World Suffers from Palestine Fever

Last Friday Finland and Denmark became the latest European countries to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority diplomatic missions to full-fledged Embassy status placing them on an equal status with every other nation in the world. The Palestinian entity is now treated by the United Nations, UNESCO, many countries, NGOs, many religious organizations as well as their ruling councils and now also by Google as being a real nation despite their glaring deficiencies. The Palestinians have no independent currency, no borders, no established capital city, and the population possesses no individual identity which serves to differentiate them from the surrounding native populations. But why allow such minor items get in the way of granting premature recognition to the Palestinian entity and in the process snub Israel presenting them with what amounts to a preemptive establishment of Palestinian statehood without demanding them to reach an agreement and have an actual treaty with Israel when one can simply forgo such technicalities. I would like to be able to believe that when Mahmoud Abbas has gathered sufficient nations who have granted them equal status as a national state as they have such others as the United States, France, England, China, India, Brazil, Australia, and the rest of the almost two-hundred nations of the United Nations that he will also receive their support in declaring whatever borders he chooses.

 

I can honestly visualize the day coming within a decade when Mahmoud Abbas will stand before the United Nations General Assembly and demand that they resolve to have the member nations to assist in every manner necessary to establish the state of Palestine within its natural borders from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea and receiving a standing ovation right before an overwhelming consensus vote affirming his request. This vote would necessitate another vote follow it where the United Nations finally would affirm that it has discussed but never approved before, a vote to rescind the United Nations General Assembly declaration which allowed the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. Then the world will have chosen to stand behind the Palestinians and enforce their desire to not just form their state within borders sharing the land with Israel, but to form their state in place of and atop the corpse of the state of Israel. Can there be much doubt as to the inevitability of such a ruling when the vote to establish a Palestinian state over the objections and in denial of United Nations Security Council resolutions pertaining to the establishment of said state by the astounding affirmation of one-hundred-thirty-eight votes in favor, nine votes against and forty-one abstentions? And once this precedent has been established, what country would remain safe, independent, and free from being dissolved by a vote of the United Nations that was then used to align all the power of all the world’s militaries against them to erase whatever state fell on the wrong side of the masses who would then hold the powers of fate to thusly destroy any nation they so desired.

 

Would anybody actually be surprised if the United Nations General Assembly once they had established the legitimate power to dissolve any nation that the Non-Aligned Movement groups of one-hundred-twenty member nations and seventeen observer nations would not use their overwhelming majority in the United Nations General Assembly to realign the world in their favor at the expense of those whom they accuse of having oppressed, exploited and pilfered them and their resources by the colonial and imperial nations as well as the industrialized world? The only reason such has not yet been acted upon has been that limitations placed on the powers of the United Nations General Assembly while the main authority and the right and power to resolve for the use of force was reserved solely to the United Nations Security Council. This is much of what has been behind an ever growing demand to reform the Security Council to allow a realignment of those countries holding permanent status, removal of the veto power of the permanent status members allowing them to prevent any action by their simple vote without having to give any reasons, and strip or dilute the powers of the Security Council and transferring many of those powers either exclusively to the General Assembly or at a minimum a share of such powers. Once such a revolutionary reconstruction and redefinition of the powers and responsibilities within the branches of the United Nations has been enacted even should it require a complete rewrite of the United Nations Charter, does anyone really feel safe that this would not lead inevitably to a conflagrative conflict that would envelop the world and leave in its wake a world in ruins with most of its major cities having been laid waste and starvation being the normal state of existence persisting for an indeterminate amount of time while the world attempted to rebuild from the ashes. This would not be the aim or even the desire of those who would initially support dissolving the Jewish state of Israel and replacing it with the twenty-second Arab state established for those claiming to be a separate peoples known as Palestinians, but it would be the eventuality which such inevitably would spawn. That is the one problem when expedience trumps thought, there will always be unexpected consequences hiding in the shadows of the future, and they would often be dire and extremely undesirable. But caution has proven not to be a welcome element when emotions run hot and actions are the result of the moment coming into fruition free of restraining contemplation. I have realized that if you do not think things through before acting you usually find yourself later asking yourself what was I thinking.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Backdoor Gun Control; Not so Fast

