On the other hand, it’s not like Yassin was the leader of just another Palestinian group. These are hardcore killers, responsible for most of the worst suicide bombings. It could be argued that killing Yassin may produce some violence in the short run—which is going to occur in any case; these people weren’t holding bake sales—but in the long run it could prevent violence.
Israel has a right to go after mass murderers. It has a right of self-defense. I would say it’s the equivalent of the US killing Osama in a cave. He’s not pulling the trigger but he’s getting others to do his dirty work. Putting him in jail may only incite more attacks. Putting him in the ground may be the only way to prevent that.
Besides, why is the onus always on Israel? If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace and a Palestinian state. If Israel puts down its weapons, there will be no Israel. Does anyone doubt that?
Not only would putting a man like Sheikh Yassin in jail only incite more attacks, he becomes their reason and justification. The Israelis had jailed the guy several times before, only to have to release him in prisoner swaps (i.e., kidnappings) and in “goodwill gestures” for “peace talks.” As they say in Texas ... he needed killin’
The question is whether Israel is engaged in a law enforcement action or a war of self-defense. In the same way, John Kerry wants us to arrest and try al Quaeda terrorists rather than fight them where they are.
Was America wrong to launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator UAV at a car in Yemen carrying members of al Quaeda?
If this is a war on terror, then such actions are not out of bounds.
I agree with what Duncan Maxwell Andersons says at HMS Blog:
Here’s what Joaquin Navarro-Valls of the Vatican press office had to say yesterday (puzzlingly, to me) after Israeli rockets sent the founder and head of Hamas to his reward:
“The Holy See joins the international community to reprove this act of violence that cannot be justified in any state of law.”
No doubt the act can’t be justified in any state of law.
But it seems to me that Hamas and Israel are not in a state of law; they are in a state of war, one of Hamas’s choosing. Yassin arranged the killing of hundreds of people, most of them civilians, and promised to do more of the same. He was a combatant devoted to the destruction of Israel, which is a lawful authority, and to the slaughter of its inhabitants, including non-combatants. He even proclaimed publicly that he was a combatant against Israel’s government.
Of course, now, he’s not. (Law could now be applied to him safely.)
Was it wrong that this combatant was dispatched by ambush? For example, St. Thomas says that deception, even in war, can be sinful—such as making a false truce with an enemy. But there was certainly no truce in this case. In the Summa, iia iiae, q40, St. Thomas affirms clearly that ambushes are a lawful part of a just war, since nothing obliges a soldier to reveal his strategy to his enemy. (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/304003.htm)
Considering the stakes imposed by Hamas’s terror campaign, I don’t see that Israel has any choice.
Yeah, because these Hamas guys might start using kids to smuggle bombs through Israeli checkpoints and strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up on school buses ... Oh wait ...
Might there be an uptick in violence in the short term? Yes. Is this action likely to prevent violence in the long term? Maybe.
Well, I was hoping my original question would spark this debate…
Part of the problem is that Israel has not always been blameless. They share in being violent and threatening over the years. Does the end justify the means? Yes in the early days the non-Jews in Palestine (BTW, they only came to be known as “Palestinians” in this centruy) had the entire goal of “pushing the Jews into the sea” and it’s my opinion that the Jewish fight is still one of survival.
But, I’m still not convinced that survival means you get a free pass to assasinate. Or do their own bombing.
Then again, does Yassin not set himself as military in this fight and thus as a legit target of war? But again, does this legitimize assasination? Why not capture? Why not a trial? Why not justly executing? Would it really prove more costly to Israeli lives to give him a swift and quick trial/execution?
ahh, if only Abraham would have relied on the Lord to send him a son…
Are you saying that you should never try to kill the opposing general in a war? But it is okay to kill his soldiers? Would it have been wrong to assassinate Hitler in 1942? It seems to me that you could shorten a war and prevent more death if you killed the guys running it.
