A merry Christmas to all of my Christian readers.

And a happy Festivus to all the Seinfeld fans out there.

I will be doing, for the first time in my life, a traditional Jewish Christmas dinner: I’m meeting a bunch of Jewish friends for Chinese food tomorrow night.

After going to the movies tomorrow afternoon, of course.

Daled Amos and JudeoPundit did a fine job of expanding on a little discussed topic.

Working off a post in InstaPundit, about a Caroline Glick column describing the effect Israel’s out of control legal establishment affected the war against Hezbollah in 2006,

Mandelblit and Mazuz testified that legal advisers were present at all levels of command in all the relevant service arms and in the security cabinet. At each level the lawyers were asked to judge the legality of all the proposed targets and planned operations before they were carried out. And as the two explained, in their decisions, these lawyers were informed not by the goal of winning the war, but by their interpretation of international law.

Daled Amos writes

Based on the subsequent outcry by the international community, it is obvious that the lawyers failed on both counts.

Judeopundit adds

And every non-lawyer who prattles about “disproportionate response” has adopted this kind of thinking/madness.

WizBang.Jay Tea goes into somewhat more detail

But I recall no one discussing how nearly every single aspect of Hezbollah — both their conduct and their very existence — constituted a violation of nearly every single precept of legal war.Did the Hezbollah fighters wear distinctive uniforms? No. They dressed as civilians, virtually indistinguishable from ordinary Lebanese — until they started fighting.

Did Hezbollah avoid civilians, to keep them from being harmed? No. They set up their weapons and fighting positions in and among towns and villages, schools and hospitals and places of worship.

Did Hezbollah take pains to avoid injuring civilians? No. They fired off unguided missiles and rockets by the thousands, in the general direction of cities and towns and villages and farms, in the hopes of killing civilians.

Did Hezbollah respect the rights of prisoners? No. Their policy has been for years that Israeli prisoners are to be kept incommunicado, only rarely even offering proof that they are still alive, in hopes of exchanging them for Israeli prisoners. Even still, they are often tortured and executed in the cruelest fashion.

Did Hezbollah abide by the terms of the UN Resolution that ended the conflict? No. They have reasserted their control over southern Lebanon, keeping out the Lebanese government and army and re-arming with even more missiles and rockets than they had before the fighting.

While Jay Tea is in search of a larger point, this observation is still apt.

Practically, how else has the Israeli justice system made it harder for Israel to defend itself? In June 2004 a panel of 3 judges from the Israeli High Court of Justice (including then-Court President Aharon Barak) issued guidelines for the construction of Israel’s security fence.

The court, in its decision, dictated that the economic consequences to the Palestinians must be considered when deciding on the route of the fence and that those consequences must be proportional to the threat. Here’s how the New York Times described the decision.

The unanimous decision by the three-judge panel asserted that Israel has a genuine security reason for building the barrier and can expropriate land in the West Bank for it. But it said the army ”has a legal duty to balance properly between security considerations and humanitarian ones.”The barrier’s planned path along a 20.5-mile section, the court ruled, could not be justified because of the suffering it would cause.

A court summary of the ruling said, in part: ”The fence’s current path would separate landowners from tens of thousands of dunams [quarter-acres] of land, and the planned regime of authorizations to access that land would not substantially reduce the harm. The fence’s current path would generally burden the entire way of life in petitioners’ villages.”

It added that while the ruling might reduce security for Israelis, ”this reduction in security must be endured for the sake of humanitarian considerations.”

It’s important to realize that the court reached its decision even after accepting the premise that only the government’s security apparatus could properly assess the security risks in changing the route. Still the court allowed a nebulous concept of “proportionality” to trump the concrete concerns of Israel’s security establishment.

The New York Times excerpted a section of the ruling that proudly proclaims:

There is no security without law.

That’s not legal reasoning, it’s simply a slogan. I could just as easily argue “There is no law without security” and it would have the same legal force. (Well no, it wouldn’t have the same legal force, I’m not the member of any court with jurisdiction over anything. I simply meant that even the declaration of the Israeli court is devoid of any legal meaning.)

