Let’s get this straight, becuase you are not the brightest bulb in the box, I am not from the US, and the part you quoted, was when I made mention of people who have been murdered by foreign governments IN THE UK
Clearly you do not have the slightest idea of who Litvenenko was, or where or how he was murdered,
Nor do you seem to have the slightest idea of the Bulgarian murder of Georgi Markov by use of injected ricin poison on the streets of London.
In the most general sense, the idea that its acceptable to carry on wars and murders outside your own borders makes other countries less safe, seems to me to be a logical conclusion, and since Israel is taking its disputes into other countries and therefore making it part of the scenery of murder and terrorism, then yes it is true to say we are less safe.
If any other poster wishes to confirm or disagree then please do so.
I would like to see if any other poster is having the same trouble as you with parsing this statement,
**In the Arab world, you can bet that this will play well, the Americans and the Zionists who control them will be a superb recruiting tool, even if the facts are nothing like this at all. **
My intent is to put this in the way that Arab terrorists will use this incident, and to point out that actually, this will not resemble the truth in any way.
,
you even got the drift of my meaning, Arab terrorists will certainly use this statement, and likely in these exact (though in Arabic) words and they will use this incident to smear the US and Israel.
I have to admit, I have never come across the term ZOG before, so your use of it in an attempt to insult is dumb, simply because the term means nothing to me.
I would be interested to know how you could possibly view the abortion issue in any way as being germaine to any discussion about the Middle East, this is quite inventive, or stupid, it might be clear in your little head, it certainly isn’t in mine, which is why I avoid analogies and generally discuss the matter which is the subject of debate.
You seem unable to stick to the topic and therefore call in strange anllogies because you have run out of relevant things to say, perhaps this is your way of putting across a false premise in the hope that someone will fall for your diverting strategy, me, I’ll stick with the issue - you can garble on about anything you please.
I also note your attempt at diversion in you other recent post, where you mention miscegenation laws - this has totally nothing to do with the issue, and is another example of the sort of person clutching at straws with nothing useful to say.
First you bring up some analogy with abortion, then something about unfair laws in the US, and yet here we are, discussing a murder committed by Israel in Dubai using false passports of individuals who may not be too happy about that.
What relevance have any of your pointless drivelling diversions got to the matter under debate??
By that standard everything is subjective. Shooting an unarmed, innocent man in the head? Well, some might argue for it and some against. Letting blacks live outside of ghettos? Well, some might argue for it and some might argue against, and so on.
It is possible to construct a moral calculus in which to operate that stands up to scrutiny. And as I’ve argued, there’s no real damage done by using fake passports, a valid target of war can be eliminated and massive suffering can be avoided for a great many people. In my estimation, that is a very good place to draw the line.
I’m arguing that in the context of performing espionage, the respect for passport laws is a bad thing, yes.
When there’s actual harm done. A guy getting all flustered doesn’t count. Unless of course we can weigh him against all the folks who are upset that Hamas is still out there planning news ways to attack civilians. But we can’t, right? If he was executed you’d have a point. But heck, even if he was questioned by the police all he’d have to do is show them where he actually was that day. A guy losing an afternoon to talk to the cops doesn’t seem like a significant negative consequence to me.
I believe that, ultimately, justification becomes something of a sloppy term to use. I will state though that if it’s possible to get passports from recently deceased people, then that should do just fine and preferable simply to avoid complications.
But we’ve already agreed that agents using fake documents has been standard through the modern era of espionage and that there haven’t been any real negative consequences for citizens of countries who’ve had their passports forged. Even if they use someone’s name on a passport, it’s not a serious issue as it’s trivially easy for someone to prove that they were not, in fact, in another country assassinating someone on a certain date. The use of passports simply does not bother me.
I’d also point out that forged passports were an absolute necessity *as people with an Israeli passport or even an Israeli stamp on their passport cannot enter the UAE. *
Actually, it’s an example of you failing to understand.
It’s actually rather simmple:,when its stated that "illegality [can] count as a reason to consider something ‘unjustified’ ", someone might respond with an example of an unjust law and point out that illegality in and of itself does not determine anything. It’s interesting that Kim had no trouble figuring out what I was talking about.
Clear as mud. But I do enjoy seeing you try to assign states of knowledge to me.
It’s funny to see your accusations (coupled with your clever use of flaming in Great Debates). I’d wager it would be hard not to know who Litvenenko was, as his poisoning was front page news. Markov wasn’t just killed by ricin, but with a weaponized umbrella. Interesting story. But of course, you’re hammering on these factoids, for some reason, because you think it proves a point. Ah well.