You know, I’d be more inclined to listen to all this moralizing about Israel’s bad acts if I heard even one tiny bit of the same condemnations every time there’s a suicide bombing. How many press releases get issued from the European capitals condemning the Palestinian Authority or Hamas when an Israeli bus blows up or a restaurant or disco is destroyed? But when evil old man (his wheelchair didn’t seem to slow him down any) is killed in a surgical strike, the condemnations fly.
“beyond the requirements for putting the combatants out of the conflict”
Sheikh Yassin declared himself and his group at war with Israel. He was tried and imprisoned once before only to become the rallying point for more terrorism. Thus his death was required. And please, don’t give me any nonsense about less lethal means. Once war is joined, not every act has to pass that test. We were not required to try to arrest and try every Hans and Fritz in the Wehrmacht before firing on their unit. If the Israelis cared only about killing Palestinian leaders with no regard for civilians, Arafat would have been a puddle under a rock years ago.
Oh, and “war on terrorism” is only a novel sophistry if “terrorism” be a novel sophistry. Bali, Madrid, 9/11 and the daily risk of getting on a bus in Israel are not novel sophistries.
“... lying, perjury, bad faith, treachery, as well as the direct slaughter of the innocent, wanton destruction, and the lawless pillage and outrage of cruder times, are, as far as the worst of them go, A THING OF THE PAST AMONG CIVILIZED NATIONS.”
“Yassin could have been arrested (as he was before) quite easily, and put out of the conflict.”
And Al, *as has been pointed out to you,* being tried didn’t put Yassin out of a conflict. He was just ransomed.
And of course in Al-logic, the fact it had happened before and it didn’t put him out of the conflict is not proof that trials are unsuccessful, no ... it’s proof that they’re possible and thus always show the immorality of force (on one side only, of course). At some point in life, you decide from induction that you’ve tried and failed and move onto another option.
So, if they don’t have capital punishment why can they assasinate him?
Dom-we didn’t assassinate Hitler and we didn’t assassinate Saddam Hussein, who was as near as Public Enemy #1 as Yassin is to Israel.
But I will agree with you that Israel gets the short end of the stick in a serious way when it comes to news stories. I’m still trying to figure out why there is such huge support for a group of people (Palestinians-who are really a conglomeration of a variety of Arab nations) whose main goal has been to wipe out another nation-and this other nation (Israel) simply wants to live with them, as an independant state.
Don’t think for one second we wouldn’t have assassinated Hitler had it been within our means. But given the technology of the 1940s (the inaccuracy of gravity bombs, the primitiveness of radar and the slowness of pre-jet aircraft), a Yassin-like operation was simply impossible. Assassination could only have been done by a turncoat in Hitler’s inner circle (and there *were* attempts, but by good Germans trying to save their country, not help ours).
As for why we didn’t try to assassinate Saddam: very likely because it couldn’t be done without leaving a paper trail and/or our fingerprints. The Clinton administration (a team of lawyers trained to think in legalisms), which ran US foreign policy for most of the time between the two Iraq wars, felt constrained by some Vietnam Syndrome restrictions on US agencies. We know Saddam tried to assassinate Bush the Elder.
Why the double standard in the Middle East? I’d say an existential decision that the Palestinian Arabs are in the right and ther Israelis in the wrong, facilitated by the weakening of post-Holocaust taboos ... a constraint that will only get weaker as the Holocaust generation continues to die off. Like all existential decisions, it is beyond reason because it filters and categorizes the information received.
To pick an example from another issue, when Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe” of the “vs. Wade” Roes) was pro-abortion, she was a hero to the pro-choice groups, the Rosa Parks of abortion. When she had her religious conversion and became pro-life, those groups said “this was an issue about all women’s right to choose, not a single woman’s. Plus she is free not to exercise it,” and there also came behind-the-back mutterings of “traitor,” wondering how much she was bought off for, and the usual conspiratorial machinations.
That kinda displaces your question: “why the existential decision?” Here’s my hypotheses.