The United Nations member States are once again working to implement an all-inclusive weapons treaty with dual intents. The publicized intent is to control the trading of weapons between weapons manufacturers and countries such that all weapons transactions will be covered thus preventing any sales to terror or other non-state actors. This treaty will presumably prevent terrorist and criminal entities from acquiring armaments from handguns to advanced weapons systems such as rockets and mortars. The secondary and less mentioned impetus is to control all private ownership of weapons by individuals. This time the treaty will not be aiming to necessarily disarm all non-state individuals but will instead be satisfied in simply having complete lists of every weapon privately owned. Of course these lists are guaranteed not to be a first step towards eventual weapons confiscation and everyone can believe that the world’s governments would never go back on this promise. But why should this be of any concern to the American people as they have the Second Amendment which guarantees them the right to keep and bear arms. But is the Second Amendment really sacrosanct or can it be abridged through international agreements?

John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under President Dwight Eisenhower, asserted that treaties are a form of law which overrides the Constitution. The Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution is in Article VI and states, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” This clause was primarily intended to forbid the individual States from being allowed to enter into treaties independently and also to guarantee that all the individual States would be bound by and treaty entered and legally ratified by the Federal Government. There have been numerous people who have maintained that a treaty entered into by the United States through ratification by the Senate and signed by the President would then supercede the United States Constitution. This statement can be made true if one replaces one little word; remove ‘United’ from before the word ‘States’ and instead replace it with the word ‘individual’ and then it would be correct. Treaties do override the individual State’s Constitutions, not the United States Constitution. This also applied to individual State laws, regulations, statutes or other legally binding resolutions.

The reasoning behind the contention that international and other treaties entered into by the United States would supercede the Constitution ignores the semicolon replacing it with a comma. The treaties that are enacted must be tempered by the Constitution and can be rendered mute if found to be unconstitutional. The phrasing which states that treaties are to be made “under the authority of the United States” places the limitations within the constitution in effect for treaties just as it is for laws passed by the States or Congress. So, the Administration is limited in its power to enter into and negotiate treaties even with the ratification of the Senate by the same restrictions that the Congress and President are under when enacting Federal Law. So, let the world negotiate a presumable universal arms treaty which will eventually be used to implement the universal disarmament of individuals because even should the Senate ratify such a treaty and the President sign same, the Supreme Court, in theory, should render the enforcement of such a treaty unconstitutional and hopefully support the individual rights of the American peoples.

So sorry to those in the Administration and to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who have been rumored to be hoping they could use such a treaty to negate the Second Amendment and were working for Senate ratification. The Founding Fathers were smart enough to preclude the meddling of the outside world with the unique rights granted by the revolutionary Constitution they crafted. The world around them was full of Emperors, Kings, Caliphs and other absolute rulers whose slightest whim was law. With a world where any treaty the nascent United States would enter would be with countries with such autocratic rulers that they realized that the rights provided by the United States Constitution would not be respected or even understood outside the nation they were founding. With such a world surrounding the Founding Fathers it is only logical that they would protect the delicate balance which gave the individual supreme rights even over and above the government which was crafted to serve the people and be endowed with limited powers, a strange and unique concept in their time. The American people will owe those men a debt of gratitude as long as there continues to be those who guard and keep those precious rights safe and protected. That is the task that the Founding Fathers demanded of those generations which followed and upon whom they had doubts and hopes, much as many patriots today harbor.

Beyond the Cusp

Rocket Barrage Continues Four Wounded Two Seriously

More than fifty rockets have been fired across the border wounding four, two of them critically. Some of the wounded were found to be foreign agricultural workers who are simply helping with the harvest to support their families. What would your reaction be if this were the beginning of an article in your local news media outlets, print, radio, and television? Instead of this report being about rockets fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, what if it were about southern Florida and the rockets originated in Cuba, or if this had been eastern Pakistan with the rockets fired by India or if the rockets were fired from Chechnya into Russia? We could go on listing such possible places and combinations for pages but these will suffice. Would we not expect in each case there to be some response by the nation made victim by the rocket fire and whose citizens live with fear of just such events being commonplace in their lives. This has to be put in perspective of these fifty rockets are just one day’s strike in a chain of such strikes totalling in excess of 10,000 rockets to date. Would not the United States acting on Florida’s behalf, Pakistan, or Russia be within their rights to respond and respond harshly to such a provocation, such that is tantamount to an act of war? Surely such retribution would be accepted by the majority of the rest of the world and might even find aid arriving from other sympathetic nations as well as much noise made against the aggressors in the United Nations, through many NGOs and in the general discourse coming from governments throughout the world. I predict we will see a similar level of scorn and denunciations of actions coming from all entities, governments and of course the United Nations with all its disparate agencies. But what we will hear will be different from what we could expect in each of the alternate situations described above.

