Guilty verdicts must be rendered according to law.
After posting this post, I heard from Irwin Cotler, whom I know. I went back to the quoted article and found this,
Instead of trying to change the laws of war, Israel and its friends should work to change the principles and procedures of the UN itself, which displays a constant country-specific indictment of Israel,
It would appear then that we are not so far apart depending how he expands on this. I wrote to him and told him that this is an opportunity for Israel to discredit all actors who demonize and deligitimate Israel in a highly discriminatory and biased manner. This includes the media and the NGO’s. Ted Belman
By Ted Belman
JPOST reports Cotler and Goldstone: Jurists butt heads on int’l law, but agree on rules of war
According to Cotler, the problem is,
-
The basic thing is [that] what you need is equality before the law. Israel, like any other state, is responsible for any violation of humanitarian law, but that’s the point: like any other state. It’s not the issue that Israel shouldn’t be held responsible; it’s that other states aren’t being held accountable. It’s not that standards shouldn’t be applied to Israel. They should be applied to Israel, but they’re not being applied to anybody else. It’s not that there aren’t any rules for international monitoring - there are, but they’re only applied to Israel.”
While I agree with Cotler on that, I believe he didn’t go far enough. It is not enough to apply the law to all. The problem is not that it is only applied to Israel, and that is a problem, but that it is applied unfairly and unjustly. You can’t get a just verdict if the Judges are tainted or if the procedure abandons basic legal principles that exist to assure a just verdict.
Why does Cotler ignore this?
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Pingback by All In One Information » Israpundit » Blog Archive » Guilty verdicts must be rendered … — October 28, 2009 @ 9:28 pm
It would be nice if the laws of war were APPLIED to all parties concerned. The the question arises, having applied these laws - for example, to people who deliberately use unarmed civilians as shields - how are we going to prosecute those who flout them? Go in with teams of lawyers? I think not.
Judging by the standards of WWII, the good guys have to win decisively before such prosecutions can take place… And the sentence for those found guilty should not be three months of community work…
Comment by keelie — October 30, 2009 @ 3:09 pm
From the beginning of the time when wars were fought by organizedc armies, very little patience was afforded to the prevention of civilian casualties. Either, like in Gaza recently, the battles were fought within the boundries of residences and businesses or, even more likely, after fighting was done, the winning army would slaughter civilians as a form of punishment. From the time of WWI to the present, entire cities were destroyed in order to demoralize apposing armies, civilians were tortured to gain information concerning the other side or as recently in Gaza, used scivilians as shields.
Some nations and groups are worse than others in perpatrating these crimes and it is not likely to stop. Laws are currently on the International books outlawing such practices; however, punishment, when due, is only paid by a very few of the guilty. Israel can not be held back from killing civilians so long as their enemies hide among them and, the best way to protect our own is to make the penalties for killing us so painful as possible as to give our enemies second thought. It is like carying the biggest stick.
Comment by Ed D — October 31, 2009 @ 12:15 am
This land is our land! These so called, people are truly insane! If they kill one of yours , would you truly have any respect for their peoples????? If you did, I don’t think you are human!
Comment by tov — November 1, 2009 @ 1:46 pm
Tov:
But a significant segment of North American Jewry see it differently.
American Jews Rethink Israel By Adam Horowitz & Philip Weiss
This article appeared in the November 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
October 14, 2009
This year has seen a dramatic shift in American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel. In January many liberal Jews were shocked by the Gaza war, in which Israel used overwhelming force against a mostly defenseless civilian population unable to flee. Then came the rise to power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose explicitly anti-Arab platform was at odds with an American Jewish electorate that had just voted 4 to 1 for a minority president. Throw in angry Israelis writing about the “rot in the Diaspora,” and it’s little wonder young American Jews feel increasingly indifferent about a country that has been at the center of Jewish identity for four decades.
: The new progressive Jewish organization J Street has benefited from the blogosphere’s interest. But will exposure turn into political mobilization?
Confessions of an AIPAC Veteran Judaism & Jews
Helena Cobban: Tom Dine, for thirteen years head of AIPAC, now works for a two-state solution and on improving US-Syrian relations.
The Jewish push for peace is surging through the grassroots, but leaders and policy-makers are still turning a deaf etz & Philip Weiss: Israel’s latest strategy for responding to allegations of human rights abuses: Philip Weiss: Can left-leaning Jews coalesce into a lobby to offset the influence of AIPAC?
These stirrings on the American Jewish street will come to a head in late October in Washington with the first national conference of J Street, the reformation Israel lobby. J Street has been around less than two years, but it is summoning liberal–and some not so liberal–Jews from all over the country to “rock the status quo,” code for AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
First the good news. There’s no question the Gaza conflict has helped break down the traditional Jewish resistance to criticizing Israel. Gaza was “the worst public relations disaster in Israel’s history,” says M.J. Rosenberg, a longtime Washington analyst who reports for Media Matters Action Network. For the first time in a generation, leading American Jews broke with the Jewish state over its conduct. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen said he was “shamed” by Israel’s actions, while Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Guardian that Israel’s killing of hundreds of civilians as reprisal for rocket attacks was “brutal” and probably “futile.”
Even devoted friends of Israel Leon Wieseltier and Michael Walzer expressed misgivings about the disproportionate use of force, and if Reform Jewish leaders could not bring themselves to criticize the war, the US left was energized by the horror. Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, threw herself into the cause of Gazan freedom after years of ignoring Israel-Palestine, in part out of deference to her family’s feelings. In The Nation Naomi Klein came out for boycott, divestment and sanctions; later, visiting Ramallah, she apologized to the Palestinians for her “cowardice” in not coming to that position earlier.
Comment by h peskin — November 2, 2009 @ 4:16 am