On the left, (1) Because they see the Middle East through the lens of “colonialism” and “imperialism,” with Israel as the colonizing Western society oppressing a “backward” “people of color”; (2) Because in the West, Jews have been long among us and Muslims have been “Other,” and thus they must be the misunderstood ones; (3) Because Israel is the stronger party and the left not only has a strong pacifist/peacenik streak, but generally seems to believe not only that “might doesn’t make right” but that “might makes wrong”; (4) Because Israeli success in building a modern society from nothing in 40 years and leaving the non-oil Arabs in the dust is a rebuke to their dependencia understanding (sic) of economics and dredges up the old alliance between left-wing anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism; (5) Because, and I do mean this seriously, of a perverse “anti” quality—whatever the dominant culture celebrates and whoever the US considers an ally must on that basis be opposed.
On the right, support for Israel is generally much greater for the mirror-image of those five reasons. But some residue of old right-wing anti-Semitism remains of course (from the 19th century to WW2, anti-Semitism was more a province of the right than the left) and that probably accounts for some conservative animus for Israel.
“Riiiiight. Holding someone and then giving them over to ransom for assassins is ‘trying’ incarceration as a means to keep someone out of the conflict.”
Who Israel ransomed Yassin for the first time around is neither here nor there. Do you really think Hamas would not resort to kidnappings or hostage-taking of civilians or even soldiers on patrol inside pre-1967 Israel to trade Yassin out of jail? Learn your history. That is the oldest terrorist tactic in the book (far older than suicide bombing), and it is something Israel has been forced into repeatedly as democracies are wont, sometimes even just for the remains of dead Israelis.
“The thread here, that you keep missing, is that Israel has to give up assassinations.”
Attacking a war enemy’s leadership is not “assassination” unless it be the case that all attacks on enemy units are “assassination.”
We actually tried to assassinate Saddam. That’s what all those first night of the war strikes war and that big bomb on the restuarant we thought he was meeting his top lieutenants in. Now, as you say we didn’t try to assassinate him before the war. That’s because we were under a cease fire agreement. However, Israel is at war with Hamas.
The closest analog is the Barbary pirates of the early 19th century, the terrorists of their day. We didn’t try to arrest them. We declared war on them and wiped them out. No one hears much about pirates on the Barbary Coast these days.
“I don’t think that’s true in the case of the criminal Yassin.”
That the nub of the issue. I don’t think of Yassin as a criminal, but as an enemy general. He was the head of a quasi-state organization that plans what it and the PA call “military operations” against Israel, calls for its destruction and for the death of all Jews everywhere. That’s war, not crime. Al Capone just wanted to enjoy his alcohol profits. Scott Peterson just wanted to dump his wife and marry his girlfriend. Neither is fundamentally at war with society as such.
As for your other points, Patrick:
1) If “assassinate” means try to kill enemy leaders during war, we *did* try to assassinate Saddam twice during the war, the opening night raid and the attack on the restaurant compound. But on Dec. 13, the war is over, Saddam was not in control of a sovereign state or any similar apparatus, and he was in hiding in territory he did not effectively control. Therefore, he’s something closer to a criminal than a war leader, and yes, you try to take someone like that alive. But it matters that he was alone and offering no resistance at the time, else he would have been just as legitimate an “assassination” target as Uday and Qusai or as Charles Whitman.
2) Israel was neither the sovereign nor in effective control of the ground situation around Sheikh Yassin. He was surrounded by multiple, armed human shields. To have tried to capture him alive would have required a very risky, bloodier on both sides, commando-type raid. Such raids are also much less likely to be successful.
3) The risk of capturing Yassin (quite apaprt from the greater danger to your own soldiers executing the operation) is that when you capture and jail a terrorist leader or even terrorist footsoldiers, a common result with multiple precedents and not just in this conflict is that the terrorist’s comrades engage in hostage taking and either kill civilians or force you to release him.
How is “assassination” different from “killing” (in Romance languages, they’re generally the same word)?
Where in the Catholic Encyclopedia or the Summa are age, physical health or location cited as relevant moral characteristics for determining the licitness of a target over and above that person’s SELF-DECLARED STATUS (“we are at war with Israel and I lead our group”)?
Once war is declared, self-declared soldiers are always legitimate targets. Nothing in the Catholic Encyclopedia or the Summa says otherwise.