And if Israel’s High Court of Justice thought that applying uncertain standards of international law would shield Israel from international condemnation, it was wrong. A few days later it was reported Major Portion of Israeli Fence is Ruled Illegal:

The International Court of Justice ruled Friday that the major portion of the barrier Israel is building violated international law because it was rising on Palestinian land on the West Bank.In a nonbinding decision, it called on Israeli officials to tear down the sections it ruled to be illegal and to compensate Palestinians whose land it cuts across or whose interests have otherwise been harmed..

The opinion, endorsed by all 15 justices with the exception of the sole American, Thomas Buergenthal, found that the barrier ”constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable humanitarian law” and that it ”cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order.”

Palestinian officials immediately hailed the advisory opinion as a major legal victory. ”This is an excellent decision,” the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, told reporters at his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah. ”This is a victory for the Palestinian people and for all the free peoples of the world.”

The sole dissenter, the American judge observed:

Judge Buergenthal, the American, said in his dissent that the court should have declined to hear the case because it lacked sufficient information and evidence ”for its sweeping findings.”Leaving open the possibility that some or even all sections of the barrier in the West Bank violate international law and acknowledging that ”the wall is causing deplorable suffering to many Palestinians,” the judge said the court should not have ruled until it had considered ”all relevant facts bearing directly on issues of Israel’s legitimate right of self-defense”

He said the impact of ”repeated deadly terror attacks” was something ”never really seriously examined by the court.”

All of which demonstrates that “international law” is less a rigorous discipline applied impartially than a political construct with which to achieve specific ends.

Jeane Kirkpatrick described a particularly egregious example of how this worked (”How the PLO was Legitimized“, Commentary, July 1989)

In these ways the General Assembly explicitly affirmed that the permission which had been granted national-liberation movements to use “all necessary means” included terrorism and hostage taking. And in case anyone doubted that the permission was serious, the support offered to Abu Z. Ein in 1982 showed vividly that the General Assembly majority meant precisely what it implied: throwing grenades into a crowded Israeli supermarket - killing and maiming shoppers - was an act of “political dissent” and “self-defense” and was not punishable by law. For when, after two-and-a-half years of legal battles, the U.S. courts finally agreed to honor Israel’s request for extradition of Abu Ein (who had been represented by a former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark), the General Assebly condemned the United States and Israel. Abu Ein, it said, was a “freedom fighter” and Israel had no right to put him on trial.

The problem with Israel’s High Court of Justice applying standards of international law to Israel is that, at best, international law embodies noble sounding but ultimately empty slogans, at worst, it is actively hostile to Israel’s existence.

When Israel’s High Court co-opts these standards it is not elevating itself, but rather co-opting the views of Israel’s enemies. It is, in fact, forcing to abide by standards that are meant to be inimical to Israel’s interests. There is nothing enlightened by such an approach.

Other thoughts on the overreaching of Israel’s High Court of Justice are here and here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The AP has noticed that the Muslims in the Gaza Strip have been terrorizing Gaza’s Christians. The International Herald Tribune carries the story with this headline:

Gaza’s Christians keep low profile during Christmas after slaying of activist

“Activist”? What did the “activist” do?

Ayyad, a member of the Baptist Church, managed Gaza’s only Christian bookstore and was involved in many charitable activities. He was found shot in the head, his body thrown on a Gaza street in early October, 10 hours after he was kidnapped from the store.

He regularly received death threats from people angry about his perceived missionary work — a rarity among Gaza’s Christians — and the store was firebombed six months before the kidnapping.

Oh. He actively practiced Christianity, and apparently, he tried to convert Muslims to Christianity. Or so they thought. And that, of course, gets you a death sentence in the world of jihadis.

I wonder how prominently displayed this lede will be:

Gaza’s tiny Christian community is keeping a low profile during Christmas this year, traumatized by the killing of a prominent activist after the Islamic Hamas group’s takeover of the coastal territory.

Few Christmas trees are on display, churches are holding austere services and hundreds of Christians hope to travel to the West Bank to celebrate the holiday in Bethlehem. Many say they don’t plan on returning to Gaza.

“We have a very sad Christmas,” said Essam Farah, acting pastor of Gaza’s Baptist Church, which has canceled its annual children’s party because of the grim atmosphere.

So the Muslims are effectively cancelling Christmas for Gaza’s Christians, but the AP article actually contains this laff-line:

About 3,000 Christians live in Gaza, an overwhelmingly conservative Muslim society of 1.5 million people. The two religions have generally had cordial relations over the years.

