Centrist: A well-paid ecosystem takes its grievance to Geneva

Lady Tureiti Moxon travelled to Geneva to ask the United Nations to intervene in what she calls the “political discrimination” of Māori by the coalition.

However, the pattern running through Moxon’s combative narrative, which outlines more than a dozen grievances, is that she starts in the middle of the story.

Ron Smith: Suicide warriors and the laws of war

What should we make of the offer by Japanese authorities of a collection of letters from WW2 Kamikaze pilots to the UNESCO World Heritage ‘Memory of the World’ document collection?  Unsurprisingly, the offer has not been well received by some of Japan’s WW2 adversaries, China describing it as a glorification of Japanese militarism.  

In view of China’s enormous losses in the 1930s and the 1940s, and present tensions between the respective states, this is hardly surprising.  But we still might ask whether this is an appropriate criterion to apply to the preservation of documents and artefacts, which might have historical, or legal/moral significance, in the matter of the way we view war.

Ron Smith: A kind of terrorism

I am looking at the picture on the front page of the ‘World’ section of this week’s Weekend Herald.  It shows the vapour trails of missiles departing in the direction of Israel.  Around the picture and on the following page, there is extensive reporting of the human consequences.  You fire on your adversary from amongst the buildings of your own down-town (Gaza City, in this case) and then you protest when your adversary fires back.  What sort of nonsense is this?  And the media dutifully reports on it: “Innocents pay cruel price in conflict!”

If the people of Gaza are really concerned about this loss of innocent life, they should be protesting that their militia is firing from the cover of a civilian area, and thus exposing their civilian population to harm, when the inevitable retaliation occurs.  As a matter of fact, using civilian cover for military operations in this way, is explicitly forbidden by humanitarian law.  Both Geneva Convention No IV and the Statute of the International Criminal Court refer to utilising ‘the presence of protected persons (civilians), to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations’.

Ron Smith: More on justice and war

Two assumptions lay behind the argument in my recent posting, ‘Droning on’ (2 October).  One was that the appropriate moral framework, within which to discuss targeting in the on-going conflict between Islamic extremism and the West (the so called war on terror), is that of ‘war’, and not ‘crime’, notwithstanding that the actions of the insurgent parties are generally crimes, within the jurisdiction of the state in which they occur.  I also took it that the crucial criterion for legitimate combatant status in such conflict is ‘participation in the hostilities’.

I should add that I am taking the term ‘Islamic extremism’ to encompass both an attachment to a fundamental interpretation of Islam, which promotes a way of living as close as possible to the teachings of the Prophet, and, most importantly a commitment to violent means in order to achieve it. It was also assumed, in the previous posting, that the same principles (the same moral requirements) ought to govern all who are involved (on whatever side).