[miss_silver]

Originally Posted by daddydirt

imho you'll find many truths in the book Why Terrorism Works by Alan Dershowitz.

Book Description

The greatest danger facing the world today, says Alan M. Dershowitz, comes from religiously inspired, state sponsored terrorist groups that seek to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets. In his newest book, Dershowitz argues passionately and persuasively that global terrorism is a phenomenon largely of our own making and that we must and can take steps to reduce the frequency and severity of terrorist acts. Analyzing recent acts of terrorism and our reaction to them, Dershowitz explains that terrorism is successful when the international community gives in to the demands of terrorists—or even tries to understand and eliminate the "root causes" of terrorism. He discusses extreme approaches to wiping out international terrorism that would work if we were not constrained by legal, moral, and humanitarian considerations. And then, given that we do operate under such constraints, he offers a series of proposals that would effectively reduce the frequency and severity of international terrorism by striking a balance between security and liberty.

DD Just did a research on the peep you mentionned above.

forgot to mentionned a few things

The UN has fed a monster that now threatens it and everyone else

By Alan Dershowitz

For more than a quarter of a century, the U.N. has actively encouraged terrorism by rewarding its primary practitioners, legitimating it as a tactic, condemning its victims when they try to defend themselves and describing the murderers of innocent children as "freedom fighters."


http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Several days ago I received a phone call from a Brazilian journalist who asked me to respond to the charge being made in her home country that Israel was at least indirectly to blame for the deadly truck bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that killed, among others, a prominent Brazilian diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

I was not surprised at the question, considering its source. Among many South Americans, as among many Eastern Europeans, the knee-jerk response to nearly every evil is "blame it on the Jews." For example, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has blamed the "Jewish media" for the scandal involving Catholic priests having sex with young parishioners.

But the question got me to thinking: Who does share the blame with the terrorists themselves for the horrific explosion that killed and injured so many innocent people? Although the primary culprit is clearly the terrorist group that planned and executed the mass murder, the secondary culprit is the U.N. itself.

For more than a quarter of a century, the U.N. has actively encouraged terrorism by rewarding its primary practitioners, legitimating it as a tactic, condemning its victims when they try to defend themselves and describing the murderers of innocent children as "freedom fighters." No organization in the world today has accorded so much legitimacy to terrorism as has the U.N.


Consider the following:

* There are numerous occupied peoples around the world seeking statehood or national liberation, including the Tibetans, Kurds, Turkish Armenians and Palestinians. Only one of these groups has received official recognition by the U.N., including observer status and invitations to speak and participate in committee work. That group is the one that invented and perfected modern international terrorism — namely, the Palestinians.

These rewards were first bestowed in the 1970s when the Palestine Liberation Organization was unabashedly committed to terrorism. In fact, Chairman Yasser Arafat was invited to speak to the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 at a time when his organization was seeking to destroy a member-state of the U.N. by terrorism.

By rewarding Arafat and the PLO for such behavior, the U.N. made it clear that the best way to ensure that your cause is leapfrogged ahead of others is to adopt terrorism as your primary means of protest. The Tibetans, whose land has been occupied more brutally and for a longer period than the Palestinians, but who have never practiced terrorism, cannot even receive a hearing from the U.N.

* The U.N. has for years refused to condemn terrorism unequivocally, while encouraging and upholding "the legitimacy of the struggle for national liberation movements" against "occupation" — in other words, the use of terrorism against innocent civilians to resist occupation. This has sent the message to aggrieved groups that terrorism is legitimate.

* The U.N. has allowed Palestinian terrorists to use U.N.-sponsored "refugee camps" like Jenin as terrorist bases. This has sent the message to the world that the U.N. closes its eyes to terrorism.

* The U.N. has repeatedly condemned efforts by Israel to prevent and respond to terrorism. For example, the Security Council condemned Israel for isolating Arafat in the West Bank last year, even after it was proved that Arafat remained complicit in acts of terrorism.

