Countermoves

The other day Alan Dershowitz had an interesting and even-keeled comment in the Wall Street Journal (requires subs.) on the UCU-supported British academic boycott of Israel. I found this part heartening:

It is for these reasons that so many American academics, of all religious, ideological and political backgrounds, reacted so strongly to the threat of an academic boycott against Israel. As soon as it was reported, I helped to draft a simple petition in which signatories agreed to regard themselves as honorary Israeli academics for purposes of any boycott and "decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are excluded."
Working with Prof. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, and Ed Beck, the president of Scholars For Peace in the Middle East, we circulated the petition. I expected to gather several hundred signatures.
To my surprise, we have secured nearly 6,000 signatures, including those of 20 Nobel Prize winners, 14 university presidents as well as several heads of academic and professional societies. Three university presidents -- Lee Bollinger of Columbia, Robert Birgeneau of Berkeley and John Sexton of New York University -- have issued public statements declaring that if Israeli universities are boycotted, their American universities should be boycotted as well. Every day, I receive emails from other academics asking to be included as honorary Israeli academics for purposes of any boycott. We expect to reach at least 10,000 names on our petition.
It is fair to say, therefore, that the British boycott appears to be backfiring. British academics are on notice that if they try to isolate Israeli academics, it is they -- the British academics -- who will end up being isolated from some of the world's most prominent academics and scientists.

Also see here and here for similar moves.

There he goes again

Although I have read my fair share of illustrations of Jimmy Carter's looniness, time and again I am surprised by his ability to surpass himself. The Associated Press reports:

Former President Jimmy Carter accused the U.S., Israel and the European Union on Tuesday of seeking to divide the Palestinian people by reopening aid to President Mahmoud Abbas' new government in the West Bank while denying the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
[...]
Carter said the consensus of the U.S., Israel and the EU to start funneling aid to Abbas' new government in the West Bank but continue blocking Hamas in the Gaza Strip represented an "effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples."
"All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there's no effort from the outside to bring the two together," he said.
[...]
During his speech to Ireland's annual Forum on Human Rights, the 83-year-old former president said monitors from his Carter Center observed the 2006 election that Hamas won. He said the vote was "orderly and fair" and Hamas triumphed, in part, because it was "shrewd in selecting candidates," whereas a divided, corrupt Fatah ran multiple candidates for single seats.
Far from encouraging Hamas' move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the U.S. and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.
"That action was criminal," he said in a news conference after his speech.

I am all in favour of democracy (and in this regard one may note that Abbas was also elected), but I fail to see how what Hamas has been doing these past few weeks could conceivably be considered democratic and worthy of international aid. Only someone with Carter's warped mind could think something so absurd. The Investor's Business Daily makes the argument cogently:

As the Gaza Strip flamed into Hamas gang warfare and the West Bank slid into another civil war, Carter — cozy in distant Ireland accepting another "human rights" award — found cause Tuesday to blame America first for all the violence.
Amid wine, cheese and good feeling, America's worst ex-president drew a bead on the West. The refusal by the U.S., Israel and the EU to support Hamas, an armed terror group that just launched a coup d'etat and civil war in full view of the world, was nothing but a "criminal" act at the root of the trouble there, Carter asserted.
"The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah," he said.
The statement was so malevolent and illogical as to border on insane. Carter wasn't honest enough to say he was rooting for terrorists who started a terrifying new war in the region and trashed what little democratic rule the Palestinians had. Instead, he tut-tutted the West for being insufficiently sensitive to the fact that Hamas thugs were democratically elected in 2006 in an "orderly and fair" vote.
When one party has started a civil war, democracy isn't exactly the issue anymore. Just being elected does not justify making warfare on your fellow citizens. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly points out that those who are elected democratically have an obligation to govern democratically or they aren't democrats. Hamas has blown its right to democracy.
Carter also misstated and distorted technical aspects of democratic rule in the Palestinian Authority itself, further calling into question his intentions. Hamas' 42% plurality in the last parliamentary election gave the terror group a right to participate in government, but not absolute power.
Carter neglected to notice that President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine's head of state, not only had a full democratic right to appoint Hamas members to his Cabinet, but he also had the right to dismiss them as he did Thursday. Carter's selective respect for the power-sharing aspect of Palestine's democracy stands out as significantly skewed toward Hamas.
Crazier still, Carter insisted Hamas was entitled to American aid because Fatah had been getting it. But he left out some details: Hamas is a terrorist organization that had broken six previous cease-fires, and its campaign platform vowed to destroy Israel. Hamas would gladly take Western cash to make good on that campaign promise to voters.
No one in the West is obligated to support an international terrorist organization just because it "won" an election. The proper response is to cut it off until it renounces violence.
For refusing to fund Hamas but propping up the slightly less unworthy Fatah, Carter charged the U.S. with trying to "divide the Palestinians into two peoples."
With such words, Carter can hardly be called a peacemaker. In fact, he should have been profoundly ashamed at his acceptance of his Nobel Prize. Ironically, his partner in peace, Yasser Arafat, got his stolen and desecrated by the very Hamas Carter defends. That ought to give him pause as he defends terrorists as democrats.

