captured attacker told Israeli interrogators in late October.

The disturbing confessions come to light a day after a new video surfaced showing Hamas terrorists kidnapping five Israeli soldiers on October 7. The footage shows captured women with their faces smeared with blood and terrorists boasting of raping them once in Gaza. The clip also shows armed Hamas terrorists offering Islamic prayers with the female captives tied up behind them.

The Daily Mail article calls this father-son pair “evil,” and they certainly are that. But they are not isolated sociopaths like Ariel Castro (remember him, the Ohio man who kidnapped teenagers and kept them as his tortured sexual slaves for many years?). They may indeed be sociopaths or psychopaths (the difference has never been totally clear to me), but they are certainly not isolated. Their violence has been carefully nurtured by a government and a society that encourages and rewards it. They are adherents of a branch of Islam that allows this for infidel women; thus, the Islamic prayers.

And there are very many people like them in Palestinian society. This is a huge problem, and 2 states will not solve it. The Palestinians plan to use their state to destroy Israel, and any government that recognizes that state is rewarding this sort of rape, torture, and murder – even as they mouth words of “peace.”

For example, we have the governments of Norway, Spain, and Ireland:

Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris told a Wednesday news conference in Dublin: “Today, Ireland, Norway and Spain are announcing that we recognize the state of Palestine. Each of us will now undertake whatever national steps are necessary to give effect to that decision.”

“There is never a wrong time to do the right thing,” Harris later said, speaking to CNN’s Christiana Amanpour on Thursday.

In what universe is this “the right thing?” In the universe of what Ayn Rand referred to as “altruism,” which can be loosely summarized by the old Jewish saying: “He who is compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate.”

The people in this video are part of the Ayn Rand Center, and they discuss the Objectivist approach. I don’t always agree with Rand, but I certainly agree with these excerpts – and they don’t pull their punches. I’ve cued up a 14-minute segment and a 4-minute one (again, if you’re impatient, you can speed the video up by going to “settings”):

Three more bodies rescued from the ghouls of Gaza

The New Neo Posted on by

With the assistance of Shin Bet, the IDF has found the bodies of three more October 7 victims and brought them back to Israel. They’ve been dead all that time, a situation I discussed previously in this post titled “The ghouls of Gaza.”

The three people whose bodies were most recently found are Hanan Yablonka (aged 42), Michel Nisenbaum (aged 59), and Orion Hernandez (aged 32):

Yablonka and Radoux were kidnapped from the Nova music festival. Nisenbaum, a resident of the southern Israeli town of Sderot, fell into the hands of Hamas as he was out to save his 4-year-old granddaughter during the terrorist attack. Her granddaughter, protected by her father, miraculously survived the attack.

The Hamas terrorists murdered all three them on Israeli soil and took their bodies to Gaza, news reports suggest.

Orion Hernandez was the boyfriend of Shani Louk, the woman whose dead and broken body was paraded to jeering, spitting crowds in Gaza.

RIP.

I strongly suspect the location of the bodies was obtained through the interrogation of captured terrorists.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat that, although I think a great many hostages are dead (and many were from the start, October 7), I think a certain number (probably under 50) are still alive. Most of them are probably young women being kept as both bargaining chips and sex slaves.

May they be rescued soon. Alive.

Bill Maher’s abysmal ignorance about J6

The New Neo Posted on by

I highlight this not because of Maher, who doesn’t especially interest me. I think the clip is worth watching because of what it says about the way we get information and form our opinions these days. Maher isn’t exactly on the left, although he’s a Democrat and he repeats all sorts of Democrat talking points. But now and then he says sensible things, and he tends to be very much against “wokeness” and is also a free speech advocate. He’s been speaking on political and newsworthy events in the world for umpteen years, and has a relatively large number of viewers.

So you might think he’d know the basic facts of the biggest events of the past few years. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. In this clip he’s stupendously ignorant, and although perhaps he’s lying and really does know the truth, my gut feeling is that he’s more fool than knave about this although he partakes of both.

This is what I’m talking about. It’s very short:

Note how arrogantly Maher assumes he’s right and Kelly is wrong; his voice drips with sarcasm and condescension, and he gives that little laughing snort. Then when he realizes that she actually may know more than he does about what happened – at least she knows Officer Sicknick’s name, for example – Maher acts as though it’s of no import that he thought police were killed that day and that actually they were not. He pivots to the fact that they were attacked rather than killed, as though those two things are the same.