I don’t see what Yassin’s wheelchair has to do with anything. And by Al’s logic, surgical strikes on rear-area headquarters are out of bounds. I don’t understand why.
Look, if Israel had sent a battalion of soldiers into Gaza to arrest Yassin, is anyone naive enough to believe that there would have been fewer casualties? I think not.
Al, quit talking as though Sheikh Yassin’s health is in any way relevant to his status as a combatant. He is a commander and leader.
“Ambush in ongoing combat is a different matter.”
Bzzzzt ... wrong answer. That’s EXACTLY what this is. Hamas has declared the battle to be a perpetual war against all Israelis at all times, an existential war to the finish—“perpetual war” in your phrase. It is merely reaping what it sowed.
Further you cannot cite the Catholic Encyclopedia as noting that assassination is wrong as some absolute moral principle here. What it says “in black and white above” is that “assassination ... have met with common condemnation, thus closing the loophole of obscurity in the natural law.” In other words, it’s contrary to common behavior and norms. But that’s not an absolute principle in itself, it’s a mutable practice dependent on the customs of the nations.
At a minimum it seems licit against a group that declares itself as engaged in an existential war of populations in which all people at all times are legitimate targets.
The “battle” here is Hamas’ determination—which is not “2 wrongs make a right,” but a determination of what the nature of the conflict is (which then determines what might be right or wrong).
Your first paragraph is an absolute muddle because it’s trying to think in terms of a classical-warfare category (state citizenship) that does not apply to Hamas’ war on Israel (not an abstract “war on terrorism”) because Hamas is not a state. Get out and about; not everything in the world fits into Thomistic categories and the spread of terrorist groups and the modern use of terror on civilian populations is one of them.
“the normal just war rules arise from immutable natural law, not from positive Church (or international law) precept”
Dude, the Catholic Encyclopedia passage you cite on assassination proves EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. Some of the rules of war (including assassination) and even the natural-law considerations therein are EXPLICITLY based on international custom.
And Al, you have no legitimate standing to refer to anyone as a heretic. And you know that.
The likes of al in their legalism and a priori categories of selective outrage would no doubt accuse the Israelis of humiliating children, of treating children as combatants, of forced public nudity and probably child pornography (because all are “against the natural law” which supposedly is unaffected by circumstances like ... uh, this case).
“Try learning something before bloviating and thinking about what’s being said before indulging in a display of self indulgent self righteousness.”
Waiter, check please.
Al, this ends the discussion. Do not reply to this note. I will not sully Dom’s site by replying in the manner in which right now I AM VERY SORELY TEMPTED.
al, you have not gone anywhere in responding to my challenge. You can make assertions til the cows come home, but ultimately they are only your assertions. Where are your citations? Where are your authorities for moral doctrine (the UN bureaucracy does not qualify)? If you want to invoke just war doctrine, I want to see just war doctrine. There is no imminence criteria in just war doctrine. It’s not in the Catechism, it’s not in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Merely making the assertion won’t make it true. Don’t mistake some modern thoughts on war conduct for authentic Catholic doctrine.
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Yassin’s death: right or wrong?
Yesterday, the Vatican condemned the Israeli assassination of the founder of the terrorist group Hamas. It warned that vendettas and revenge killing would be a setback for the quest for peace. Maybe.
On the other hand, it’s not like Yassin was the leader of just another Palestinian group. These are hardcore killers, responsible for most of the worst suicide bombings. It could be argued that killing Yassin may produce some violence in the short run—which is going to occur in any case; these people weren’t holding bake sales—but in the long run it could prevent violence.
Israel has a right to go after mass murderers. It has a right of self-defense. I would say it’s the equivalent of the US killing Osama in a cave. He’s not pulling the trigger but he’s getting others to do his dirty work. Putting him in jail may only incite more attacks. Putting him in the ground may be the only way to prevent that.
Besides, why is the onus always on Israel? If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace and a Palestinian state. If Israel puts down its weapons, there will be no Israel. Does anyone doubt that?