Meanwhile, in reaction to Carter's scandalous statements, this morning the Drudge Report linked to an editorial which appeared in the Jerusalem Post. Here is a juicy tidbit:

Carter pressured the Shah to make what he termed human rights concessions by releasing political prisoners and relaxing press censorship. Khomeini could never have succeeded without Carter. The Islamic Revolution would have been stillborn.
Gen. Robert Huyser, Carter's military liaison to Iran, once told me in tears: "The president could have publicly condemned Khomeini and even kidnapped him and then bartered for an exchange with the [American Embassy] hostages, but the president was indignant. 'One cannot do that to a holy man,' he said."

Ironically, I agree that the Shah could not be permitted to run an authoritarian regime indefinitely, but, as should be self-evident, Carter's blundering made the situation infinitely worse. Unfortunately his latest comments demonstrate yet again that, for Carter, old age has not brought wisdom.

Barking up the wrong tree

Although the Economist is quite reliable on a host of issues, it has a characteristically blinkered editorial on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this week's issue. The piece's concluding paragraphs highlight what is wrong with its recommendations:

In the 1980s Israelis did not let their divisions over the occupied lands tear their nation apart. Why should they, so long as the Palestinians gave no hint of ever accepting Israel? It all began to change when by accepting the Jewish state's permanence Arafat made the dream of peace look real to Israelis.
The trick now is to make statehood look real enough to Palestinians for the majority to abandon Hamas's bleak vision of war to the end. Israelis say that they tried this at Camp David in 2000 and got nowhere. Well then, they—and the Americans—need to try again. When Palestinians come to believe that a generous two-state deal is really available, many may reconsider their support of Hamas. It is time to soften the economic pressure and negotiate a detailed promise of statehood that Mr Abbas can take to his people. It will be hard, but this is a better way to win the argument against Hamas than the past year's vain efforts to make the Palestinians jump through verbal hoops they have come to consider humiliating.

Verbal hoops? It seems to me that the people jumping through verbal hoops are the editors at the Economist. The premise for this editorial is that the great majority of Palestinians want peace, and would accept Israel if only they were certain that Israel would allow them to form a state. Unfortunately, this is simply untrue, as has been established repeatedly and incontrovertibly over several decades. It is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel would be willing – nay, eager – to relinquish its control over the West Bank, if it could do so without imperilling its security. This willigness has been expressed through opinion polls, elections and by much of the political establishment on numerous occasions, clearly and repeatedly. Therefore the availability of a generous two-state solution is manifestly not the goal that many Palestinians – not least their leaders from both Fatah and Hamas – are working for, otherwise they would have removed the main impediments to reaching such a resolution: their continuing violence against Israeli civilians, and the indoctrination of their children to believe that Israelis and Jews are the scum of the earth and that ultimately Israel will be violently removed and its residents pushed into the sea.
I'm not saying that there are no extremist Israelis who hate the Palestinians, and would not want to relinquish any land under any circumstances. What I am saying is that a crushing majority of Israelis do not want to fight the Palestinians, and would be happy to give up the virtual totality of the West Bank (making up the retention of a few of the largest settlements with territorial concessions elsewhere) so that the Palestinians could establish their own state. Therefore, what needs to be done now is not encourage the Palestinians to think – as the Economist wants Israel to do – that there is a possibility of them achieving their original, preferred goal: destroying the State of Israel and expelling its Jewish residents. What needs to be done, as Daniel Pipes has ably explained, is to convince the Palestinians that the best deal they are going to get is the one being offered to them by Israel, which by dint of being a stable democracy is able to impose the will of its population's crushing majority on a recalcitrant, mostly non-violent, meager minority – as was so starkly proven when Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip. This deal being offered to the Palestinians by Israel is very similar to the end result the Economist seems to advocate. It is therefore ironic, that it should support precisely the policies that will ensure that this outcome fails to materialise.

