Human rights and justice

This post is a modified and expanded text of a contribution to a Jadaliyya roundtable on targeted killing posted on March 5, 2012, and responding to the article by Lisa Hajjar referred to in the opening paragraph. ********************** There is an emergent Israeli/American controversy on the lawfulness of targeted killing. Although the policy has not yet attained the status of being a national debate, there are signs that it may be about to happen, especially in light of the Attorney General, Eric Holder’s Northwestern Law School speech on March 5, 2012 outlining the Obama’s administration’s controversial approach to targeted killing in some detail. Lisa Hajjar convincingly narrates how the “legalization” of targeted killing has evolved over the course of the last twenty years. [Hajjar, “Lawfare and Targeted Killing Developments in the Israeli and U.S. Contexts,” Jadaliyya, Jan. 15, 2012] She there calls attention to the analogy to the torture debate...

A longer video with fundamentally important issues. About 16 minutes into it, listen to Richard Falk’s extremely relevant pointing out the difference in attention to an Israeli and a Palestinian human rights case. Listen also to his telling criticism of the UN Secretary-General’s way of handling the politicization of the world organization and the difficulties he has with reaching the UN S-G. Professor Falk is the envoy of the S-G to the occupied territories and TFF Associate since 1986.

I am publishing here my press release of today (February 15) expressing urgent concern about the fate of Khader Adnan, a Palestinian activist, who is near death resulting from his continuing hunger strike that expresses his refusal to accept the humiliating conditions of imprisonment without charges and accompanied by an Israeli court approved denial of visitation rights to his wife.

Galtung here focuses on a human rights case which – like the terrible mass slaughter in Algeria in the 1990s – have attracted little attention in the West. Please circulate the letter to the French prime minister below. Syria is horrible. Assad should step down immediately, a coalition government should come into being, and a thousand mediators should talk with the many parties, maybe with a federation in view. But Algeria is even worse.

/10/janoberg.jpg”> If we do not care for single individuals, we care for nobody. I have met Aziz twice, 5 hours conversation in 2002 and 2003 during TFF’s fact-finding missions. He came across as a decent, very knowledgeable man. No matter what he may also have done, killing him will be a barbarian act shaming us all.