COMMENTS
Is killing ever right? By either side?
Posted by JenB on 03/23/04 at 11:49 AM
Killing in self-defense or to protect the innocent is sometimes a duty and an obligation.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/23/04 at 12:09 PM
Not only would putting a man like Sheikh Yassin in jail only incite more attacks, he becomes their reason and justification. The Israelis had jailed the guy several times before, only to have to release him in prisoner swaps (i.e., kidnappings) and in “goodwill gestures” for “peace talks.” As they say in Texas ... he needed killin’
Posted by Victor on 03/23/04 at 12:19 PM
The question is whether Israel is engaged in a law enforcement action or a war of self-defense. In the same way, John Kerry wants us to arrest and try al Quaeda terrorists rather than fight them where they are.
Was America wrong to launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator UAV at a car in Yemen carrying members of al Quaeda?
If this is a war on terror, then such actions are not out of bounds.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/23/04 at 12:45 PM
I agree with what Duncan Maxwell Andersons says at HMS Blog:
Here’s what Joaquin Navarro-Valls of the Vatican press office had to say yesterday (puzzlingly, to me) after Israeli rockets sent the founder and head of Hamas to his reward:
“The Holy See joins the international community to reprove this act of violence that cannot be justified in any state of law.”
No doubt the act can’t be justified in any state of law.
But it seems to me that Hamas and Israel are not in a state of law; they are in a state of war, one of Hamas’s choosing. Yassin arranged the killing of hundreds of people, most of them civilians, and promised to do more of the same. He was a combatant devoted to the destruction of Israel, which is a lawful authority, and to the slaughter of its inhabitants, including non-combatants. He even proclaimed publicly that he was a combatant against Israel’s government.
Of course, now, he’s not. (Law could now be applied to him safely.)
Was it wrong that this combatant was dispatched by ambush? For example, St. Thomas says that deception, even in war, can be sinful—such as making a false truce with an enemy. But there was certainly no truce in this case. In the Summa, iia iiae, q40, St. Thomas affirms clearly that ambushes are a lawful part of a just war, since nothing obliges a soldier to reveal his strategy to his enemy. (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/304003.htm)
Considering the stakes imposed by Hamas’s terror campaign, I don’t see that Israel has any choice.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/23/04 at 01:28 PM
Yeah, because these Hamas guys might start using kids to smuggle bombs through Israeli checkpoints and strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up on school buses ... Oh wait ...
Might there be an uptick in violence in the short term? Yes. Is this action likely to prevent violence in the long term? Maybe.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/23/04 at 03:05 PM
Well, I was hoping my original question would spark this debate…
Part of the problem is that Israel has not always been blameless. They share in being violent and threatening over the years. Does the end justify the means? Yes in the early days the non-Jews in Palestine (BTW, they only came to be known as “Palestinians” in this centruy) had the entire goal of “pushing the Jews into the sea” and it’s my opinion that the Jewish fight is still one of survival.
But, I’m still not convinced that survival means you get a free pass to assasinate. Or do their own bombing.
Then again, does Yassin not set himself as military in this fight and thus as a legit target of war? But again, does this legitimize assasination? Why not capture? Why not a trial? Why not justly executing? Would it really prove more costly to Israeli lives to give him a swift and quick trial/execution?
ahh, if only Abraham would have relied on the Lord to send him a son…
Posted by JenB on 03/23/04 at 05:57 PM
Jen,
Are you saying that you should never try to kill the opposing general in a war? But it is okay to kill his soldiers? Would it have been wrong to assassinate Hitler in 1942? It seems to me that you could shorten a war and prevent more death if you killed the guys running it.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/23/04 at 06:32 PM
You know, I’d be more inclined to listen to all this moralizing about Israel’s bad acts if I heard even one tiny bit of the same condemnations every time there’s a suicide bombing. How many press releases get issued from the European capitals condemning the Palestinian Authority or Hamas when an Israeli bus blows up or a restaurant or disco is destroyed? But when evil old man (his wheelchair didn’t seem to slow him down any) is killed in a surgical strike, the condemnations fly.