Following the money trail

Wretchard from The Belmont Club has some comments on Jimmy Carter (via Instapundit), and links to a hair-raising article by Alan Dershowitz, Ex-President for Sale, which goes some way to explaining Carter's peculiar world-view:

It now turns out that Jimmy Carter--who is accusing the Jews of buying the silence of the media and politicians regarding criticism of Israel--has been bought and paid for by Arab money. In his recent book tour to promote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter has been peddling a particularly nasty bit of bigotry. The canard is that Jews own and control the media, and prevent newspapers and the broadcast media from presenting an objective assessment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Jews have bought and paid for every single member of Congress so as to prevent any of them from espousing a balanced position. How else can anyone understand Carter's claims that it is impossible for the media and politicians to speak freely about Israel and the Middle East? The only explanation – and one that Carter tap dances around, but won't come out and say directly – is that Jews control the media and buy politicians. Carter then presents himself as the sole heroic figure in American public life who is free of financial constraints to discuss Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis.
[...]
Each of these claims is demonstrably false, as I have shown in detail elsewhere. The plight of the Palestinians has been covered more extensively, per capita, than the plight of any other group in the world, certainly more than the Tibetans and the victims of genocides in Darfur and Rwanda. Moreover, Carter totally ignores the impact of Arab oil money and the influence of the Saudi lobby. In numerous instances where the Arab lobbies have been pitted against the Israeli lobby, the former has prevailed.
[...]
It now turns out that the shoe is precisely on the other foot. Recent disclosures prove that it is Carter who has been bought and paid for by anti-Israel Arab and Islamic money.
Journalist Jacob Laksin has documented the tens of millions of dollars that the Carter Center has accepted from Saudi Arabian royalty and assorted other Middle Eastern sultans, who, in return, Carter dutifully praised as peaceful and tolerant (no matter how despotic the regime). And these are only the confirmed, public donations.
Carter has also accepted half a million dollars and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred. Zayed's personal foundation, the Zayed Center, claims that it was Zionists, rather than Nazis, who "were the people who killed the Jews in Europe" during the Holocaust. It has held lectures on the blood libel and conspiracy theories about Jews and America perpetrating Sept. 11.
Another journalist, Rachel Ehrenfeld, in a thorough and devastating article on "Carter’s Arab Financiers," meticulously catalogues Carter's ties to Arab moneymen, from a Saudi bailout of his peanut farm in 1976, to funding for Carter's presidential library, to continued support for all manner of Carter’s post-presidential activities. For instance, it was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), founded in Pakistan and fronted by a Saudi billionaire, Gaith Pharaon, that helped Carter start up his beloved Carter Center. According to Ehrenfeld: "BCCI's origins were primarily ideological. [Agha Hasan] Abedi wanted the bank to reflect the supra-national Muslim credo and 'the best bridge to help the world of Islam, and the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists.' As Ehrenfeld concluded:

"[I]t seems that AIPAC's real fault was its failure to outdo the Saudi's purchases of the former president's loyalty. There has not been any nation in the world that has been more cooperative than Saudi Arabia," The New York Times quoted Mr. Carter June 1977, thus making the Saudis a major factor in U.S. foreign policy.
"Evidently, the millions in Arab petrodollars feeding Mr. Carter's global endeavors, often in conflict with U.S. government policies, also ensure his loyalty."

It is particularly disturbing that a former president who has accepted dirty blood-money from dictators, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and supporters of terrorism should try to deflect attention from his own conflicts of interest by raising the oldest canard in the sordid history of anti-Semitism: namely, that Jews have dual loyalty and use their money improperly to influence the country they live in, in favor of the country to which they owe their real allegiance.