Heh.
Ah yes, all along you were talking about the deadly terrorist smears. Because, naturally, that’s what terrorists do. That’s why we call them terrorists, for all that blogging they do.
You really, really shouldn’t be so quick to flame me while demonstrating that you’re unable to follow my arguments. It’s kind of like having to explain a joke to someone, but here: First , I wasn’t making an analogy between abortion on the middle east, but between how we treat terrorists on some subjects versus how we treat them on others.
-the argument is made that wackaloon conspiracy mongering terrorists whose views aren’t based in reality in the first place and who see conspiracies behind every shadow everywhere will suddenly have some sort of justification (as if they were lacking one) and might just do something about the nefarious actions of the Zionist Conspiracy that they claim controls the US. Look how this will play out in some Arab circles, my, this is bad! (despite the fact that this changes nothing and we’d have the same conspiracy theories anyways that manufacture their own facts and justifications just fine)
-this is contrasted with the fact that for other types of insanity, like bombing abortion clinics, we don’t spend time pointing out that actions we take might just inflame lunatics, we just get on with condemning the lunatics and punishing them as we find them.
No, actually you’ve demonstrated that you won’t. Time and again I’ve pointed out that it is immoral to demand war/sanctions/taking endless terrorist attacks and moral to cleanly and efficiently take out valid targets of war.
Remind me how many times you’ve engaged on that point?
Care to engage in it now? How are sanctions/war or allowing terrorists free rein ‘moral’ when it undeniably causes vastly greater suffering for innocents when a clean, targeted kill saves those innocents that misery but happens on a different piece of dirt and/or uses a fake piece of paper? How do you justify supporting greater misery, suffering and death for innocents and call that a position of greater morality?
This thread will be locked and more warnings will be handed out if there are any other insulting comments made about the intelligence of a poster, any implications of dishonesty, or any mispresentations of arguments. That goes for everyone here.
I agree that no foreign national in such a situation need realistically fear that they might be seriously accused of being a Mossad agent who committed an assassination.
What might realistically worry me, though, and what may be worrying Mr. Mildiner, is the possibility that they might be seriously suspected of having been complicit in the use of forged versions of their passports to commit assassination. It may be trivially easy to prove that you weren’t in another country on a certain date assassinating someone, but it’s not at all trivial to prove that you didn’t knowingly make your identity information available to someone else to enable them to go to another country on a certain date to assassinate someone.
Again, though, we come back to the issue of who gets to make that call. How much inconvenience would you consider counts as a “negative consequence”? Is there anything in between a police interrogation and actual execution that you’d put in the “negative consequence” category?
And that’s precisely why we have the rough approximation to an objective standard known as legality. When we have what we think amounts to a consensus that a certain act is on the whole sufficiently more bad than good to warrant prohibiting it, we pass a law and make it illegal.
Of course, there are bad and unjust laws. And of course, there are emergency circumstances where it’s better to break a certain law, even a good law, than to obey it. But I don’t think it’s as simple as you claim to decide when it’s justified to break a law, nor do I think that illegality should be dismissed as a merely annoying irrelevance in cases where you happen to approve of the lawbreaking.
Ironically enough then, that suggests that one should only use cloned passports from allied nations with a strong rule of law and fair proceedings. I don’t think, though, that many intel agencies will strongly consider that suspicious, although I could be wrong.
Not sure off the top of my head. Name a few examples and I’ll be happy to answer.
I don’t know, but apparently the British embassy in Tel Aviv thinks that continuing to use the original passports from which the forged copies were made could result in the innocent passport holders being “inadvertently detained”, though they don’t say where or by whom:
Dunno why the Clarke guy allegedly went into hiding. Maybe he’s just being “silly”, or maybe this situation is really a serious problem for him. Or maybe, of course, the story is wrong; it’s early days yet.
I’m with you. Just go in and take em out. Send Jason Bourne over there and it will be over with in a couple of weeks. I don’t think that is the strategy though or they could have done it. They had a bead on Osama’s head for a year but were not allowed to shoot. Is this a war or a peace keeping mission?
They have been fighting in the Middle East since the beginning of time and they will fight over there till the end of time. They will fight over a postage stamp sized piece of land till the death. Are we so egocentric as to think that we are going to ever change that fact? Or is it something else we are there for other then trying to turn Arabs into Democrats?
You seem to be arguing two contradictory positions.
In one paragraph, you seem to be saying that the whole situation could be resolved with sufficiently skilful covert ops: “just go in and take em out”.
Then in the next paragraph, you argue that conflict in the Middle East is eternal and inevitable and nothing that “we” (meaning the US, I guess?) could do would ever change that.