Does this make sense to anyone?
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/23/04 at 08:42 PM
Al:
“beyond the requirements for putting the combatants out of the conflict”
Sheikh Yassin declared himself and his group at war with Israel. He was tried and imprisoned once before only to become the rallying point for more terrorism. Thus his death was required. And please, don’t give me any nonsense about less lethal means. Once war is joined, not every act has to pass that test. We were not required to try to arrest and try every Hans and Fritz in the Wehrmacht before firing on their unit. If the Israelis cared only about killing Palestinian leaders with no regard for civilians, Arafat would have been a puddle under a rock years ago.
Oh, and “war on terrorism” is only a novel sophistry if “terrorism” be a novel sophistry. Bali, Madrid, 9/11 and the daily risk of getting on a bus in Israel are not novel sophistries.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 11:29 AM
Al wrote:
“... lying, perjury, bad faith, treachery, as well as the direct slaughter of the innocent, wanton destruction, and the lawless pillage and outrage of cruder times, are, as far as the worst of them go, A THING OF THE PAST AMONG CIVILIZED NATIONS.”
Self-evidently not so.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 11:40 AM
“War on terrorism is a sophistry.”
Why? Just because you don’t want to do something doesn’t mean you are relieved of the need to try the option.
“Yassin could have been arrested”
So could Hans and Fritz von Wehrmacht IF WE’D TRIED. Answer the argument on the table, Al.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 11:44 AM
“Yassin could have been arrested (as he was before) quite easily, and put out of the conflict.”
And Al, *as has been pointed out to you,* being tried didn’t put Yassin out of a conflict. He was just ransomed.
And of course in Al-logic, the fact it had happened before and it didn’t put him out of the conflict is not proof that trials are unsuccessful, no ... it’s proof that they’re possible and thus always show the immorality of force (on one side only, of course). At some point in life, you decide from induction that you’ve tried and failed and move onto another option.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 11:52 AM
So, if they don’t have capital punishment why can they assasinate him?
Dom-we didn’t assassinate Hitler and we didn’t assassinate Saddam Hussein, who was as near as Public Enemy #1 as Yassin is to Israel.
But I will agree with you that Israel gets the short end of the stick in a serious way when it comes to news stories. I’m still trying to figure out why there is such huge support for a group of people (Palestinians-who are really a conglomeration of a variety of Arab nations) whose main goal has been to wipe out another nation-and this other nation (Israel) simply wants to live with them, as an independant state.
Posted by JenB on 03/24/04 at 12:20 PM
Jen:
Don’t think for one second we wouldn’t have assassinated Hitler had it been within our means. But given the technology of the 1940s (the inaccuracy of gravity bombs, the primitiveness of radar and the slowness of pre-jet aircraft), a Yassin-like operation was simply impossible. Assassination could only have been done by a turncoat in Hitler’s inner circle (and there *were* attempts, but by good Germans trying to save their country, not help ours).
As for why we didn’t try to assassinate Saddam: very likely because it couldn’t be done without leaving a paper trail and/or our fingerprints. The Clinton administration (a team of lawyers trained to think in legalisms), which ran US foreign policy for most of the time between the two Iraq wars, felt constrained by some Vietnam Syndrome restrictions on US agencies. We know Saddam tried to assassinate Bush the Elder.
Why the double standard in the Middle East? I’d say an existential decision that the Palestinian Arabs are in the right and ther Israelis in the wrong, facilitated by the weakening of post-Holocaust taboos ... a constraint that will only get weaker as the Holocaust generation continues to die off. Like all existential decisions, it is beyond reason because it filters and categorizes the information received.
To pick an example from another issue, when Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe” of the “vs. Wade” Roes) was pro-abortion, she was a hero to the pro-choice groups, the Rosa Parks of abortion. When she had her religious conversion and became pro-life, those groups said “this was an issue about all women’s right to choose, not a single woman’s. Plus she is free not to exercise it,” and there also came behind-the-back mutterings of “traitor,” wondering how much she was bought off for, and the usual conspiratorial machinations.