Do read the whole thing. I find these disclosures to be particularly amazing considering that the Bush clan gets constantly harangued by the left for its supposed ties to the Saudis. It's always interesting to discover that what seemed to be a potentially legitimate criticism, is in reality only voiced if it applies to political opponents.
Incidentally, Commentary magazine has posted an essay by Joshua Muravchik that is to appear in the February 2007 issue: Our Worst Ex-President. No prizes for guessing who that refers to.

An admission? Maybe not

As I have noted before, the major human rights organisations are a disgrace. The New York Sun had an excellent editorial last week, which underlines just how low Human Rights Watch has stooped:

Shortly before Christmas, the group released a 24-page report that attempts to rescue its earlier accusation that "On July 23, at 11:15 p.m., Israeli warplanes struck two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances in the village of Qana."
Based on photographic evidence of the ambulances that was inconsistent with the allegation, third parties, such as Australia's foreign minister, labeled the alleged incident a clear "hoax." That the group, which styles itself as an objective investigative human rights organization, accepted the claim without question is troubling.
Attempting to salvage its credibility following extensive criticism of its summer report, Human Rights Watch dispatched researchers to Lebanon to collect evidence on the alleged event. The new report summarizes their findings.
"Human Rights Watch originally reported that the ambulances had been struck by missiles fired from an Israeli airplane, but that conclusion was incorrect," the report states. The Lebanese ambulances could not have been struck by missiles fired by an Israeli warplane "as such missiles would have caused much more massive destruction and have left a huge crater." Additionally, "the limited damage caused, and the non-existence of heavy shrapnel, also rule out an artillery-fired round." Moreover, "none of the witnesses reported hearing helicopters in the air before or during the attack." And the researchers found no "diagnostic shrapnel or missile parts in the street." The report contains no evidence whatsoever of any other Israeli presence in the area that could have attacked the ambulances.
Yet, Human Rights Watch buries these critical admissions in the middle of the document and instead headlines the report with a claim that the group did no wrong. "On the basis of this investigation," the report says, "we conclude that the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead."
What is the evidence for the new allegation of an Israeli drone attack using missiles? The report makes clear that there is none. This time, Human Rights Watch is not being duped by a fabrication — it is the fabricator.

Do read the whole sickening exposé.

The fence works

Surprise! The Israeli security fence actually works - preventing suicide attacks, according to the leader of one of the foremost Palestinian terrorist organisations (via Melanie Phillips):

On November 11, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Abdallah Ramadan Shalah granted a long interview to Al-Manar TV, Hezbollah's television channel. During the interview, for the first time he admitted that Israel's security fence was an important obstacle to the terrorist organizations (the "resistance").
He noted that the suicide bombing attacks (istishhad) were the Palestinian people's "strategic choice," and were meant to "create a balance of force and deterrence" in the campaign against a superior enemy. Ramadan Shalah noted that the terrorist organizations had every intention of continuing suicide bombing attacks, but that their timing and the possibility of implementing them from the West Bank depended on other factors. "For example," he said, "there is the separation fence, which is an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there the situation would be entirely different."

Who knew?

A second Lebanon War in 2006?

A few days ago John Keegan wrote an interesting article in the Daily Telegraph (where he is defense correspondent) in which he argues as follows:

There will soon be another war in the Middle East, this time a renewal of the conflict between the Israel Defence Force (IDF) and Hizbollah. The conflict is inevitable and unavoidable. It will come about because Israel cannot tolerate the rebuilding of Hizbollah's fortified zone in south Lebanon, from which last year it launched its missile bombardment of northern Israel.
Hizbollah has now reconstructed the fortified zone and is replenishing its stocks of missiles there. Hamas is also creating a fortified zone in the Gaza Strip and building up its stocks of missiles. Israel, therefore, faces missile attack on two fronts. When the Israel general staff decides the threat has become intolerable, it will strike.

Do read the whole thing, which seems quite reasonable to me. What struck me as most surprising in his analysis, however, was this (emphasis mine):

What is certain is that – probably before the year is out – Israel will have struck at Hizbollah in south Lebanon. And the strike will come even sooner if Hizbollah reopens its missile bombardment of northern Israel from its underground systems.

If the time frame of this prediction turns out to be correct we are looking at a reopening of the hostilities in the next few weeks (the year ends in less than two months). Remarkable.

