More Timely Than Ever!

More Timely Than Ever!

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Question of the Day

Killing civilians who may have tried to defend themselves when their aid ship was boarded by an armed force on the high seas is the new self-defense?
Posted by Sheldon Richman at 8:31 AM
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4 comments:

Eric Hanneken said...

This is self-defense in the same sense that ATF agents were defending themselves from an "ambush" at the Branch Davidians' home in Mount Carmel, TX.

June 1, 2010 at 10:21 AM
Samson said...

Thank you.

I was starting to wonder. I get the FFF newsletter email. And when I opened it, I was a bit struck by the fact that the Gaza incident was unmentioned in any of its news headlines. I'd been on more lefty websites all morning up until then, and they are of course filled with outrage over this attack. So it was rather striking to open up the FFF newsletter and see a set of headlines that never mentioned the attack.

So, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the new blog posts, came here and found you talking about this.

Thus, a "thank you".

You've got it exactly right of course. Note these three different versions of self-defense in the same story.

-- Israel has the right to attack anyone anywhere at anytime if they feel that they imagine that they feel threatened.

-- The people on the boat have zero right to any self defense at all when attacked in the dark by armed raider.

-- The armed raiders have the right to open fire with machine guns on a crowd and kill nearly 20 people and wound 60 more because they saw someone with a sharp object or because someone struggled for a gun.

The most basic idea of freedom is that every one has the same rights. When you see three different rights of self-defense for different groups in the same story, the one thing that is sure is that you are not seeing freedom or justice.

June 1, 2010 at 12:43 PM
JimiG said...

You took the words right out of my mouth, Sheldon.

June 1, 2010 at 5:12 PM
Kevin Carson said...

Well, the U.S. seems to define a "threat" as the ability to fight back when attacked by the U.S. so this makes a perverse kind of sense.

I actually saw a TV news story once about Hugo Chavez threatening to repel a hypothetical American invasion, headlined as "Hugo Chavez threatens U.S."

Whod've thought Bil Keane's lame-ass "Billy hit me back" shtik would actually be topical humor?

June 3, 2010 at 12:58 AM

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