Should the world hold true to its normative form, we can expect calls for Israel to show restraint and to not strike at the assets of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other known terror groups which populate Gaza and were responsible for this attack. The warnings to Israel will inevitable include reasoning that should Israel strike back it will simply cause the terrorists to be motivated to strike back as retaliation. Israel will be instructed to simply absorb this strike in the hopes that by not striking back, the terrorists will respond with quiet and peace and everyone will live happily ever after. Needless to point out that should such terror strikes have been perpetrated against any other country that the world would accept their retaliation and many might even go so far as to applaud such. But not Israel. Israel is supposed to sit there and allow its citizens to be murdered and traumatized, its properties and infrastructure to be blown to pieces without so much as a murmur of indignation. When Israel does strike in retaliation for this grievous act of war we will likely hear from numerous Muslim countries, the European Union along with many of its member nations, the United States, Russia, China, international NGOs, the alphabet soup of United Nations agencies and especially the United Nations General Assembly to all roundly condemn this overt, harsh and unilateral, unjustified attack on innocent Palestinians. The entirety of Hamas rocket, mortar, IED, and other attacks will be neatly placed out of sight and the world will act as if Israel was the initiator of any and all violence in the Middle East. There will even likely be motions for sanctions against Israel brought before the United Nations Security Council which will hopefully be vetoed and placed rightfully into the waste basket. But there will be one cry which will pierce through the cacophony of denunciations and declarations of unity with the people of Gaza which will ask, “But Israel deserved this as a result of the blockade and their starving of the oppressed Palestinians and what about the occupation.”

Once more let us clear up the misinformation about events and the order in which they occurred which will make those willing to listen to gasp in disbelief and then run to check our facts; we welcome such scrutiny. We all probably will agree that Israel gained possession of the Gaza Strip as the result of the June 1967 Arab Israeli War. Israeli actions in this war has been adjudicated and was found to have been a defensive war as Egypt had initiated the war with their closing of the Straights of Tiran (a casus belli in and of itself), Egypt and Syria in coordinated actions massed troops on Israel’s northern and southern borders, both Egypt and Syria had announced their intent to push the Jews into the Sea, and Jordan was not brought under attack until after they rejected the Israeli calls for Jordan not to attack and they struck anyway. It is also hard to argue against that fact that Israel removed every Israeli and all IDF troops from Gaza in 2005 leaving it completely under Palestinian authority rule and control. There was no embargo or blockade of Gaza at this time. By the end of 2007, Hamas had assumed full control of Gaza after a coup which removed the ruling Palestinian Authority from the enclave. Even after Hamas had taken control of all of Gaza through its violent purge of all things Fatah, Israel still had not put in place the embargo and naval blockade. It was after rockets were fired into Israel by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terror interests which have found safe haven in Gaza that Israel acted and put in place the embargo and naval blockade. After the incident with the flotilla and the violent attack on the IDF units enforcing the blockade that the United Nations held an investigation and hearings on the Israeli blockade which was found to be legal and within the applicable demands for legitimacy in international law. The only interaction that Israel has with Hamas and the Gaza governing entities is the transfer of humanitarian aid, supplying some of the water and electricity to Gaza, and offering and supplying Gazans with medical treatments in Israeli hospitals very often at no cost. This is considered by some as a form of occupation but one can only imagine the howling and tragedy that would be noted should Israel cease these “occupation motivated assistances”. Now all we can do is wait and see if Israel retaliates in equal measure or if they instead target a number of leaders of the terror groups operating within Gaza and the resultant highly charged insanities that will follow whichever action Israel should employ. Even if Israel were to not retaliate, something that has occurred in the past, history has shown that this only serves to engender even larger and bolder attacks as not acting is perceived as weakness and an inability to act. This is one truth in the Middle East that the Western nations have yet to figure out or understand. They appear to be unable to see the world through anything beyond their rose colored glasses which filter out any and all truths which they will to wish away.

Beyond the Cusp