The ICJ Descends

The International Court of Justice has just tendered its contribution to the long and sordid record of international institutions in regards to Israel. From Haaretz

The court said that in building the fence, Israel had violated international humanitarian law by infringing on Palestinians' freedom of movement and freedom to seek employment, education and health.

It also stated that Israel violated international treaties it had signed which deal with these topics: "The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its various obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law and human rights instruments."

What is not mentioned here? It is the lives of a thousand innocent people murdered by terrorism. It is the lives of thousands of innocent people, including perhaps myself or people I love, whose lives have been saved by the fence. We don't matter. We are irrelevant to the beautiful souls sitting in safe judgement over us at the Hague. It is rare indeed that one is privileged to witness one's own dehumanization; but nothing less than that is what has occurred here. Let us not be sanguine on this point - this is nothing less than the most blatant and murderous act of racism by an international organization in decades. It is a declaration by the cowardly and corrupted that Israel is now required to consent to the murder of its citizens and, more than that, that any attempt to prevent such slaughter, and thus assert the humanity of those whose lives would be destroyed, is illigitimate and illegal. We have lived to see the day when an international institution has declared the saving to lives to be illegal on the basis of the identity of those to be saved. It is nothing less than a descent of nearly unprecedented proportions. But I do not merely lament; I also accuse -

I accuse the ICJ of politicizing the legal and legalizing the political; of violating their charge and their office in the name of enforcing their fealty to a single side of this conflict.

I accuse the ICJ of a dispicable and obviously racist disregard for the lives of other human beings.

I accuse the ICJ of aiding and abetting a genocidal terrorist campaign.

I accuse the ICJ of engaging in a brutal, unjust, and dangerous justification of the most horrendous forms of violence, and of doing so at a moment when the whole world faces a threat from said forms of violence.

This disgrace was by no means unexpected; but that makes it no less of a horrendous act of Orwellian violence against the very principles the ICJ claims to uphold. We can only hope that Israel has the requisite courage and wherewithal to take the only correct action and ignore it.

Brando Dies

Marlon Brando apparently died yesterday. Its hard not to view him as something of a monument to the dangers of eccentric self-indulgence, particularly in his later years; but its also impossible not to respect a man who accomplished a rare emotional nakedness in a commercial medium like film. One of my favorite movies is Last Tango in Paris, and I fully believe his tale that the extraordinary pathos that role required was simply too much for him to reproduce again. He had a lot of guts as an artist, even if it did him a lot of damage in the process. Very few people in the movies posess an elementary artistic courage, if Brando is to have any testament, it would have to be that he most certainly did.