Well, which do you mean? Is Middle East conflict essentially ineradicable by its very nature, or does it just need better wetwork on the part of agents from the first world?
Or is it perhaps more complicated than either of those alternatives?
Israel just broke the laws of 2 other nations, at least one of which should be considered a friend, and you are surprised that they attract condemnation?
Thank you, I would have thought this was obvious, and was the point I was trying to make. And if I am not wrong, China does see him as, at the very least a treasonious traitor, if not an outright terrorist.
But there are certain posters here who need help to find the nose on their faces if it doesn’t suit their arguments.
These two positions aren’t mutually exclusive. Irrational antisemitism and anti-Israel prejudice can coexist in the world with rational criticism of and/or anger at Israel because of specific policy choices it makes.
Yes, They were two separate points. I was agreeing with the person I was quoting. I also threw in my own two cents about the war being a ‘no win, no win’ since they didn’t opt to take out the enemy.
Difficult situation. If it turns out that having your passport cloned really does represent some sort of serious rick to someone’s health and safety, then that too would have to take place in the calculus. I’m not an expert on passport forgeries, so maybe it’s possible to clone passports from dead folks or insert fake records into someone else’s passport system so you can make up names, or whatever.
Obviously the best situation will have to be one in which the absolute minimum (preferably zero) risk is transferred to civilians. Ideally that’s the situation if spies don’t get caught. But by the same token, since spying will go on and fake passports will be necessary, the process will generally be one of risk management and not risk elimination.
It’s an absurd point based on nothing more than radical relativism run amok. And it is, naturally, being selectively applied. Some nations (like Iran) murder their gays as a matter of policy. Does that mean when we say that murdering gays is wrong we’re just need help to find our noses since, after all, someone disagrees and we can’t possibly make our minds up if someone disagrees!
No, sorry, China, an autocratic state may or may not view a harmless man as a terrorist. That doesn’t mean we need to change the definition of terrorism to suit them any more than we needed to change the definition of ‘virtue’ to suit the Talaban. That you can’t differentiate what makes China’s definition of “terrorist”, meaning an old man who’s hurt nobody, less valid than other definitions is your own issue of course. Somehow I remain unconvinced that you really reserve judgment or, worse, go along with whatever others say as long as there’s disagreement. I think you’re rationalizing in order to try to find some way around the fact that the word “terrorist” has a fairly well understood and highly useful denotation.
But of course, I may be wrong. So prove me wrong. Many societies on the planet consider personal property to be nonsensical and would in fact have a totally different definition of what can or cannot be owned. As such, I trust that you’ll be sending me your computer in the mail ASAP since, as we all know, just like the word “terrorism”, there is substantial difference of opinion over what “property” means. And who are you to say otherwise?
When can I expect my new computer? I’d like to make sure I’m home to accept delivery.
Their moral code really doesn’t matter. If you want legitimacy, you need to act morally. Because your enemy is immoral, doesn’t mean you get to be immoral. Because your enemy is a terrorist, doesn’t mean you get to behave like a terrorist. The more you do, the longer the whole mess drags on, and the more the rest of the world condemns you - which you then just use as further justification that you “need” to act like a terrorist. Well I think this is a self fulfilling prophesy
What seems to be forgotten, is that this act by Israel (again if it was them) gives people in the UAE and England legitimate reasons to be angry at Israel. It diminishes support for Israel.
This has the flow-on effect of making the rabid anti-semites LESS of a fringe, and lowers the general support for Israel - so next time round it is harder for Israel to get support, and there is less condemnation of Israels enemies.
Can I measure and “prove” this? No I can’t - but just use your understanding of human nature, doesn’t it seem a rational argument?
Sure, I agree. The question of how much anti-Israel sentiment in any particular place and time is due to prejudice or antisemitism, and how much is due to legitimate reasons to be angry at Israel, is subject to debate, but it’s certainly true that legitimate anger at Israel and lessening of supportive feelings for Israel is a real phenomenon. Hell, it’s a phenomenon that has occurred in the feelings of many Jews, including Israeli Jews.
After reading so many of your posts, I see that two things pop up often: you refer to other’s arguments, opinions, facts, and conclusions as either silly or absurd quite often, and you argue constantly that anyone who doesn’t agree with you whole-heartedly is arguing “relativism”.
I can only conclude that you operate from a position of moral absolutism, where everything you think is right is right, and what you think is wrong is wrong, and you will brook no disagreement. At least, that’s what I get from your posts in this thread.
As such, I can see why you ignored my last questions directed to you.