Hamas and Hitler

I normally cringe when people, organizations and governments - even those I despise - are compared to the Nazis. But when the people you're comparing to Hitler openly admit they want to eliminate the Jews, I think they're fair game.

Damian P.

Update: David Bernstein responds to the argument that Israel is acting as though its citizens' lives are worth more than the lives of Palestinians:

...The idea, obviously, is that given that the number of Palestinian noncombatants killed by Israel exceeds the number of Israeli noncombatants at immediate risk from Hamas rockets, to defend Israeli military action one must logically believe that Israeli lives are worth more than Palestinian lives.

[...]

We have to start, I think, with a broader question. Are governments, in general, expected to act as if individuals who are outside their jurisdiction are "equally valuable" to their own citizens? The answer is clearly no. In practice, no government acts this way. Governments provide military protection, police protection, a justice system, food, shelter, medical care, etc., to their own citizens, especially poor citizens, and give little to the citizens of other countries, even when those citizens are far worse off on average. The most "Progressive" countries in the world, the Scandinavians, devote something like 2% of their budgets to their total foreign aid budgets to help billions of poor around the world, a figure obviously dwarfed by the money spent on helping their own small, well-to-do populations. Children are starving in Sudan and Bangladesh so an elderly Norwegian can enjoy a rejuvenating week at the spa paid for by his government! Aren't Sudanese and Bangladeshi lives worth more than the temporary comfort of a retired Norwegian?

Relatedly, no country in the world has open borders. The blessings of American citizenship, for example, are available only to a select few hundred million, and the rest of the world is treated as if they are "less valuable" by our government.

This goes to the basic heart of the implicit social contract between government and its citizens in a democratic society. The citizens pay taxes and obey government dictates, and in return the government fulfills its obligations to them. Protection from foreign enemies is among the most basic functions of government. Any government that fails to engage in such protection because it believes that noncombatants on the other side are equally valuable to its own noncombatants would be violating that social contract, as well as acting contrary to the actions of every government in human history.

In protecting its own citizens, a government still should take moral considerations into account. That's the point of conventions and treaties on war, treatment of prisoners, etc. But even under the most generous interpretations of international law, there is no such established principle as the critics of Israel are asserting. Indeed, the establishment of such a principle would not only prevent states from engaging in the expected defense of their citizens, it would undermine the entire concept of the nation-state, which is premised on the idea that nations have fundamental duties to their own citizens that do not extend to citizens of other states. ...

Posted by damian at January 5, 2009 01:59 PM