Now we'll use force

Is it any wonder that many Israelis - and those who sympathise with them - consider the UN anti-Israel? After repeatedly and shrilly insisting that the UNIFIL forces would never dare disarm Hezbollah, we've finally found a case in which they would be willing to use force: against Israel!
Ha'aretz reports (via lgf):

Commanders of the French contingent of the United Nations force in Lebanon have warned that they might have to open fire if Israel Air Force warplanes continue their overflights in Lebanon, Defense Minister Amir Peretz told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.
Peretz said that nevertheless, Israel would continue to patrol the skies over Lebanon as long as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 remained unfulfilled, adding that such operations were critical for the country's security, especially as the abducted IDF soldiers remain in Hezbollah custody and the transfer of arms continue.
Over the past few days, Peretz said, Israel had gathered clear evidence that Syria was transferring arms and ammunition to Lebanon, meaning that the embargo imposed by UN Resolution 1701 was not being completely enforced.

Quelle surprise!
Meanwhile, I am sorry to have to admit that my previously cautiously optimistic view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seems to be showing some cracks. If the Second Intifada dashed any hope of reviving the Oslo Accords, this summer's war with Hezbollah makes it much harder to argue in favour of Israel's unilateral withdrawal from any further territory. I was a firm supporter of the withdrawal from Gaza and the policy objectives that came with it, and although I still think it was a good idea, I think the argument that such moves put Israeli security in jeopardy has been strongly boosted by the discovery of Hezbollah's covert activities in the Lebanese territory Israel returned to Lebanon in 2000.
This month's Commentary magazine has some interesting reflections on these points, by Hillel Halkin, in Israel's New Reality (requires subs. after the end of the month; see here for free version).

The Guardian's dishonesty

It is truly a pity to see how appallingly dishonest and shoddy the Guardian, considered by some Britain's foremost daily, has become in its reporting. William Sjostrom at AtlanticBlog illustrates a recent despicable example. The article begins:

George Bush last night admitted that Saddam Hussein had no hand in the 9/11 terror attacks, but he asked Americans to support a war in Iraq that he said was the defining struggle of our age.
[...]
The president conceded some crucial ideological ground, formally disavowing the neo-conservative accusation that Saddam had played a role in the attacks on September 11 2001. But he was unapologetic about the decision to invade Iraq.

AtlanticBlog notes:

Is the Guardian really this incompetent, that neither its reporter nor its editors pay attention to their own stories, or is something else going on? In 2003, the Guardian says Bush "admits", then three years later does the same thing, in neither case saying when Bush made the claim. Any suspicions that the Guardian is a newspaper rather than a tiresome propoganda rag are once again eliminated.

Do read the whole thing. Harry's Place also mentions this and notes:

The Guardian story in a nutshell: Bush has once again 'admitted' that something he and his administration never said, wasn't the case.

Also see Melanie Phillips' comments, where she expands on the Al Qaeda-Iraq question. Elsewhere, in regards to the Lebanese Red Cross ambulance story, Tim Blair makes a good point:

Mayes, reasonably enough, allows for "inconsistencies and anomalies" in reporting from war zones. Perhaps, then, the Guardian's initial report should have indicated some fog-of-war doubt over the claims made to their correspondent instead of stating as fact: "Israel's rocket strike on two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances on Sunday night set a deadly new milestone [...] Two ambulances were entirely destroyed, their roofs pierced by missiles."
[...]
Great work, Clouseau.

Do read the whole thing. And then journalists wonder why the MSM is not trusted...

International law, only if it fits the agenda

I have mentioned before that I am somewhat skeptical of international law and international organisations. I have recently seen two cases which underline one of my concerns. Many of the most ardent supporters of international law and its apparatuses, often seem to be more interested in using the principles involved to further what can only be termed nakedly political ends, while completely ignoring any principles or precedents which are unhelpful or contrary to those ends.
The first example I encountered this week comes from the Claremont Institute blog, The Remedy, and has to do with the right to self defense:

Glenn Reynolds alerts us to this U.N. Report which denies that there is such a thing as a right to self-defense in international law.

No international human right of self-defence is expressly set forth in the primary sources of international law: treaties, customary law, or general principles.

