Defending Gaza (II): Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation
READ PART I: “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism”
Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide.
The Jewish State is genocidal not because it has been denounced as “genocidal” by ostensible “antisemites” and “terrorist sympathizers,” but by virtue of its actions. Israel is genocidal by virtue of what it has done to Gaza, the people and their land.
Shortly after October 7, 2023, conceptions of vice and virtue were crystalized like never before. It was then that certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. For you are what you do. Israel’s actions within Gaza and without it have shown the world—myself, a former supporter of Israel included—in cruel relief the barbarity of Israeli state and civil society.
By closely observing Israel in action over nine months, in Gaza and beyond, and then, as closely, listening to and chronicling Israeli and Jewish leaders, stateside and in Israel, as they walked the walk—immutable truths about the Jewish State were easily deduced commensurate with Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Thumping majorities across Israel’s public sector, private sector and “third sector,” you name them—have been justifying, finessing and fibbing about their army’s “high-tech murder spree” in Gaza, a campaign that Israel and its American underwriters have taken to the West Bank, and are poised to continue in Lebanon, if allowed.
Thus, the labels “antisemite” and “terrorist sympathizer” amount to a blood libel leveled at millions, perhaps billions, in the Global South, in particular—although the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred hearts across the world.
So far, the watching world has been peacefully protesting genocide through the written and spoken word, or by marching and voting.
Caught in the act, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to demand cavalierly the right to kill and deceive. The world is instructed to, first deny Israel’s genocide, then justify it or risk defenestration.
To no avail.
“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). Verbatim, Matthew 7:20 reads: “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
In pointing to human action as the undeniable key to man-made reality—Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Ethics of Argumentation go even further than did Jesus in Matthew 7:20.
ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING RIGHT TO COMMIT GENOCIDE
Our overlords who art in D.C. and their overlords in Tel Aviv strive to condition us, at once, to watch Palestinians die daily en masse, and either justify or deny the holocaust visited on them by the Jewish State.
Countering this parallel universe being enforced by the Axis of Genocide are Dr. Hans-Hermann Hope’s Ethics of Argumentation. Particularly handy here is “the legal theory of ‘estoppel,’” attributed by Dr. Hoppe to Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian legal theorist. It is “the legal principle that bars a party from denying or alleging a certain fact owing to that party’s previous conduct, allegation, or denial.” (Emphasis added.)
I’d venture that still stronger than legal estoppel apparently allows is the fact that Israel is denying current and ongoing genocidal acts at the very same time it is committing them! Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide while committing genocide.
It is a performative contradiction, then, for Israel and its backers to dispute that the Jewish State is committing genocide at the very same time that the Jewish State is carrying out the denied deeds.
Genocide, ethnocide and domicide are, obviously, never justified and can never be exculpated. Therefore, to assert that you are just and justified as you carry out the manifest genocide, ethnocide and domicide of a people; is to not only perform a contradiction, but to embody one, all the while demanding the unique authority to carry out all of the above.
To be mired in such grotesqueries, as Israelis indubitably are, is to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane. The Greek philosophers would have concurred.
ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR
Laws against genocide impose no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.
Lest we be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide must be reasonably qualified and clarified. And, in particular, the reference here to the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people.
Natural-rights libertarians are seldom enamored of legal positivism, which generally conflates justice with the law of The State. Our all-too-small cohort is, for the most, wedded to the natural law, a higher law—a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation and common sense.
“By natural law,” propounded the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, in Liberty, Order, And Justice, “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”
I would further argue that even as he is mired in evil—as Israelis certainly are—man knows right from wrong full-well. He knows he is perpetrating evil even as he does so.
Since it is anchored in the very nature of man, the Natural Law is the highest law known to man, and is therefore a priori just. More often than not, any vestiges of natural law still present in the positive law have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.
So, while it is a rare occasion when natural-rights libertarians defer to the positive law in a positive way; it can and does happen that this or the other state law is inoffensive in that it does nothing to undermine the natural rights of man—those to his life, his liberty and his property.
To the extent that the positive law comports with the natural law—to that extent it is inoffensive. Such is the case of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which articulates, mostly, a set of negative rights, whose enforcement imposes no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.
To Israel’s beefy genocide rap sheet one can now add another qualification: The Article II injunction that enjoins against the imposition of “measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
There are no maternal facilities left in Gaza.
It’s now well-nigh impossible to give birth safely in Gaza—unless genocide adjudicator Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, thinks that, under her own power, a woman and her newborn can survive squatting within a spitting distance from a sewage ditch to expel that baby. Or, having her abdomen opened without anesthesia to extricate the neonate. Or trusting her preemie’s life to the oxygen “supplied” by Israel and staving off post-operative septicemia, also under her own power. Sullivan was the US point person who unveiled a dodgy dossier that commanded fusspots to quit the fuss and feathers over Israeli genocide. There is none.
Standing in for a complicit America, the dissembling Sullivan has denied that anything our Israeli “friends” have done or are doing is perpetrated “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
You be the judge, dear reader. These are the four genocidal actions that preceded Israel’s last:
* “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
* Killing members of the group.
* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
* Direct and public incitement to commit genocide. (https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/ij/ictr/3.htm#_Toc62641378)
On top of this, holocaust denial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has, too, devolved into a grotesque burlesque. In its May 24 order to Israel to “immediately halt military operations in the governorate of Rafah”; the ICJ appeared to bolster the bogus demarcation between carpet-bombing Rafah and carpet-bombing the Greater Gaza.
With particular relish, Israel has continued carpet-bombing both Rafah and the Greater Gaza. Why, then, did the ICJ’s order single out the attack on Rafah alone, as “an underlying act of genocide”? Hasn’t Israel’s ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip in its entirety “pos[ed] … irreparable risk to the rights of the Palestinian people to be protected under the Genocide Convention and further threaten[ed] their physical destruction in whole or in part”?
There is no qualitative difference between the IDFs actions in Gaza before the invasion of Rafah and after. The incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south, exists on one craven continuum of crime against humanity.
What, then, was the thinking behind Rafah-as-a-red-line? The ICJ’s attempt to manufacture an imaginary line between mass murder in Rafah and genocide in the Greater Gaza is perplexing.
Reading between the lines of Washington’s pretense is hard, but I suspect the reflexive impulse in Washington was to separate genocide before Rafah from genocide after the invasion of Rafah with the aim of counting the 113,918 Palestinians murdered and maimed before Rafah as somehow “lawful,” legitimate casualties of a just war.
Washington’s attempted connivance was not reciprocated by its clients, the ingrate Israelis. The line the assassin’s sponsors had attempted to draw between murder before Rafah and murder after its invasion, soon vanished in the blood-soaked sand of the Strip’s southernmost tip. That line itself was blurred… by blood shed by Israel.
CHRONICLNG A DAY IN THE LIFE …
We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists.
Without let, then, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) continues to martyr, maim and displace Palestinians up and down
Article from LewRockwell
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