…in the media business, when Nat Hentoff is laid off from the Village Voice. He was an institution in his own right, after fifty years.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
“Proportionality”
Tigerhawk has some thoughts on this lefty canard:
During 2006’s Hezbollah war I wrote this post, which remains sadly germane to the present fighting with Hamas:
The left claims that the powerful states of the world, especially the United States and Israel, need not fear for their security because they can use their military power to deter aggression. To a post-Cold War lefty, the magic of deterrence supposedly obviates the need to intervene preemptively, or to remove regimes that commit “petty” acts of war against us or even declare themselves to be our enemy. See, e.g., the most frequently offered reasons why we should not have removed Saddam, or should not consider military options to deal with Iran. We can, after all, obliterate any power that actually attacks us, so why worry?
What your basic anti-defense lefty does not admit, however, is that effective deterrence requires not only the capability to retaliate, but that the threat to retaliate be credible. The former without the latter is worthless.
The requirement that retaliation be proportional reather than “massive” destroys the credibility of the threat to retaliate and therefore the effectiveness of the deterrance. Why? Because it allows the attacker to determine the price he will pay for launching the attack. If the attacker knows that he can absorb a blow equal to the one he delivers, then he will not be concerned that the defender has the capability to retaliate massively.
This is like limiting the penalty for property crimes to restitution. Why not rob the bank? If you’re caught, you only have to give the money back.
The advocates of “proportionality”, therefore, are undermining the effectiveness of threatened massive retaliation as a means for preventing war. If the left succeeds in promoting this ridiculous idea as a new norm of international behavior or requirement of international law, it will have destroyed the effectiveness of deterrence, the one means that we know reliably prevents war in the first place. Surely this is not what the left and the Europeans hope to accomplish.
Surely not…
[Update a few minutes later]
Michael Totten asks what a proportionate response would look like:
The Israeli counterattack is, indeed, disproportionate, but it could hardly be otherwise. “At last count,” J.G. Thayer wrote, “one Israeli and two Palestinians (sisters, ages 13 and 5) died from rocket attacks. So a proportionate response, one presumes, would have required Israel to kill a single Palestinian and two of its own citizens.”
There were, I suppose, other “proportionate” responses available aside from killing one Palestinian and two Israelis. The Israel Defense Forces might have launched thousands of air strikes against targets in Gaza to match the thousands of Qassam rockets fired at the cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. It’s unlikely, however, that this is what Israel’s critics have in mind.
So what do they have in mind? What would a legitimate and “proportionate” response actually look like? Surely they don’t believe Israel should scrap its sophisticated weapons systems, build Qassam rockets, and launch those at Gaza instead.
It’s hard to know what they believe, other than that Israel is intrinsically evil.
[Late morning update]
More thoughts from Alan Dershowitz:
The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.
The attacks on Israeli citizens have little to do with what Israel does or does not do. They have everything to do with an ideology that despises – and openly seeks to destroy – the Jewish state. Consider that rocket attacks increased substantially after Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and they accelerated further after Hamas seized control last year.
In the past months, a shaky cease-fire, organized by Egypt, was in effect. Hamas agreed to stop the rockets and Israel agreed to stop taking military action against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. The cease-fire itself was morally dubious and legally asymmetrical.
Israel, in effect, was saying to Hamas: If you stop engaging in the war crime of targeting our innocent civilians, we will stop engaging in the entirely lawful military acts of targeting your terrorists. Under the cease-fire, Israel reserved the right to engage in self-defense actions such as attacking terrorists who were in the course of firing rockets at its civilians.
The world (and much of the media) is nuts when it comes to Israel.
[Afternoon update]
Heh. Disproportionate humanitarian aid:
No indication yet that any aid packages have been strapped onto the 6300 (and counting) missiles those humanitarians from Hamas have fired into Israel since 2005. It seems to me this Israeli aid is very disproportionate. We’ll be back to let you know if the New York Times thinks it should stop until Hamas catches up.
I won’t hold my breath.
Zionist Nazis
Maybe someone can correct my faulty memory, but I don’t recall anything in history about the Jews launching rockets at the surrounding Polish towns from Auschwitz.