That kinda displaces your question: “why the existential decision?” Here’s my hypotheses.
On the left, (1) Because they see the Middle East through the lens of “colonialism” and “imperialism,” with Israel as the colonizing Western society oppressing a “backward” “people of color”; (2) Because in the West, Jews have been long among us and Muslims have been “Other,” and thus they must be the misunderstood ones; (3) Because Israel is the stronger party and the left not only has a strong pacifist/peacenik streak, but generally seems to believe not only that “might doesn’t make right” but that “might makes wrong”; (4) Because Israeli success in building a modern society from nothing in 40 years and leaving the non-oil Arabs in the dust is a rebuke to their dependencia understanding (sic) of economics and dredges up the old alliance between left-wing anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism; (5) Because, and I do mean this seriously, of a perverse “anti” quality—whatever the dominant culture celebrates and whoever the US considers an ally must on that basis be opposed.
On the right, support for Israel is generally much greater for the mirror-image of those five reasons. But some residue of old right-wing anti-Semitism remains of course (from the 19th century to WW2, anti-Semitism was more a province of the right than the left) and that probably accounts for some conservative animus for Israel.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 12:58 PM
“Riiiiight. Holding someone and then giving them over to ransom for assassins is ‘trying’ incarceration as a means to keep someone out of the conflict.”
Who Israel ransomed Yassin for the first time around is neither here nor there. Do you really think Hamas would not resort to kidnappings or hostage-taking of civilians or even soldiers on patrol inside pre-1967 Israel to trade Yassin out of jail? Learn your history. That is the oldest terrorist tactic in the book (far older than suicide bombing), and it is something Israel has been forced into repeatedly as democracies are wont, sometimes even just for the remains of dead Israelis.
“The thread here, that you keep missing, is that Israel has to give up assassinations.”
Attacking a war enemy’s leadership is not “assassination” unless it be the case that all attacks on enemy units are “assassination.”
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 01:08 PM
Jen,
We actually tried to assassinate Saddam. That’s what all those first night of the war strikes war and that big bomb on the restuarant we thought he was meeting his top lieutenants in. Now, as you say we didn’t try to assassinate him before the war. That’s because we were under a cease fire agreement. However, Israel is at war with Hamas.
The closest analog is the Barbary pirates of the early 19th century, the terrorists of their day. We didn’t try to arrest them. We declared war on them and wiped them out. No one hears much about pirates on the Barbary Coast these days.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/24/04 at 01:18 PM
“I don’t think that’s true in the case of the criminal Yassin.”
That the nub of the issue. I don’t think of Yassin as a criminal, but as an enemy general. He was the head of a quasi-state organization that plans what it and the PA call “military operations” against Israel, calls for its destruction and for the death of all Jews everywhere. That’s war, not crime. Al Capone just wanted to enjoy his alcohol profits. Scott Peterson just wanted to dump his wife and marry his girlfriend. Neither is fundamentally at war with society as such.
As for your other points, Patrick:
1) If “assassinate” means try to kill enemy leaders during war, we *did* try to assassinate Saddam twice during the war, the opening night raid and the attack on the restaurant compound. But on Dec. 13, the war is over, Saddam was not in control of a sovereign state or any similar apparatus, and he was in hiding in territory he did not effectively control. Therefore, he’s something closer to a criminal than a war leader, and yes, you try to take someone like that alive. But it matters that he was alone and offering no resistance at the time, else he would have been just as legitimate an “assassination” target as Uday and Qusai or as Charles Whitman.
2) Israel was neither the sovereign nor in effective control of the ground situation around Sheikh Yassin. He was surrounded by multiple, armed human shields. To have tried to capture him alive would have required a very risky, bloodier on both sides, commando-type raid. Such raids are also much less likely to be successful.
3) The risk of capturing Yassin (quite apaprt from the greater danger to your own soldiers executing the operation) is that when you capture and jail a terrorist leader or even terrorist footsoldiers, a common result with multiple precedents and not just in this conflict is that the terrorist’s comrades engage in hostage taking and either kill civilians or force you to release him.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 01:37 PM
Al:
How is “assassination” different from “killing” (in Romance languages, they’re generally the same word)?