The relations are so cordial that Christians have been disappearing from the Palestinian territories for decades. Fifty years ago, the Christian population of the territories was estimated to be 15%. It is now 1.5%. Christian flight from the Middle East is the biggest open secret of the area. Did you know that most Lebanese Americans are Christian? And by “most” I mean “90%”? Why is that, I wonder, especially when you factor in the famous Muslim tolerance for other religions. I mean, that’s what they tell us, right? Islam is more tolerant of other religions than, say, Christianity or Judaism. And yet—Gaza’s Christian population is down to a paltry few thousand, and the ones remaining want to leave and never return. But don’t think they’ll get a warm welcome, even in Bethlehem, one of the biggest Christian tourist attraction in the world. Bethlehem used to be 80% Christian. That was before the Palestinian Authority took over running the town several decades ago.

And see how Gaza’s Christians are forced to lie about the persecution by their Muslim neighbors:

While no official statistics were available, the signs of the flight are evident. Rev. Manuel Musallem, head of Gaza’s Roman Catholic church, said he alone knows of seven families that sold their properties and left the area, and 15 more are preparing to do the same.

Musallem blamed Israeli sanctions and excessive violence in Gaza for the flight.

“In previous years we didn’t see this rate of migration,” Musallem said. “Now, exit is not on individual basis. Whole families are leaving, selling their cars, homes and all their properties.”

Really? It’s the Israeli economic policies of Gaza that are running the Christians out of town? Not things like this:

Ayyad’s older brother, 35-year old Ibrahim, said his 6-year old son, Khedr, was nagged in school about his uncle’s murder. Muslim schoolmates call him “infidel.”

[...] A distant relative of Ayyad, Fouad, said he also is packing up. He said his father, a guard at a local church, was stopped recently by unknown bearded men who put a gun to his head before he was rescued by passers-by.

[...] Those who are staying are trying to limit the risks. Nazek Surri, a Roman Catholic, walked out from Sunday’s service with a Muslim-style scarf covering her head.

“We have to respect the atmosphere we are living in. We have to go with the trend,” she said.

The Israelis aren’t the ones who are running the Christians out of town. Not that the media really notices all that much. Those facts were buried far down in the AP article. It’s far easier to blame Israel for the lack of Bethlehem tourism than to point out the religious persecution endemic in the Muslim world. And besides, you can’t shake the narrative. So you can’t blame the Muslims for anything bad that happens. It has to be all Israel’s fault.

The nomination of Dmitry Medvedev, one of Russia’s two first deputy prime ministers, by the United Russia party (read Putin) as its candidate for the presidential election next March, raised quite a few brows. Quite a non-entity, at least as far as his control of Russian power centers is concerned, Medvedev is a non-starter without being fully supported by Putin. His nickname - “Porridge*” tells the whole story exceedingly well.

Putin’s maneuvering clearly has its goal to keep all the strings of power to himself after the March 08 elections, no matter what role he will take up in the after-elections power structure. Keeping in mind the cosmetic nature of the forthcoming changes, the level of antisemitic histrionics caused by Medvedev’s candidacy is impossible to explain, but it is a fact. Probably since Stalin’s war against “rootless cosmopolitans” and the glory days of the Black Hundreds before that, Russia had not seen such an eruption of antisemitic venom.

A typical example is displayed by this article that will take even the author of the Protocols by surprise. The poisonous language belongs to the times of the Ochranka, Purishkevich, Dostoyevsky - in short, the best and finest.

The article is titled “[Russia] at crossroads: A successor who will never be“.

The title by itself causes a question: why should Putin choose as a successor a man whose chances to be elected are low? Some foul play is being hinted at, but what is its eventual goal is unclear, and no answer is forthcoming from the article. Because it is dedicated to pure hissing Joo-hate that keeps a difficult equilibrium not to become criminal incitement. The article offers a single picture of Medvedev (in the middle, if you haven’t guessed by now):

Of course, Medvedev, as many a political leader, gets his share of visits to various religious chieftains, but this picture is tightly linked to the contents. Now to the contents:

It couldn’t be that important who is nominated by the United Russia party, when the secret plans of Kremlin nurture the idea of the “Chief Prime Minister” or, in other words, Putin. …

To start with, we have to say a few words about the candidate’s CV, but in Russia it is considered a sin to badmouth these people. Nerd, in short. We cannot say anything bad about his Jewish mother, Yulia Benyaminovna, a good woman, apparently, only her nationality is a matter of public knowledge. For example, nobody aside of closest people knew about Mr Blank’s (nickname Lenin) mother, Mr Dzhugashvili’s (nickname Stalin) father, Mr Lieberman’s (nickname Andropov) mother. And 99.9% of the general population and 90% of the world’s elite didn’t even suspect their true nationality. Which means that these people had their reasons to hide their roots. “Russia, you see, they wouldn’t get it.” And this during the totalitarian times.