This has sent the message to the victims of terrorism that if they fight back they risk sanctions.

* The U.N. has allowed states such as Syria that sponsor terrorism to sit on the Security Council and to chair important committees, while denying Israel these same rights. This has sent the message that the U.N. applies a double standard when it comes to terrorism.

The bottom line is that the U.N. has served as an international megaphone for the perverse message that any people who feel that they are occupied have the right to resist occupation by randomly murdering innocent civilians anywhere in the world.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. Some Iraqis, who feel that they are now occupied, have taken the U.N.'s message to heart and are engaged in a "national liberation movement" of the kind long praised by the U.N. and are using the tactics rewarded by the U.N. against that very organization.

Now that the victims of "national liberation terrorism" are U.N. employees instead of Jewish babies, maybe the U.N. will finally come to its senses and understand that by legitimating and rewarding terrorism, they have created a Frankenstein monster that can be turned against any nation, organization or group. Unless there is a change, no one will be safe from this U.N.-created, -fed and -rewarded monster that threatens the entire world.

from


Hey, wasn't it this peep who defended O.J. Simpson? Wouldn't touch his stuff with a 20 feet pole, more about this sadistic puppy below...

Alan Dershowitz's Mad World

by Will Youmans

Alan Dershowitz is the kind of guy who never lets the facts get in the way of a good argument.

The Harvard Law School professor and part-time voracious defender of Israel devoted his celebrity legal mind to combating terrorism. His partisan and fundamental support for Israel, however, discredits his own views on terrorism.

He outraged supporters of civil liberties and due process after September 11, 2001 for suggesting that torture should be legally sanctioned and warranted by the courts--an argument he forwards in his new book 'Why Terrorism Works'. His shining model for a legalized system of torture is Israel, of course. In a talk he gave to the World Affairs Council on September 3rd, 2002, he described Israel's procedure as invoked judiciously and non-lethal in technique. He was unconcerned with who was being tortured and for what. What mattered to him was strictly technical in nature, like a good lawyer.

In a 1999 essay in 'The Nation,' Alexander Cockburn quoted a 15 year-old torture victim's description of his experience after being arrested for throwing stones:

"They handcuffed and beat me during the journey to Fara'a [a military prison in Nablus]. Once we arrived, they took me to a 'doctor' for a 'checkup.' I found out later that this 'checkup' is to locate any physical weakness to concentrate on during torture. They paid particular attention to my leg, which was once injured and was still sensitive. Before they began interrogation, they asked me if I was ready to confess. They then hanged me by my wrists, naked, outside in the cold, and gave me hot and cold showers alternatively. A hood covered in manure was put over my head."

A September 1999 Supreme Court ruling scaled back Israel's routine use of torture according to B'tselem, and Israeli human rights group. However, there are still numerous reports of use by Israeli occupation police. Many of the victims are minors.

It is a truism that armies occupying populaces against their will rely on systematic violence to keep them in their place. Every historical example of military occupation involves many of the same practices, which by any useful definition constitutes terrorism. Yet, according to Dershowitz, we are supposed to believe that Israel's use is enlightened enough to learn from? How can Israel be a shining light given its systematic military domination of an entire people? Is this something all states should aspire too?

The fundamental failure of Dershowitz is that he advocates fighting terrorism with terrorism. A Newtonian principle applies to the physics of violence: every act of violence by one party will be answered with an opposite and equal one. He dismisses the notion that state counter-terrorism practices are a form of terrorism since they are aimed at fighting it. So when Israel kills eleven innocent bystanders in an effort to kill one Hamas official, it is not terrorism. Neither are the checkpoints, closures, curfews, arbitrary arrests, and gun shots at children or media. In a talk he gave, he praised the behavior of Israeli military in Jenin, and completely ignored what it calls "neighbor practice"--using Palestinian civilians as human shields on their searches of houses.

