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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (244544)	8/2/2005 4:02:14 PM
From: Emile Vidrine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571527

The Right to Life: An Absolute Right The Israeli Assassination Policy <<Assassinations, such as those carried out by the State of Israel, clearly involve a violation of the right to life, a right that has been recognized by all human rights conventions as the most basic and important right.The centrality of the right to life is reflected in the fact that severe restrictions are placed on the possibility of limiting its scope. For example, human rights conventions clearly establish that states of national emergency cannot justify violations of the right to life. The right to life is thus recognized as jus cogens - a supra-principle accepted as a binding norm from which no state is permitted to deviate from, not even those, which are not signatory to the relevant conventions. The right to life is thus an absolute right. Absolute rights are basic human rights that cannot be derogated from and therefore also cannot be balanced against other rights. From a legal standpoint, then, the State of Israel cannot avoid its obligations to preserve and not arbitrarily deny human life and cannot cite a state of emergency or security concerns in order to justify violations of an absolute right such as the right to life. The continuity of an Israeli assassination policy that has touched the highest ranks of the political leadership has contributed to transferring this fight into an existential realm. This transition is in harmony with the ideology of this Israeli right-wing government, which does not believe in the compromise that the two sides had been trying to reach in negotiations. A policy of assassination is also congruent with the strategies and ideologies of some Palestinian factions that do not believe in Israeli-Palestinian compromise, but rather push the struggle towards an existential conflict. The practices of the current Israeli government and the Palestinian opposition to the peace process reinforce each other. The assassination policy and its results are examples of this. The Israeli use of assassinations has been a major strategy in its confrontations with Palestinians since the beginning of the conflict. That it has been intensified during the current Intifada and carried to the highest levels of politics and leadership is another sign of the Israeli government's mentality that contradicts the spirit of compromise and the desire to reach an agreement. It is the tool of those who believe in a zero sum game. Israeli assassination policy violates the right to life, the most fundamental of all human rights enshrined in religious, international and even Israeli law. There is no legal basis for these killings. The Israeli army plays the role of informer, attorney, judge and executioner and the decision to kill is implemented with no legal process whatsoever. As Yael Stein from B'tselem Human Rights Association put it, "Problems are rife from the initial decision through all stages of the process, problems which render any legal justification Israel could mount irrelevant."(3) Today, one of the roles of assassination as used by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is to prevent the possibility for political compromise. However, while Israel may enjoy great technical success at killing the Palestinians it has targeted, the policy of assassinations is clearly a political failure. It has never managed to stop Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation and generations of activists have been replaced by new waves of leaders. Assassination against Palestinians is carried out as Avraham Burg attests: through their complete dehumanization. It is this very same dehumanization and cultural differentiation that was the driving force behind the many massacres committed by the Zionist movement in 1948, which lead to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.>>>

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (244544)	8/2/2005 4:07:17 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1571527

re: Bush is a kind of guy that lets the results speak for themselves. And they do, loud and clear. re: That alone should give you plenty of valid reasons to criticize him, so why bellyache over phrases like "Not if, but when"? You don't get it do you? The goal of the terrorist is to effect political change by creating fear, "terror". When you say things like "Not if, but when" you giving them exactly what they want. They win... and bin Laden has won big time. For a second imagine if terrorist attacks were never reported, no one knew about them. There would be no more terrorism. They don't give a rats ass about the people they kill, one way or another. They care about how everyone else reacts. And the reaction they are looking for is "Not if, but when". So no, I don't think I am being over-critical. John