That’s Probably His Last Appearance
Christopher Hitchens verbally demolishes Bill MoronMaher and his imbecilic audience (and no doubt, some of my commenters). “Bush IQ jokes are the ones for stupid people.”
This Should Put Her Over The Top
Caroline Kennedy has gotten the coveted Rosa Ortiz endorsement:
Senora Kennedy she is always know the issues. Every morning she always tell me, “Rosa, where is my New York Time paper?” Then she read it before she go to Fifth Avenue for the shopping. When she get back she tell me to put it in the recycle because to save the planet.
Senora Kennedy is the good boss for the people. She treat everybody on the staff very nice and no yell. We all get one day off in the week and she give the $200 bonus this Christmas. Except Maria because she broke the crystal bowl in the office when she dusting.
Senora Kennedy knows how to call the taxi. Senora Kennedy say to tell you she sometime call taxi by herself.
We’re so fortunate to have investigative reporter David Burge to ferret these things out. But Camelot Barbie shouldn’t feel too bad — Extreme Mortman has come up with a list of ten marketing flops that are bigger than her Senate bid. I think that Waterworld
is worse, too.
Goodie
I know, I know, we culturally insensitive types are always kvetching about how the radical Islamists want to take us back to the seventh century. Well, OK, we were wrong. They want to go even farther back:
On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari’a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.
Hamas’s endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn’t feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.
I’m sure that the usual human rights groups suspects will be complaining any minute now.
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Bailout Rage
Arnold Kling vents:
De Rugy and the others also mention my other frustrations. First, that the Republican Party betrayed libertarians so badly on this issue. Second, that the media portrayed opponents of the bailout as unserious and ideological. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson were hailed as saviors, even though they could just have easily been portrayed as bumblers. The whole thing was portrayed as government having no choice but to come in and clean up the private sector’s mess, rather than an ill-conceived attempt to stop markets from adjusting to a mess that was created by a combination of market failure and government failure. Third, that even though much of the public instinctively and correctly opposed the bailout, it sailed through without costing Congressmen their seats.
The one upbeat commentator is Len Gilroy. He thinks that the high level of indebtedness of government will force politicians to scale back spending and to privatize. I’m sorry, but he comes off sounding like Mary Poppins on laughing gas.
As a commenter notes, the only hope is that a lot of non-libertarians are outraged, too. I hope it doesn’t end in riots, but I hope it ends.
Looking Pretty Damn Good…
…for a grandmother. Sarah Palin, that is:
The teenage daughter of former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has given birth to a son months after the announcement of her pregnancy became one of the first dark clouds to swirl over the Alaska governor’s candidacy.
I can do the math. Will the moronic troofers (including you-know-who, who should have known better, not to mention some of my moronic commenters) who demanded to see Sarah Palin’s birth records for Trig give it up, now?
Probably not. They’ll just claim that we have to see the birth records for Bristol.
Dave Barry
Is not making this up this time.
I Am So Relieved
…to hear that the Obama transition team has cleared itself of any impropriety:
Greg Craig, the incoming White House Counsel, conducted his inquiry by taking questions to each transition staff member’s lawyer. The lawyers then went to the staff members and collected the answers. The lawyers then gave the answers to Craig.
In some cases — team Obama won’t say how many — Craig would go back to either the staff member’s attorney or the staff member directly for clarification. But it appears Craig’s direct questioning of staff was very limited.
Additionally, there was no independent effort to verify any of the information provided by the staff member or the staff member’s attorney. If, for example, a staff member’s attorney said there was no e-mail or text messaging with Blagojevich or his staff, Craig took that at face value. No one knows if there was any e-mailing or texting, by the way.
Also, the lawyers’ own words mattered to Craig. He told reporters on Tuesday’s conference call that Valerie Jarrett described Blagojevich’s suggestion he might be appointed secretary of health and human services as “ridiculous” when that subject was broached by the Illinois head of the Service Employees International Union.
How does Craig know Jarrett said the word “ridiculous”? He knows that because that’s what Jarrett’s lawyer told him. Jarrett didn’t say it to Craig. Her attorney did.
This reminds me of when Bill Clinton was fending off Juanita Broaddrick’s accusations of rape. He never denied it, but directed people to his attorney, who claimed that it never happened. Even though he had no first-hand knowledge of it. And of course, the press accepted it as a denial.