Friday, June 29, 2018

TGIF: Why Palestine Matters


Why does Palestine matter? It's a question I ask myself nearly every day. Another way to put it is, "Is the devotion of major attention to the plight of the Palestinians an obsession worthy of suspicion or an appropriate response to a grave historic and continuing injustice? 
No one will be surprised when I reply that major attention is an appropriate response. Palestine matters and should matter. I will try to explain why.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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Friday, June 22, 2018

TGIF: What Does Trump Have Against Children?

 
I hate the children being taken away.
--Donald Trump
Finally, a tweet we can believe. He does seem to hate those children. Trump does seem to hate those immigrant children; he must because they’re part of the “infestation” he’s so alarmed about.
Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Fiddler on the Roof with a New Ending


Tevye the dairyman is packing his family's belongings because the tsar has just expelled the Jews from Anatevka. As he prepares to leave, a younger resident of the shtetl says, "Reb Tevye, look at the bright side. Beginning in about 50 years, our descendants will do the same thing to the people of Palestine. Won't that be wonderful?"

 Tevye smacks the kid in the face, sheds a tear, and heads for New York.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

The Logical Flaw in Immigration Law

Apart from the obvious rights violation, I see a serious flaw at the very root of immigration law. Let's begin with an indisputable point: no law passed by Congress and signed by a president applies to people on the far side of a US border. Logically, that must include laws against entering the US. Since the US government has no jurisdiction over people in, say, Mexico, someone who crosses the southern border cannot do so illegally because the law in question did not apply to that person when he or she was crossing. No jurisdiction, no illegal entry. That's just logic.

Well, the immigration-control enthusiast may respond, we can change the law to say that no one can stay in the US without papers signifying permission to do so from the proper authorities. (Leave aside the general question of proper authority.) Now we have a new problem. According to this position, Person A, having been born here, needs no permission, but person B, having been born elsewhere, does need permission and can be expelled without it.

But that's discrimination by the government and thus a violation of equality under the law, a core liberal value (as long there are governments making laws). On what basis is that discrimination perpetrated? On the basis of birthplace -- hardly one that can withstand rational scrutiny. No one is harmed -- in the sense of having his or her rights violated -- merely because someone who was not born here resides in the US without government permission. No harm, no foul. The policy is simply vicious discrimination.

I remind the constitutionalists that their beloved document makes no reference to birthplace in its clauses related to rights. Rights and protections against their violation are said to apply to persons, not citizens. See the Fourth Amendment. All persons, no matter their birthplace, have the same rights.

Therefore, all legislative diktats relevant to immigration control fail the test of reason and should be stricken forthwith. No US law could have been broken by the entry, and on the matter of who can stay here, the government has no good grounds to discriminate between people who were born here and people who were not.

Friday, June 15, 2018

TGIF: Trump, North Korea, and Iran

As one of the original settlers of the sparsely populated territory situated between the deranged and warring states of Antitrumplandia and Philotrumplandia, I'm breathing easier today. 
Anyone who longs for peace can only welcome what Trump and Kim did in Singapore this week. It's just the beginning, of course, and things could go south at any time, but -- and this shouldn't have to be said -- it's preferable to the other available alternatives. Trump's earlier threats were insanely reckless and risky, and I stand by that judgment. One cannot point to Tuesday as proof that Trump's initial stance was reasonable. No person with a gram of historical knowledge -- not to mention moral decency -- can think that peace-making required a threat to visit "fire and fury" on an entire society. In fact, Trump's threat did not get Kim to the table; on the contrary, Kim's nuclear tests
and South Korean President Moon got Trump to the table.
Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

Saturday, June 09, 2018

Friday, June 08, 2018

TGIF: Separation, Not Association, Requires Force

Whenever I write about Palestine, Israel, and Zionism -- especially when I point out that American Reform Jews en masse gagged on the thought that America was not their "homeland"; they insisted they were Jewish Americans not American Jews -- I am lectured on Facebook about how "keeping to one's own kind" is a natural inclination and that inclusion, not exclusion, requires aggression. We shouldn't be surprised, then, that alt-right-types who may dislike Jews nevertheless respect their expressed desire to live among themselves in a Jewish State. Why wouldn't the alt-right take this position? Israel is a (pseudo)ethno-state. It is identitarianism run amok.
Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

Wednesday, June 06, 2018

51 Years of Israeli Occupation


This is the 51st anniversary of Israel's 1967 war against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians. The so-called Six-Day War began the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai peninsula, which was eventually relinquished by Israel. It also continued the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began around 1948.

After more than half a century, should we continue to call this an occupation? Israel has annexed the West Bank, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem for those the state regards as Jews. The Gaza Strip is a prison camp into the which the guards do not go, preferring to gun down protesting prisoners and medics from a safe distance outside the fence while the authorities fully control the ingress and egress of people and goods like building materials, medicines, and other vital things. Every so often the Israeli Air Force bombs Gaza to smithereens.

Contrary to popular myth, it was not a defensive war on Israel's part. The top Israeli political and military leaders knew there was no existential threat to the country. For one thing, the leading Arab power, Egypt under President Nasser, was embroiled in a civil war in Yemen, not an opportune time to start a war with Israel.

But rather than rehearse the facts, I list here some pertinent articles I published in the early 1990s.

"Israel's 1967 Attack Was Aggression; Israel's Current Occupation Is Illegal"

 "The Golan Heights: A History of Israeli Aggression"

"US Journalists Consistently Ignore Israeli State Terrorism"

"'Who is a Jew' Matters in Israel"

 Here's a more recent account from Zena Tahhan, "The Naksa: How Israel Occupied the Whole of Palestine in 1967." See also Ramzy Baroud, "The Colonization of Palestine: Rethinking the Term 'Israeli Occupation.'"

Saturday, June 02, 2018

The Decent Must Weep

Razan al-Najjar, 21
Razan al-Najjar, 21, a paramedic helping injured protesters in the Gaza Strip, was murdered by what Benjamin Netanyahu insists the Palestinians recognize as the State of the Jewish People.
How, in these conditions, can individuals who are not religious believers but simply humanists, democrats and liberals, and endowed with a minimum of honesty, continue to define themselves as Jews? 
--Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew
Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.
--Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population. 
--Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan

Friday, June 01, 2018

TGIF: How the US Created Israel and a Whole Lot of Trouble

Calvin Coolidge Signs Bigoted Immigration Act of 1924

Shlomo Sand, a remarkable scholar who studies how "peoples," including the Jewish people, have been invented through myths propagated by court historians and politicians, makes a startling yet obvious connection in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel (2014):

In fact, it was the United States' refusal, between the anti-immigration legislation of 1924 and the year 1948, to accept the victims of European Judeophobic persecution that enabled decision makers to channel somewhat more significant numbers of Jews toward the Middle East. Absent this stern anti-immigration policy, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have been established. [Emphasis added.]

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!