1. Israel cannot morally defend itself against Hamas by tanks, planes, and artillery — that’s too indiscriminate and injures innocent civilians.

2. Israel cannot morally defend itself by assassinating individual Hamas members — that’s too focused and is disrespectful of human life.

“Last November, a sharp-eyed Israeli woman named Niva Ben-Harush was alarmed to notice a young man attaching something that looked suspiciously like a bomb to the underside of a car in a quiet street near Tel Aviv port. When police arrested him, he claimed to be an agent of the Mossad secret service taking part in a training exercise: his story turned out to be true – though the bomb was a fake.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/19/ian-black-mossad-dubai

Now we know for sure who trains terrorists.

Was that last post I did on The hateful bile of Melanie Phillips thread right wing in your opinion?

If Peter Taylor was so biased, how come some many Republicans and former IRA men were willing to be interviewed by him?
And as for your comment about why not do the same to loyalists ….. that’s such a big subject in itself, that this is probably not the place for it.

The fact is that some significant percentage of the Israeli population believes that Israel has a divine right to all Palestine:

Try this video clip on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irIXIy6hNc8

And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1su8m_d9xU&NR=1

I just read peter Taylor’s excellent book ”Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein” and I think that the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade were a complete menace and danger to everyone around them.
This series of documentaries by Taylor is essential viewing in my opinion.
This part is about East Tyrone and ‘’shoot to kill”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHW59EvGqKA&feature=related
Taylor is so far up the MI5 arse I wouldn’ trust a word he says

Firstly I don’t think that Northen Ireland really applies in this thread, as, as far as I know the British didn’t go bumping off members of the IRA’s army council that were living in the Republic. Nor did they go about assassinating people in cold blood (well Gibraltar maybe). But they did take a deadly approach to people they had under surveillance who were in the process of carrying out IRA actions.

I just read peter Taylor’s excellent book ”Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein” and I think that the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade were a complete menace and danger to everyone around them.
This series of documentaries by Taylor is essential viewing in my opinion.
This part is about East Tyrone and ”shoot to kill”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHW59EvGqKA&feature=related

What I am saying is that state-run extra-judicial executions are illegitimate.

Maybe illegitimate in law, but maybe justifiable in practice.
In 1985 the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade started on a campaign of driving out the police from small rural police stations and barracks in a repeat attempt at what the IRA had done in some places in Ireland during the war of Independence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_IRA_East_Tyrone_Brigade

They meant business, and they had to be stopped. But even though the security services had a good idea who many of the people involved were, going through the judical process hindered the fight against the IRA.

They would blow up a police station, and then threaten with death, any civilian building contractor who went to make repairs and rebuild them.

When someone talked about ”a race to the bottom” – I think the IRA were already involved in it, and what was most important was not letting them win.

The BBC’s Mark Urban wrote a book about this period called ”Big boy’s rules”.

His most recent book on the Palestine conflict is: Israel and Palestine – Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso Books, 2009), reviewed here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/24/shlaim-israel-palestine-book-review

And so, to a far greater degree, does the Israeli military. Not to mention the US & UK militaries, or NATO.

The real killer was behind the grassy knoll.

Two words for you there: Shirley Bassey.

According to wiki, Lee Harvey Oswald was of English, German, French and Irish ancestry, which implicates pretty much everyone but the Welsh! zomgz :O

The Welsh killed JFK. FACT.

How about the many previous atrocities?

- the bombing of SS Patria in Haifa habour in 1940?

- the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946?

- the massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948?

- the massacre at Qibya in 1953?

- the massacre in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982?

- the Khiam Prison in South Lebanon when it was under occupation 1985-2000?

As someone who endured as a young boy being a target for V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets in 1944/5, I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. But then the V1s and V2s killed nearly 9,000 civilians in and around London over a nine month period and I see that the civilians in Israel killed by rockets from Gaza and Lebanon come to less than 100.

For a dispassionate assessment of the continuing conflict over Palestine, try Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall (Penguin Books, 2001).

Avi Shlaim, who holds joint Israeli-British citizenships, is professor of international relations at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, which some dub the MI6 staff college. His book is a revelation for those unfamiliar with the history of the conflict.

A little Googling will retrieve details of the atrocities shown above.

In this thread, the morality and legality of assassinating politicians is under question. From what I recall, assassinating a head of state is illegal under international law unless the countries are at war. And we might use the same argument for associates of the head of state. That is a vague consensus view; many argue that assassination is entirely forbidden. I assume that it is forbidden unless the countries are at war.

There is no agreed two state solution for Israel and Palestine. Hamas is not a state, but is trying to conduct war against Israel.

Thus we have to question whether the alleged acts of Mossad would be a war crime (it is certainly illegal to commit such a murder in Dubai) if a state of Hamas existed. And judge accordingly.

I’m not defending the IRA. What I am saying is that state-run extra-judicial executions are illegitimate. You appear to want to legitimate them in ‘messy times’.

A technical correction. Biometric “smart” passports are being introduced as an international measure agreed between nations. This is a measure that is supposed to provide greater security in the future (ie when most passengers will have them) which is not in place today. My passport stores no biometric information and I will be renewing it at the last moment when it is possible to get a traditional one.

Unless there was corruption (unlikely given the number of separate entries into Dubai by the killers), we have to assume that the Dubai authorities inspected the passports in the normal way: face matching picture, passport not on banned list, passport looks authentic etc. Apparently somebody made fake conventional passports that fooled the inspectors in a visual inspection.

We also have to assume that the spoofing was 100% successful and that no passport was identified as a fake; identifying a counterfeit would have meant that other EU passports were examined more closely (ie looking up the passport number in the databases that are shared between passport authorities).

If my proposed inspection criteria are true, I would be aghast if Israel or any other developed country could not make a decent fake passport. North Korea creates fake currency that fools the inspectors employed by the printers of the genuine article. It also appears that the fake passports were tested on earlier occasions for admission to EU and non-EU countries.

Nor would I be surprised if Israel in particular produces fake biometric passports in the future. Israeli companies — privately owned and subsidiaries of multi-nationals — employ cryptographic experts. Other companies are good at chip design. The smart card that you or your neighbours use to authenticate to a satellite TV service was probably designed in Israel.

61 – talking of silly…

58 – hey, you were the one talking legal jargon. Since there was a legal inquest to determine whether it was murder or not, and it was found that it wasn’t (and another ECHR case where it was found that more than reasonable force was used, but that no sanctions were appropriate) I think that saying it wasn’t murder is reasonable enough. But as I said, messy times, messy measures. The IRA shot the wife of the Governor of Gibraltar in the face afterwards.

Are you seriously suggesting that the election of Pim Fortuyn wouldn’t have resulted in the civil liberties of muslims in Holland being curtailed?

If Hitler’s policies had run to ending Jewish immigration, I suspect he wouldn’t occupy quite the same position in history.