And now, after a strange “election” a few strange “parties” get together and nominate an apparently good person who doesn’t have any suitable background and just pushed papers all his life. A typical nerd boy and a son of Yulia Benyaminovna to boot, in other words the most Halachic Jew. Not just a potential repatriate to Israel, but one whose genealogy is above suspicion and guarantees him a very good reception in his historic motherland.

I could go on with the translation, but the above is enough to get the drift and, more important, the tone of this quite poisonous piece. Just to get the full measure of hypocrisy, the author (or the editor) put a footnote addressing the potential commentators of the article:

We request that readers be as proper as possible when discussing the article. Jews are not guilty that Medvedev was nominated. Comments that include insulting and provocative statements will not be posted.

As you can imagine… no, actually you couldn’t and I am not going to translate any of the sewer-level comments (which is the major part) that follow.

I intended to emphasize a few especially poignant items in the translation above, but after some mulling decided to leave it to your imagination.

(*) In fact, the direct translation of “манная каша”, which is how Medvedev is nicknamed, is “Cream of wheat”. Porridge was chosen as a better translation that may give an English speaking reader a feeling of the subject matter. Any ideas to improve this translation are welcome.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Israel is caving on an issue where she has caved before: Olmert is going to allow Palestinian terrorists who were involved in murdering Israelis to be swapped for Gilad Shalit. He is signaling Hamas and Hezbollah that their tactic of kidnapping soldiers is a good one, and will get them back hundreds of their own for one or two of Israel’s.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is trying to relax the criteria for releasing Palestinian prisoners, a move that could advance efforts to free a captured Israeli soldier, officials said Monday.

Israel’s stated policy is to refuse early releases to Palestinians involved in attacks on Israelis, even though it has relaxed that policy in past prisoner swaps. On Monday, a key ally of Olmert’s will convene a meeting of senior ministers to ask them to approve the release of prisoners involved in attempted attacks, officials said.

“We are in such a situation that, if we continue with the criteria that were used in the past, there will be no one else left to free,” Ephraim Sneh, a lawmaker in the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told Army Radio. “If we want to free prisoners … And bring about the release of Gilad Shalit, we will have to broaden this.”

Really? No one left to free? Well, then perhaps they should stay in prison. Because freed terrorists have committed more terror attacks on Israelis once they’re, gee, free to do so.

Palestinian militants, freed in past prisoner releases by Israel, were responsible for at least 30 terror attacks which claimed the lives of 177 Israelis, according to a study published yesterday by Almagor, an organization representing the victims of Palestinian terrorism. The report’s publication came in response to yesterday’s release of 429 Palestinians jailed in Israeli prisons. According to the report, 6,912 militants were released between the years 1993 and 1999, and nearly 80 percent of them returned to terrorist activity.

So apparently, Olmert thinks that a 1-for-177 ratio isn’t bad. Or that 80 percent of freed terrorists returning to terrorism is a number he can live with.

And the endless cycle of Israeli stupidity continues. It doesn’t seem to matter who is in the Premier’s office. Ariel Sharon released terrorists, too.

So, how many terrorists is Gilad Shalit worth? Apparently, about 500.

According to the sources, in exchange for Shalit Israel would be willing to release 500 Palestinian prisoners, most of whom were apprehended prior to the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000.

As part of the deal, the sources told the newspaper, Israel would also release members of the Palestinian Legislative Council who were detained in the aftermath of the IDF soldier’s abduction by Gaza terrorists in a cross-border raid on June 25, 2006.

Of course, we’ve had word of deals like this reach almost as high a fever pitch before, only to fall through completely when Hamas changes its demands to add another thousand or so terrorists. I won’t be surprised if that happens this time, too.