[...]People writing reports for the U.N. should consider what the founders of the modern ideas of the law of nations had to say about the subject. Hugo Grotius was quite clear on the subject. Emmerich de Vattel was too.
[...]
The U.N. is therefore wrong to say, "primary sources of international law: treaties, customary law, or general principles." Clearly the U.N. has cut international law off from its root.
Of course, as I have noted before the U.N., has grown to be hostile to the natural rights foundation of the United States by its very nature. At the foundation of the U.N.'s understanding of law is an idea that is irreconcilable with the natural rights foundation of the U.S. Hence the U.N. does not grasp the necessity of a natural right to self-defense, a right of inestimable importance to us, and formidable only to those who would be tyrants.

Do read the whole thing.
The second instance regards the West Bank, and the fact that some people claim Israel should not be allowed to enact a unilateral withdrawal. Apart from the fact that I find it unlikely that someone in good faith could expect Israel to establish its final borders in negotiation with an entity which does not recognize its right to exist tout cour and advocates its destruction, there was an article in the July-August issue of Commentary, Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders by Michael I. Krauss and J. Peter Pham (requires subs.), which explores some of the international law issues which are involved. It goes over the relevant history and has a concurrent legal discussion which is particularly interesting. Here is the conclusion:

None of this is to suggest that Israel's legal and historical claims to sovereignty in the West Bank require it to remain there. But neither is it required to consult either the Palestinian Arabs or the self-appointed representatives of the "international community" if it decides to withdraw from some territory and determine its own borders. As Ariel Sharon and now Ehud Olmert have argued, it may well be in Israel's national interest to disentangle itself, as much as prudence requires, from the Palestinians and the territory in which they predominate. As many Israelis see it, to do any less might court the risk of Israel itself becoming an "occupied territory"- and at the hands of a far less benign power.
It would be best to bring about any such disengagement through negotiations with a credible and well-meaning Palestinian counterpart. But for now and the foreseeable future, the seat on the other side of the table remains empty. In this circumstance, exactly as in the 1967 war of aggression that attempted its annihilation, Israel, if it chooses to do so, has every legal right to act alone.

A copy of the article can be found here (pdf). Do read the whole thing.

Biased, as usual

It is truly a pity that Amnesty Interantional and Human Rights Watch have come to represent the positions of the international far Left, often abandoning any objectivity and therefore significantly damaging their effectiveness (and usefulness).
According to the Financial Times:

Amnesty International says attacks on civilian targets by Israeli military forces during the recently ended fighting in Lebanon look like deliberate war crimes.
In a report released on Wednesday, the London-based human rights organisation argues that the destruction of Lebanese homes and basic infrastructure "was an integral part of the military strategy".
Noting violations by both sides, Amnesty says it has asked the United Nations to open a "comprehensive, independent and impartial inquiry" about the 34-day war between Israel and the Lebanese-based Hizbollah militia.

David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy (via Instapundit) illustrates the absurdities of the report and also of the positions of HRW’s director, Kenneth Roth:

The idea that a country at war can't attack the enemy's resupply routes (at least until it has direct evidence that there is a particular military shipment arriving) has nothing to do with human rights or war crimes, and a lot to do with a pacifist attitude that seeks to make war, regardless of the justification for it or the restraint in prosecuting it [at least if it's a Western country doing it], an international "crime."
[...]
I also have to question the "high number of civilian casualties" that Amnesty is reportedly relying on. Any innocent civilian death are tragic, but 1,000 or so (alleged, we don't really know) civilians in a month of urban warfare against an enemy that based itself in the middle of cities and villages hardly seems excessive by any objective standard. The idea that Israel deliberately targeted civilians should be self-refuting to anyone with common sense, given the low level of casualties relative to the destructive power of the Israeli air force.
[...]
According to Roth's logic, Israel can only retaliate if it's retaliation will cost no more civilian lives in Gaza or Lebanon than would be caused by the terrorists if Israel didn't try to stop them. This is a formula that would paralyze not only Israel, but the U.S., Russian, India, and any other country that feels the need to pursue a military response to terrorism. Surely, the Allied forces inadvertantly killed more Afghan civilians than the number of Westerners likely at immediate risk from Al Qaeda and the Taliban! The type of "international law" and "human rights" activism that Roth and co. represent is scrupulously amoral in failing to consider that the aggressor should be held responsible for the deaths on both sides, as you can't expect any nation to allow its civilians to be attacked and not retaliate militarily.