Where in the Catholic Encyclopedia or the Summa are age, physical health or location cited as relevant moral characteristics for determining the licitness of a target over and above that person’s SELF-DECLARED STATUS (“we are at war with Israel and I lead our group”)?
Once war is declared, self-declared soldiers are always legitimate targets. Nothing in the Catholic Encyclopedia or the Summa says otherwise.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 03:04 PM
I don’t see what Yassin’s wheelchair has to do with anything. And by Al’s logic, surgical strikes on rear-area headquarters are out of bounds. I don’t understand why.
Look, if Israel had sent a battalion of soldiers into Gaza to arrest Yassin, is anyone naive enough to believe that there would have been fewer casualties? I think not.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/24/04 at 03:27 PM
Al, quit talking as though Sheikh Yassin’s health is in any way relevant to his status as a combatant. He is a commander and leader.
“Ambush in ongoing combat is a different matter.”
Bzzzzt ... wrong answer. That’s EXACTLY what this is. Hamas has declared the battle to be a perpetual war against all Israelis at all times, an existential war to the finish—“perpetual war” in your phrase. It is merely reaping what it sowed.
Further you cannot cite the Catholic Encyclopedia as noting that assassination is wrong as some absolute moral principle here. What it says “in black and white above” is that “assassination ... have met with common condemnation, thus closing the loophole of obscurity in the natural law.” In other words, it’s contrary to common behavior and norms. But that’s not an absolute principle in itself, it’s a mutable practice dependent on the customs of the nations.
At a minimum it seems licit against a group that declares itself as engaged in an existential war of populations in which all people at all times are legitimate targets.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 03:39 PM
Oh, and the members of Hamas are not citizens of Israel.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 03/24/04 at 03:54 PM
The “battle” here is Hamas’ determination—which is not “2 wrongs make a right,” but a determination of what the nature of the conflict is (which then determines what might be right or wrong).
Your first paragraph is an absolute muddle because it’s trying to think in terms of a classical-warfare category (state citizenship) that does not apply to Hamas’ war on Israel (not an abstract “war on terrorism”) because Hamas is not a state. Get out and about; not everything in the world fits into Thomistic categories and the spread of terrorist groups and the modern use of terror on civilian populations is one of them.
“the normal just war rules arise from immutable natural law, not from positive Church (or international law) precept”
Dude, the Catholic Encyclopedia passage you cite on assassination proves EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. Some of the rules of war (including assassination) and even the natural-law considerations therein are EXPLICITLY based on international custom.
And Al, you have no legitimate standing to refer to anyone as a heretic. And you know that.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 04:34 PM
Confronted with an account like this one at David Morrison’s blog,
http://davidmorrison.typepad.com/sed_contra/2004/03/suicide_bombers.html
The likes of al in their legalism and a priori categories of selective outrage would no doubt accuse the Israelis of humiliating children, of treating children as combatants, of forced public nudity and probably child pornography (because all are “against the natural law” which supposedly is unaffected by circumstances like ... uh, this case).
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 06:38 PM
“Try learning something before bloviating and thinking about what’s being said before indulging in a display of self indulgent self righteousness.”
Waiter, check please.
Al, this ends the discussion. Do not reply to this note. I will not sully Dom’s site by replying in the manner in which right now I AM VERY SORELY TEMPTED.
I think, I hope, you know what I mean.
Posted by Victor on 03/24/04 at 09:04 PM
al, you have not gone anywhere in responding to my challenge. You can make assertions til the cows come home, but ultimately they are only your assertions. Where are your citations? Where are your authorities for moral doctrine (the UN bureaucracy does not qualify)? If you want to invoke just war doctrine, I want to see just war doctrine. There is no imminence criteria in just war doctrine. It’s not in the Catechism, it’s not in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Merely making the assertion won’t make it true. Don’t mistake some modern thoughts on war conduct for authentic Catholic doctrine.
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