Again, one might think that a person might show a bit of surprise at having a long-held assumption – an important one on which that person had based some of his belief that J6 was an insurrection by a highly dangerous group of people – demolished. But Maher doesn’t miss a beat. His moving of the goalposts is seamless and doesn’t give him a moment’s pause.

And this isn’t just Bill Maher. This is so many people: their knowledge is shallow, but pointing out errors doesn’t change their belief system, which has been constructed on a huge edifice of such errors.

A mind is indeed a difficult thing to change.

The Bronx ♥ Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Some people there do, anyway. There was an overflow crowd for Trump’s rally yesterday:

Former President Donald Trump promised Thursday evening to “make New York City great again” during a raucous rally in the South Bronx, his first major campaign event in the state of his birth since 2016.

“This is some turnout,” Trump told a rowdy crowd in Crotona Park. “We have thousands of people outside the gate.”

The event was permitted to host up to 3,500 people, but thousands more gathered outside security checkpoints in the 127.5-acre public park in the hope of catching a glimpse of the 45th president or a sample of his remarks.

“Make New York City great again” – and Trump remembers the days when it was indeed pretty great.

You can’t argue with this:

“Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of our country,” the former president added later in his remarks. “He has no sense — doesn’t know what he’s doing, is grossly incompetent.”

The crowd looks pretty diverse, too.

Look, I don’t think Trump has a chance of taking New York. But it’s nice to dream. And where does Trump get his energy? The contrast with Biden is phenomenal.

The triumph of DEI at UCLA medical school

The New Neo Posted on by

Everything falls before the almighty DEI deity. It’s more important that doctors fit the proper woke demographics than that they be competent, although I don’t think the public was consulted on the question:

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Sounds good. But that’s the median. This is the reality:

In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.

[Since the advent in 2020 of Dean of Admissions Jennifer Lucero] Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”

This story is based on written correspondence between UCLA officials, internal data on student performance, and interviews with eight professors at the medical school—six of whom have worked with or under Lucero on medical student and residency admissions.

I find over and over that year 2020 keeps coming up in terms of the explosion of DEI domination in so many institutions, universities prominent among them, although the trend had been going on already for many years, of course.

In the article, Lucero is quoted as saying, during the admissions process involving a black female candidate whose grades were substandard: “Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” and that therefore “we need people like this in the medical school.”

That sort of thinking reduces everything to group identity. If black women’s health is particularly compromised, what they really need i is a black woman doctor even if she’s inferior as a doctor. Everything is race and sex and groups, and meritocracy is a bad word. However, I bet if Lucero did a survey of black women and asked them which they’d prefer, the best doctor or a doctor that might not be so good but who would match them in race and sex, they’d answer they wanted the best doctor.

What’s more, are black women dying at a higher rate than everyone else? Of course not. See Figure 2, the chart there on death rates , race, and sex, and you immediately see that the death rate for black males is the highest. I’m going to assume that violent death is a big part of that. Black females have death rates that are significantly lower, and in fact their rates of death are lower than that of white males. Hmmm; I doubt Lucero will be advocating for more white males in medical school as a result.

And then there’s this:

Portland, Oregon has had enough of its Soros-backed DA

The New Neo Posted on by

Good news – Portland, Oregon has decided anarchy isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, even for leftists:

“It’s official: Portland got the Schmidt kicked out of it!” Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo wrote. “Soros-funded [Schmidt] has finally conceded after the surge of last-minute ballots failed to help him overcome his gap against centrist challenger Nathan Vasquez. Antifa now have a new target.”

Prosecutor Nathan Vasquez defeated Schmidt — a progressive DA who took office amid the George Floyd protests and whose campaign has received contributions from groups linked to liberal billionaire George Soros — by a margin of 55.7% to 43.8%, according to the National Review. It is a major victory in one of the most dependably blue regions in the country.

Vasquez plans on stopping “open air drug dealing and drug use while helping connect individuals to treatment,” he told Fox News Digital in a statement after beating Schmidt, his former boss. …

As part of his campaign pitch, Vasquez argued that Schmidt neglected to enforce the law and prosecute criminals.