Do read the whole thing, which mentions some other interesting points. One of the commenters mentions a short article in Capitalism Magazine (whose brashness I often find deliciously refreshing), which puts things in a, er, slightly different perspective from AI and HRW:

The primary purpose and moral obligation of any legitimate government is to protect the lives and rights of its own citizens. Hezbollah, a military wing of the Islamic dictatorship of Iran, had been explicit in its desire to destroy Israel and had been preparing to do so for the last several years from inside Lebanon, but Israel’s government did virtually nothing to pre-empt the recent attack.
When Hezbollah attacked, Israel significantly dampened its response in order to minimize the killing of "Lebanese civilians," thereby allowing many Hezbollah terrorists to live and kill Israelis. It was immoral for Israel's government to sacrifice a single Israeli soldier or civilian to save the lives of those Lebanese civilians who chose to remain in a region occupied years earlier by a terrorist organization.

Also see here, where this subject is expanded on. I had to almost laugh out loud as I was contemplating what the general reaction would be if this were the kind of strong condemnation of the Israeli government Amnesty and HRW felt impelled to make...

Post Scriptum:
I see that Instapundit has linked to an excellent Steven Den Beste post from 2003 which takes a more in-depth look at the faults and biases of Amnesty International and HRW. Do read the whole thing.

Post Scriptum II:
And the hits keep on coming!

The situation in Lebanon

I am somewhat conflicted by what is happening in Israel and Lebanon, as I feel terrible about the civilian casualties on both sides, while at the same time I see the necessity and justification for the Israeli response. At any rate I think this Washington Post column by Charles Krauthammer describes why this is a unique opportunity:

Hence the golden, unprecedented opportunity. Hezbollah makes a fatal mistake. It crosses the U.N.-delineated international frontier to attack Israel, kill soldiers and take hostages. This aggression is so naked that even Russia joins in the Group of Eight summit communique blaming Hezbollah for the violence and calling for the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty in the south.
But only one country has the capacity to do the job. That is Israel, now recognized by the world as forced into this fight by Hezbollah's aggression.
The road to a solution is therefore clear: Israel liberates south Lebanon and gives it back to the Lebanese.

Emphasis mine. I think the Israeli government should be more strenuous in asserting this last aspect. It should repeatedly call on the Lebanese government to cooperate with Israel, as Israel intends to pull back as soon as its very reasonable objectives are fulfilled, and collaborating will minimize civilian casualties, disarm Hezbollah more effectively and protect the Lebanese infrastructure. Obviously the Lebanese government would probably not accede to these sincere demands (as Hezbollah is even part of the governing coalition), but if so they would at least undermine the claim that Lebanon is stuck between two warring parties.
Naturally, the military straregy is of essence as well:

It starts by preparing the ground with air power, just as the Persian Gulf War began with a 40-day air campaign. But if all that happens is the air campaign, the result will be failure. Hezbollah will remain in place, Israel will remain under the gun, Lebanon will remain divided and unfree. And this war will start again at a time of Hezbollah and Iran's choosing.
Just as in Kuwait in 1991, what must follow the air campaign is a land invasion to clear the ground and expel the occupier. Israel must retake south Lebanon and expel Hezbollah. It would then declare the obvious: that it has no claim to Lebanese territory and is prepared to withdraw and hand south Lebanon over to the Lebanese army (augmented perhaps by an international force), thus finally bringing about what the world has demanded -- implementation of Resolution 1559 and restoration of south Lebanon to Lebanese sovereignty.

Do read the whole thing. And to keep abreast of the latest news and commentary an excellent source is Pajamas Media, whose latest roundup can be found here.

This is leadership

Good news:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed Monday to continue his plan for unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, saying that the current round of violence would not stop the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
"I haven't changed my basic commitment to the realignment plan," Olmert told foreign reporters in Jerusalem. "I am absolutely determined to carry out the separation from the Palestinians and establish secure borders."
He said that Israel had no policy of trying to topple the Hamas-led Palestinian government despite its arrest of dozens of Hamas officials and military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
"We have no particular desire to topple the Hamas government as a policy. We have a desire to prevent terrorists from inflicting terrorism on the Israeli people," he said.
Olmert also rejected European Union criticism of Israel's
military offensive in Gaza, saying the EU should focus instead on Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel.
"When was the last time that the European Union condemned this shooting and suggested effective measures to stop it?" Olmert asked. "At some point, Israel had no point but to take some measures in order to stop this thing."