The cover of his book features pictures of Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat--the two main faces of terrorism in the Dershowitzian world. Noticeably absent from the cover are the most prominent and successful terrorists, those who really made it work by using the cover of legitimacy or by achieving governmental stature, which obfuscates their use of terror. So, there is no picture of Menachem Begin, the former Israeli Prime Minister who was once wanted by the British mandate authorities for terrorism, or Henry Kissinger, or the Shah of Iran, or the countless other "world leaders" whose terrorism worked so well that their extermination of so many opponents was met with neglect, complicity, or even assistance. No wonder a 'Washington Post' reviewer called his book "convoluted."

Dershowitz handles the question of state versus non-state terrorism by ignoring the former. This important divide is coming to a head in Israel's legally bizarre trial of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who incidentally was tortured numerous times according to <www.freebarghouti.org>. He is being tried in a regular Israel court for terrorism and murder. Since he committed none of the alleged acts directly, the prosecution must rest on a theory of command responsibility, that means under his authority and with his approval others carried out acts of violence.

If he is found guilty, it will set a clear precedence for the prosecution of Ariel Sharon, who as an Israeli leader authorized attacks that have killed citizens. I am not saying a prosecution team would go after Sharon, but the contradiction would be too glaring to ignore.

That Israeli courts will struggle to handle this legally formalistic hindrance is emblematic of how Israeli law deals with the Palestinian "other." The Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza occupy a strange legal space. They do not have the rights of citizens, nor do they have the rights of occupied persons under international law, yet they are subject to Israeli rule and pay taxes to Israel. To make the distinction clear, within the Palestinian populations are Jewish colonists who are granted full rights of citizenship and are thus treated entirely different by Israel. This is clearly an Apartheid structure.

Critics are charging that this whole affair is political in nature, not purely legal. Nelson Mandela drew an interesting parallel: "What is happening to Barghouti is exactly the same as what happened to me. The government tried to de-legitimize the African National Congress and its armed struggle by putting me on trial."

Palestinians escape conventional legal classification and are thus subject to legal contortion acts, mysterious procedural innovations and new legal fictions--in many ways a mirror to the evolution of American Indian law.

As a law professor, this should dumbfound Dershowitz, but he no qualms about running with it. He is already beginning to advocate a trial of Yasser Arafat in Israeli courts, as his preferable choice among other options he deems legitimate, such as the "exile of Arafatand even targeted assassination" (Haaretz 9/2/02).

In March 2002, Dershowitz penned a piece for the 'Jerusalem Post' that argued for the collective punishment of Palestinian villages for acts of violence sponsored by Palestinian individuals or groups. He proposed that any act of violence sponsored by an individual Palestinian would result in Israel's destruction of an entire pre-announced Palestinian village.

He also publicly stated that Nathan Lewin's proposal that Israel execute the family members of suicide bombers was "legitimate." Israeli currently began a policy of expelling family members of suicide bombers from their villages. Before, they merely demolished their homes.

These proposals define Dershowitz's inability to put Palestinian rights of security on equal footing with Israel's. Since he sees everything through a lens that prioritizes Israel's security above all else, he cannot see the fundamental disparity between populations within the legal system he praises. Israel's Basic Law, its pseudo-constitution (because Israel lacks one) is characterized by legal devices for securing the Jewish nature of the state by the appropriation of "Absentee" property, the homes of Palestinian refugees Israel disallowed from returning.

The international community tried to address the effects of the fiasco it created with the partition plan. For instance, Israel's membership into the United Nations was conditioned on a just settlement of the refugee issue, which until this day has no occurred. Numerous UN resolutions affirm the rights of the refugees. His explanation for this: global anti-Semitism.

Dershowitz dismisses international law and bodies entirely. In the talk to the World Affairs Council, he accused the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA), the main humanitarian services provider in refugee camps, of "complicity" in terrorism for not cracking down on terrorists. He did not expound of course. In his recent book, he even casts doubt on the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians. In response to reports of Palestinian "desperation" in the refugee camps, he wrote "there are reasons to be skeptical of this claim."

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