Oops, just a little oversight. Actually, of course, it was deliberate.

I hope this sort of thing spreads to voters in other cities who previously had been taken in by Soros-backed DAs. I wish it would also translate to an awakening about the wisdom of voting left versus right in general, but I somehow doubt it.

Good news from Nigeria: Bring back our girls

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember ten years ago when Boko Haram kidnapped many girls from a school in Nigeria? It was disturbing front-page news everywhere. Michelle Obama got into the act with a “Bring back our girls” campaign online.

Well, a couple of days ago we got some very good news related to all of this, but not many news outlets even reported it. I don’t see anything from Michelle Obama, either (I checked her “X” page). I guess over the years much of the virtue-signaling world has stopped caring about “our” girls.

They haven’t been forgotten in Nigeria, though; take a look [emphasis mine]:

Hundreds of hostages, mostly children and women, who were held captive for months or years by Boko Haram extremists in northeastern Nigeria have been rescued from a forest enclave and handed over to authorities, the army said.

The 350 hostages had been held in the Sambisa Forest, a hideout for the extremist group which launched an insurgency in 2009, Maj. Gen. Ken Chigbu, a senior Nigerian army officer, said late Monday while presenting them to authorities in Borno, where the forest is.

The 209 children, 135 women and six men appeared exhausted in their worn-out clothes. Some of the girls had babies believed to have been born from forced marriages, as is often the case with female victims who are either raped or forced to marry the militants while in captivity.

Note the use of the word “extremists” rather than “terrorists.” And I don’t know why the word “either” is in there; in such cases, marriage is rape.

More:

The army said the hostages were rescued during a dayslong military operation in Sambisa Forest, which was once a bustling forest reserve that stretches along the border with Cameroon and Niger, but now serves as an enclave from where Boko Haram and its breakaway factions carry out attacks that also target people and security forces in neighboring countries.

Some extremists were killed during the rescue operation and their makeshift houses were destroyed, the army said.

So the hostages were apparently being guarded and there was some sort of battle.

Finally the article gets around to explaining the Muslim jihadi origins of the group:

Boko Haram, Nigeria’s homegrown jihadi rebels, launched its insurgency in 2009 to establish Islamic Shariah law in the country. At least 35,000 people have been killed and 2.1 million people displaced as a result of the extremist violence, according to U.N. agencies in Nigeria.

The US campuses seem notably silent on the matter. They’re too busy championing other jihadi terrorists kidnapping and raping and killing other young women.

Here’s a reference to the kidnapped group that sparked the “Bring back our girls” campaign [emphasis mine]:

The majority of those rescued were women and children, many of whom had been abducted a decade ago.

Acting General Officer Commanding … Haruna revealed that the rescue operation was part of a 10-day endeavor named ‘Operation Desert Sanity 111’, aimed at eliminating terrorist remnants from Sambisa forest while offering surrender opportunities to willing insurgents.

… [In] the infamous Chibok schoolgirls abduction in 2014 … approximately 276 girls were forcefully taken from their school dormitory.

While some managed to escape captivity, others were rescued by troops during clearance operations, with the latest rescue occurring in April 2024.

Despite these efforts, approximately 90 of the Chibok girls remain unaccounted for, raising hopes that some may be among those recently rescued from Sambisa forest.

Let us hope so. This is really good news, in a time when we haven’t gotten too much of it, especially about raped and kidnapped woman taken into sexual slavery by jihadis.

Note also that the articles don’t mention the word “Christian,” but in the case of the Chibok kidnapping (and probably the others, as well, although I’m not 100% sure of that) the targeted girls were Christian. More:

Boko Haram has used the [Chibok] girls as negotiating pawns in prisoner exchanges, offering to release some girls in exchange for some of their captured commanders in jail.

Sound familiar?

The girls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014 are only a small percentage of the total number of people abducted by Boko Haram. Amnesty International estimated in 2015 that at least 2,000 women and girls had been abducted by the group since 2014, many of whom had been forced into sexual slavery.

Nigeria is a country that’s about half Muslim and half Christian, and in much of the country there isn’t much tension between the two groups. But in the north – which is predominantly Muslim – Boko Haram is very active and has wreaked havoc, especially with the Christian population in that area.