Terrorists? Here? Working for us?
This makes me feel sooooooo much better about the work of the UN:
Israel said Sunday that the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) supports Hamas and demanded the UN investigate the agency and its head, Peter Hansen.
Hansen has "for years has expressed anti-Israeli, biased, unrestrained positions and statements," Dan Gillerman, Israel's UN ambassador, told Israel Radio.
Israel released a picture which it says shows a UN vehicle being used to move a rocket for the militants.
The UN said the picture showed a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.
Hansen said he believes there are Hamas members on UNRWA's payroll, but they have to follow UN rules on remaining neutral.
"Oh I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime. Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another," Hanson told CBC TV.
"We demand of our staff, whatever their political persuasion is, that they behave in accordance with UN standards and norms for neutrality," he said.
Hanson is the leader of an organization that has essentially colluded with terrorists for years by allowing them free run of the refugee camps. That being the case, both his inability to see a problem with having Hamas members on his payroll, and his blasé declaration that not every member of an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel is a "militant," makes perfect sense.
(Thanks to Damian Penny for the link.)
Athanasius on 10.04.04 @ 10:50 PM EST [link]
The Next Big Thing
Better pay close attention to this argument–you're going to be hearing it a lot over the next few months:
Tom Green is an American polygamist. This month, he will appeal his conviction in Utah for that offense to the United States Supreme Court, in a case that could redefine the limits of marriage, privacy and religious freedom.
If the court agrees to take the case, it would be forced to confront a 126-year-old decision allowing states to criminalize polygamy that few would find credible today, even as they reject the practice. And it could be forced to address glaring contradictions created in recent decisions of constitutional law.
For polygamists, it is simply a matter of unequal treatment under the law.
Individuals have a recognized constitutional right to engage in any form of consensual sexual relationship with any number of partners. Thus, a person can live with multiple partners and even sire children from different partners so long as they do not marry. However, when that same person accepts a legal commitment for those partners "as a spouse," we jail them.
Likewise, someone such as singer Britney Spears can have multiple husbands so long as they are consecutive, not concurrent. Thus, Spears can marry and divorce men in quick succession and become the maven of tabloid covers. Yet if she marries two of the men for life, she will become the matron of a state prison.
Haven't we heard this before?
(Thanks to Mark Shea for this link, too.)
Athanasius on 10.04.04 @ 10:14 PM EST [link]
Proposing a new totalitarianism
No doubt with nothing but the best of intentions, applied ethicist Peg Tittle offers this recipe for statism: licence people before allowing them to become parents, to make sure that no unworthy people bring life into the world, and to make sure that no unworthy lives are lived:
We've talked ourselves silly and tied ourselves in knots about ending life–active, passive, voluntary, coerced, premeditated, accidental, negligent–we have been horrendously silent, irresponsibly laissez-faire about beginning life. We would not accept such wanton creation of life if it happened in the lab. Why do we condone it when it happens in bedrooms and backseats?
It should be illegal to create life, to have kids, in order to have another pair of hands at work in the field or to have more of us than them. It should be illegal to create a John Doe Jr. to carry on the family name and/or business.
And it should be illegal to knowingly create a life that will be spent in pain and/or that will be severely substandard.
Because we all know that the government knows the future, and knows that life lived in pain is worthless, and knows exactly how to define "severely substandard," and knows just who should live and who should die.
From here Tittle proceeds to deal (badly–I can understand why she's referred to in the past tense as a teacher of applied ethics) with various objections, though not with the one about abortion's immorality because that's SO Catholic/fundamentalist, it therefore needs no response. She does, however, deal with the issue of statism:
One last objection concerns the potential for abuse. Do we really want to give the state this particular power? I have to say, seeing a theocracy coming ever closer, that this is the argument that gives me most pause.
I want to point out that just because something will be abused doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried, and I want to point out that our many other licensing policies still exist despite the occasional abuse. But I've read Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale." It's chilling. [Not to mention ridiculous–A.] But I've also read the reports of people too drugged out to even know they're pregnant. And it's not a question of which scenario is more likely. One is already happening and has been for quite some time.
Most of us have seen broken kids, kids who didn't get what they needed at a critical stage in their development, so they go through life thinking the world owes them something. And indeed we do. But sadly, tragically, we can't give it to them because that critical window of time has passed: We can't go back and flush from the fetus the chemicals that interfered with its development; we can't go back and provide the baby with the nutrients required for growth; we can't go back and give the child the safety and attention that would have led to a secure personality. Every year, millions of the people we've created so carelessly are being starved, beaten or otherwise traumatized. Thousands die. And that doesn't count the ones still walking around.
Who apparently shouldn't be walking around, because if you can't live the fantabulous life of a teacher of applied ethics, you shouldn't be allowed to live at all.
Here's a question for the editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: I presume you wouldn't run Aryan Nations propaganda on the op-ed page. So why are you running this eugenicist nonsense?
(Thanks to Mark Shea for the link.)
Athanasius on 10.04.04 @ 08:56 PM EST [link]