I'm glad to see I agree with everything Olmert said. I strongly feel this is a courageous and moderate stand to take. See this and also see some interesting comments from Melanie Phillips which put things in much needed perspective:

Let us remind ourselves of the context. Israel was condemned for its occupation of Gaza, which was said to be creating 'despair' and 'frustration' that was causing violence against Israel. Israel withdrew from Gaza. From the day it withdrew, the Palestinians started firing rockets from Gaza into Israel. These rockets have caused some fatalities and injuries. More than 1000 have been fired since the withdrawal. Now two rockets have hit Ashkelon, one hitting a school playground which just happened to be empty. As the Haaretz writer Ze'ev Schiff has observed, this constitutes 'an unequivocal invitation by Hamas to war.'
Virtually none of these attacks has been reported in Britain.
The Palestinians have been smuggling into Gaza a vast arsenal of weaponry and have been tunnelling into Israel. If they haven't got it already, it is only a matter of time before they get chemical or biological material with which to arm these weapons still further. For the Palestinians, withdrawal from Gaza has provided the opportunity to ratchet up their war against Israel. So much was always entirely predictable (including to people like myself, who supported withdrawal as the lesser of two terrible evils). Since Israel no longer occupied Gaza, it should have been plain — to those who didn't believe it previously — from these post-withdrawal attacks that the Palestinians' war was not one of liberation but of extermination (as they had so helpfully announced in both the Palestinian national charter and the Hamas charter).
Virtually none of this has been reported in Britain.
It was only with the tunnel raid on Israel, the killing of the Israeli soldiers, the kidnapping of Cpl Shalit and the subsequent murder of an Israeli teenager on the West Bank that Israel finally responded. It had taken months for it to do so. And so how did it respond? It destroyed two bridges and a power station — and the British media immediately screamed that these were war crimes and 'collective punishment', even though virtually no Palestinians at that stage had been killed.
Today, the fighting escalated and so did the casualties. Such is the inevitable price of a war declared upon Israel. Such civilians who are regrettably killed become casualties because the men of terror position themselves amongst them, thus effectively using the Palestinian population as human shields as this small snippet illustrates.

Do read the whole thing.

Never mind

The Jerusalem Post reports:

While sticking to its demand for the establishment of an independent inquiry into a blast on a Gaza beach 10 days ago that killed seven Palestinian civilians, the Human Rights Watch conceded Monday night for the first time since the incident that it could not contradict the IDF's exonerating findings.
On Monday, Maj.-Gen. Meir Klifi - head of the IDF inquiry commission that cleared the IDF of responsibility for the blast - met with Marc Garlasco, a military expert from the HRW who had last week claimed that the blast was caused by an IDF artillery shell. Following the three-hour meeting, described by both sides as cordial and pleasant, Garlasco praised the IDF's professional investigation into the blast, which he said was most likely caused by unexploded Israeli ordnance left laying on the beach, a possibility also raised by Klifi and his team.
[...]
Garlasco told Klifi during the meeting that he was impressed with the IDF's system of checks and balances concerning its artillery fire in the Gaza Strip and unlike Hamas which specifically targeted civilians in its rocket attacks, the Israelis, he said, invested a great amount of resources and efforts not to harm innocent civilians. "We do not believe the Israelis were targeting civilians." Garlasco said. "We just want to know if it was an Israeli shell that killed the Palestinians."

Adloyada (via Harry's Place and Instapundit – also see Haditha developments there) wonders:

As I commented previously, Mr Garlasco seems to have a remarkable tendency to radically recast his accounts of his actions to match emerging evidence. His entire previous case was about active Israeli shelling dropping out of the sky, which he had said was almost beyond doubt responsible.
And I wonder if Chris McGreal of the Guardian, Donald McIntyre of the Independent, and the BBC News web site will now report in full Garlasco and Human Rights Watch's latest statements that the Israeli forces invest such effort not to harm innocent civilians and were correct in stating that an errant shell did not cause the killings.
And will they raise questions about the Palestinian witness evidence they so graphically reported, which had barrages of shells landing in the midst of the family on the beach?

As they say in German: So siehst du aus!

Post Scriptum:
Also see these interesting comments from Meryl Yourish and Perry de Havilland.